It's 2006.

In a muggy New England basement, I'm rewinding a video to the eight-minute-forty-five-second mark, over and over, squinting just a little bit more at the pixelated image on the screen. It's an old TV that had belonged to my great-grandmother towards the end of her life. The bulky wooden box sat on a swivel with a pretty limited range of motion. You had to press the buttons on the pop-door panel that sat to the right of the screen itself to change channels or adjust the volume. My xbox was plugged into the three red, yellow, and white hookups of the AV port and, voila, I'm watching the Follow Me Around DVD from Mack Dawg Productions.

What I'm really trying to figure out, though, is whether DCP's front three was of off his toes or not. It's a cool shot—there's someone cannon-balling into the water he's jumping over. That's also what's making it so hard to tell how he set up his spin.

Until then, I'd only ever tried front three's off of my heels.

Now it's 2026.

In a warm, sun-lit office, I'm rewinding a YouTube video to the eight-minute-forty-five-second mark still trying to figure it out. Twenty years later, and it's the first thing I thought of when I heard about Dolly Parton's passing.

As a kid who was really into snowboarding, the annual videos put out by companies like Mack Dawg Productions became an unexpected way to find music I likely wouldn't listen to otherwise. That's why any time I hear the song "Jolene" by Dolly Parton, I'm transported to the muggy basement of my childhood home in New England where I'm watching the "Trapped In Chile" segment of Follow Me Around.

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If you're curious, that segment's linked below. It starts at minute 7:45 and runs until minute 10:20.

 

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Our Daily MAP Year Prompt
(frontside) 360/365

What does "Jolene" make you think of? What about any of Dolly Parton's other songs?

onward. 

For more on this daily column and The MAP Year Project, read the backstory here. And if you know someone who'd appreciate this, pass it along.