Big Laughs, Bigger Hair

This photograph is a relic of a place that no longer exists. It used to hang inside Threadgill’s, the beloved Austin restaurant where a national credit card company once filmed a commercial. Threadgill’s closed its doors for good a few years ago, but a handful of its photographs made their way into private hands — including this one.

Threadgill’s was the starting point for Janis Joplin’s career, and its walls carried the memorabilia to prove it — among the pieces, a photo of Kenneth Threadgill himself performing alongside Joplin on the restaurant’s small stage back in the early 1960s.

This particular photo, though, was always the one that made me wonder. It’s a haunting kind of image — the late Governor Ann Richards and Dolly Parton, caught mid-laugh, face to face, sporting two of the biggest hairdos Texas has ever produced. There’s something so Texan about it that I named it “Big Laughs, Bigger Hair” the moment I got a good look at it.

Dolly Parton passed away yesterday, August 25, 2026, at 80. It sent me straight back to this photograph, and to Ann Richards, who left us on September 13, 2006, at 73. On paper the two women couldn’t have come from more different places — a Tennessee mountain girl who became one of the most beloved entertainers on earth, and a Waco-born schoolteacher’s daughter who became the sharpest wit and warmest heart Texas government ever produced. But in this frame they’re laughing together like old friends, and I don’t think that’s an accident. Each of them spent her public life insisting, in her own voice, that everybody deserves a fair shot and a little respect.

Richards made the case the day she was sworn in as governor, in January 1991:

“Today we have a vision of a Texas where opportunity knows no race, no gender, no color — a glimpse of what can happen in government if we simply open the doors and let the people in.”

She’d made a version of that same case to the whole country three years earlier, at the 1988 Democratic National Convention:

“America is still the country of fair play, that we can come out of a small town or a poor neighborhood and have the same chance as anyone else.”

Both lines are carved into her gravestone at the Texas State Cemetery.

Parton, for her part, never needed a podium. Asked on CNN in 2016 about a bill aimed at restricting where transgender people could use the restroom, she kept it simple:

“I think everybody should be treated with respect…
I hope that everybody gets a chance to be who and what they are.”

Nearly seven years later, asked about anti-trans legislation moving through her own home state of Tennessee, she put it even more plainly:

“I just want everybody to be treated good.
They cannot help that any more than I can help being Dolly Parton.”

I can only imagine the two of them meeting again, wherever that meeting happens, still laughing about whatever it was that had them so tickled that night. I’m sure it’s a happier place with those two wonderful women in it. Texas is a little quieter without either of them — but between a photograph like this one and words like theirs, that laugh isn’t hard to keep hearing.

That is the story behind the shots. For more like this, enjoy these related stories: Ann Richards, Austin, Cityscapes, Dolly Parton, Texas, and Threadgill’s. Until the next shoot, keep chasing the light and the wonders it reveals.

---

Sources:

• Speakola, Ann Richards’ 1988 Democratic National Convention Keynote Address (transcript) — https://speakola.com/political/ann-richards-dnc-keynote-1988
• Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub, “Quote of the moment: Ann Richards, open doors of government, let people in,” citing Sarah Weddington, The Texas Observer (October 12, 2012) — https://timpanogos.blog/2017/02/01/quote-of-the-moment-ann-richards-open-doors-of-government-let-people-in/
• Texas State Cemetery, Ann Willis Richards plot record — https://cemetery.texas.gov/locate-a-plot/plotholder/ann-willis-richards
• Deseret News, “Ann Richards, Former Texas Governor, Dies at 73” (September 13, 2006) — https://www.deseret.com/2006/9/13/19973966/ann-richards-former-texas-governor-dies-at-73/
• The Advocate, “10 Times Dolly Parton Earned Her LGBTQ+ Icon Status” — https://www.advocate.com/news/people/dolly-parton-lgbtq-icon
• CNN, “Dolly Parton on LGBTQ+ rights: ‘I hope that everybody gets a chance to be who and what they are’” (August 25, 2026) — https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/25/entertainment/video/dolly-parton-bathroom-bill-lgbtq-rights