The Time I Embodied Dolly

When I was ten years old, living with my family in a Motel 6 in Texas, Halloween became a much bigger deal than it probably should have been.

I wanted a real costume. The kind the other kids at school had. Annie wigs. Garfield whiskers. Strawberry Shortcake everything.

We didn’t have the money for any of that.

What I did have was an older sister with an idea, a borrowed ruffled dress, a grey thrift-store wig, a lot of makeup and, eventually, two strategically placed balloons.

And just like that, I became Dolly Parton.

Or at least ten-year-old me was completely convinced I had.

What I remember most now isn’t really the costume. It’s the Motel 6. It’s my sister showing up early to help me get ready. It’s my dad finding a wig at a thrift store on his lunch break. It’s searching the room for 35 cents for the bus. It’s trick-or-treating door to door among people who weren’t expecting children to show up at all.

And it’s a group of waitresses at the motel diner giving my brother and me cobbler and ice cream because they didn’t have any Halloween candy.

Years ago, I wrote that memory down and called it “Dolly at the Motel.”

With Dolly Parton’s passing this week, I found myself thinking about that story again and about what Dolly represented to a ten-year-old girl who didn’t have much but had absolutely no shortage of imagination.

So I pulled the piece back out.

It’s funny. It’s uncomfortable in places. It’s very much a story about my childhood. And somewhere inside all of that, it’s also about creativity, pride, family and figuring out how to make something spectacular out of whatever happens to be lying around.

You can read the full story, Dolly at the Motel, on my Substack.

Cyndi Coon is a time traveler and rule-bender, nerding out for good using data, science and curious questions as an Applied Futurist, author, creative, ecosystem builder, facilitator, producer, researcher, storyteller and publisher for: governments, the military, higher education, private partnerships, enterprise, and industry. Cyndi is the Founder and Principal Futurist at Applied Futures Lab, Founder of Laboratory5, and Co-founder of Arizona State University’s Threatcasting Lab and is the co-founder at Threatcasting.ai. Cyndi is the author of Future AI Mindset, co-author of Threatcasting (2021), Futurecasting (2026) and the author of numerous reports, articles and book chapters. Founder and Publisher at Turkey Hill Press.

She is an Affiliate at the Center for Emergency Management & Homeland Security. Chief Media Officer for Content Evolution. She leads the i4j (global innovation for jobs workforce) and Coolabilities communities, promoting inclusive and forward-thinking solutions. She is a Web 3 advisor. Connect with Cyndi Linktree

September 7, 2026labfive Leave a comment

Five Dollars of Felt, One Elevator Ride, and the People Who Helped Build Laboratory5

Twenty-five years ago, Laboratory5 began as an experiment in making things by hand.

Before the futurist work, before the labs, before the consulting, workshops, research and all of the strange and wonderful places the company would eventually go, there was paper. There was felt. There were die presses, glue, stacks of cards, orders to fill and a house in Tempe slowly turning into a manufacturing operation.

There was also a five-dollar box of craft felt from a flea market that helped define the look of the company.

But when I look back now, that era is not really about the products.

It is about the people.

The Arizona State University board member who asked me about my little-girl dream. The friend who seated me beside exactly the right person at a dinner party. The stationery company owner who invited me to walk the National Stationery Show in New York. The stranger who overheard me telling my husband I was completely out of my league and informed me that I was, quite literally, on the wrong floor.

That elevator ride changed everything.

The next year, Laboratory5 had its own booth at the National Stationery Show. From there came showroom reps, museum stores, independent boutiques, national media, TV appearances, a lot of felt, and eventually an opportunity with Target that forced me to decide what kind of company I actually wanted to build.

This second piece in my Laboratory5 25th anniversary series is about that chapter, but mostly it is about the humans who helped shape it.

It is also about something I understand much better now: sometimes the dream is not supposed to keep getting bigger. Sometimes you get to live it fully, recognize that you did what you came to do, and move on to the next thing.

Read Five Dollars of Felt, the Wrong Floor, and the People Who Helped on Substack