We've Got Tonite

Get in, readers, we’re going down a rabbit hole.

Recently I watched two versions of “We’ve Got Tonite” about a dozen times, each, riveted by their differences.

Here is the Sheena version. Watch it first.

Here’s the Dolly version. Watch the song and the banter after.

Sheena is FEELING it, or at the very least, she is performing a woman feeling it. Dolly is… doing something someone could write an essay about. I find it fascinating how in the performance and in the banter afterwards, Dolly keeps setting boundaries with Kenny and letting him back into a place she’s ok with, and then putting him outside, and then letting him in. What a toggle! What she’s doing with her smile is super interesting - again I feel like she knows how to open a door with it and she knows how to close a door with it.

Dolly’s physical contact with Kenny - is it me or is she like, Ew I don’t wanna touch your hand, and like, I don’t really want your handsy hand on my shoulder, either - she finds a way of breaking the contact by cracking a joke, by getting a laugh that diverts attention from her quickly reclaiming some physical and psychic space. What a skill that is!

Whereas the physical contact between Sheena and Kenny felt welcome and inevitable. Sheena was always just gonna melt into that husky hug and sweet hand holding. We want her to!!! How else was she going to come down from the adrenaline of evoking abandon? Go on, Sheena, and receive, honey, receive!!!!

After Dolly and Kenny are done singing, they banter, and Dolly just wipes the amorous moment of the song away and busts his chops and moves the conversation to the craft and skill of singing, all with that glorious smile on her face. Dolly’s persona is soft on the outside but, readers, she’s steely: This is a job. I’m working here.

This is in the midst of Kenny doing the opposite. From the moment she enters the arena, Kenny floats right into the reverie of his attraction to her and splashes around in it freely like a toddler in a kiddie pool. Even before she is up on the stage, he is evoking Your bod is driving me bananas and she is maintaining, without directly saying anything, You are my coworker and if I’m winking with anyone, it’s the audience. That is some Jedi level holding the line and feminine self-regard.

She keeps bringing in allies from the audience. Like you do when you want to wriggle out from someone’s net of horniness. Establishing: We are not alone here. Having walked to the stage flanked by two (rather fetching) security guards she now flanks herself with the segment of the audience who will appreciate that she is severing herself from objectification.

Meanwhile Sheena’s like, Babe it’s just you and me and who’s gonna know? Let’s find somewhere private and blow off all of our responsibilities for the next, I dunno, 24-36 hours. From the point of view of a female gaze upon Kenny, Sheena’s like Who needs tomorrow, and Dolly’s like, I’ll show you who needs tomorrow: me.

In Kenny and Dolly’s post-song repartee, he jokes about her breasts. Then she does, but again in a way that allows her to step outside objectification, referring to her boobs as basketballs she has to carry around. Seriously, in the course of her career, about how many times do we think Dolly had to deal with comments about her breasts, maybe a billion? Ok, sure, on some level she invited it and enjoyed it and benefitted financially from it. But there had to have been (many) days when she didn’t really feel like discussing her tits. Remember she is a genius. She has genius level talent and skill. But oh well, here we go, I guess it’s time once again to engage with a man in a professional setting about his experience of my tits. Then she ends the convo by bringing up and honoring the presence, somewhere in the arena, of Kenny’s wife, Marianne (his fourth of five wives). Underneath it all, she’s communicating, Co-worker, you have a wife. But laughing and smiling all the way. Jedi! She’s a Jedi.

I’m a huge Dolly fan on multiple levels, she’s a brilliant songwriter, her voice is gorgeous, she can act, she’s so funny and so smart, she’s put literally hundreds of millions of books in the hands of children and if I am remembering correctly, she spent a million dollars funding one of the Covid vaccines. And yet, if I’m only evaluating who is more in service to the song with this particular tune, I may be Team Sheena because it’s Sheena who is going to the tender, deranged moment of barreling into a night of lust, and letting an audience see and feel and hear and remember their own wild tonites.

What’s your favorite version, Dolly or Sheena?

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Upcoming Out and About

The Brooklyn Public Library is doing an event around the Philosophy of Mathematics with Werner Herzog on March 14. I bet it’d make you dizzy in the best of ways. Info here.

Compagnie Hervé Koubi returns to the Joyce March 10-15 - I’ve taken my kids twice to see them. Astonishing acrobatic choreography, deep dark throbbing gong vibes. Info here.

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Paintings by Mai Takeshita now on view at Alison Bradley Projects.

Thanks for riding along and thanks especially to my paying subscribers who put gas in the vehicle.

I will leave you with this gem. “Mom can you please wait longer in the morning to start dancing in the kitchen because the last two mornings you woke me up!” lol. Please note: it’s not “boom boom,” it’s “pum pum.”

xo Lizzie

PS - Want to join a benevolent universe of writers writing under my caring guidance? I have a 7 week zoom class beginning March 27 and another beginning July 1. Details and registration here.