It’s getting a might scary looking in Peckerwood, hey, Dolly?

Dolly Parton, who has been out of the public eye for awhile, appeared last night to pick up a beribboned award, that was placed around her neck by the President, as one of five recipients of this year’s Kennedy Center Honors.

The Kennedy Center Honors are considered to be the premier event in America’s cultural life: an award for very famous artists who are chosen by a a panel of very famous artists, and usually presided over by the President. (Barbra Streisand has repeatedly refused the award because she didn’t want to receive one — and you gotta love the sheer Babsyness of this — “while a Republican was in office.”)

No such compunctions hobble the big hearted Dolly, So a shockingly tightened, drawn-on Dolly came out last night. And while we know fashion maestro Karl Lagerfeld has decreed “plastic surgery is 21st Century haute couture.” — have you seen Karl lately? For all the high-quality work, he looks weirdly severe, somewhere between an ancient grandee and a withered-up matador, in head-to-boot black, topped by snow-white hair pulled into a sharp Iberian ponytail.

Dolly, of course, is our favorite sweetheart of the rodeo and so will never look severe to us. Instead, the imagery she suggests comes more from the circus, the pop circus of bigger-than-life glitz stars like Cher, who have made of themselves the greatest show on earth, a death-defying — certainly age-defying — spectacle going on in three rings.

But to the Washington Post’s Darragh Johnson, Dolly suggested not so much a circus, as Marvel Comics.

Johnson filed this deliciously catty report on the event:

“Helloooo, Dolly!” sang the chorus of photographers, their moods as jubilant as Dolly Parton’s brisk bounce down the red carpet at the State Department dinner on the eve of last night’s Kennedy Center Honors gala.

Except — the country music star wasn’t slowing down. She was supposed to slow down. And stop.

“Not too far,” one of the photographers cautioned.

“No!” the country star retorted, finally halting and leaning forward flirtatiously. “He said to the ‘X’ ” — she pointed to the black tape under her heels — “and that’s the ‘X.’ ” The lower half of her face cracked into a wide Joker’s grin, the upper half remaining frozen as a photo. Flashes popped. Sparks flared from the sequins of her black velvet dress.

When Parton heard she would be one of the 29th annual Kennedy Center Honors recipients, joining musical theater composer Andrew Lloyd Webber, conductor Zubin Mehta, Motown legend Smokey Robinson and filmmaker Steven Spielberg, she “immediately went to work on the clothes,” she said, telling her designer, Robert Bahar, “I have to look good, and I have to look like me. I want to look like Frederick’s of Dollywood.”

She calls her very low-cut dress and its accompanying bolero “my version of a tuxedo, with boobs out.”

And we admit it, say Dolly and we think big boobs. We know it’s awful. It’s crude and insulting and demeaning to women — but that’s just who we are. Gay or straight, who doesn’t LOVE big boobs!

Still, Dolly in Washington — well, there’s something magically fated about that. And as our last picture attests, in Washington these days Dolly has no monopoly on big boobery. (You didn’t think we were going to relent on the cheap Bush jokes, didya?)