A note from our founder

My name is Curtis Crimmins, and I’m the founder of Roomza. I don’t usually put personal notes on the Roomza homepage, but today felt different.

I grew up in the Deep South. Before I founded anything, I was a gay kid in a place where that could make you feel very visible and very invisible at the same time. I grew up around poverty, hunger, addiction, illiteracy, people doing the best they could with very little, and people who never really got a fair shot.

Dolly Parton made sense to me before I had the words for why.

She was completely herself. Loud, glamorous, funny, ambitious, deeply Southern, and never embarrassed by any of it. She took up an enormous amount of space without making other people feel like they had to shrink to make room for her.

That inspires me.

She also never seemed interested in pretending she came from somewhere else. She talked about poverty. She talked about her family. She talked about her father not being able to read, just like my Uncle Ocie. Then she spent decades putting books into the hands of kids who might otherwise grow up without them. Kids like me.

There are a lot of people who become successful and spend the rest of their lives trying to get as far away as possible from where they started. I am often guilty of being one of those people.

But not Dolly. Dolly kept reaching back. Showing us the way.

One of the first Rooms of the Day I ever chose for Roomza was the SongTeller Suite at her new Nashville hotel. There was no strategy behind it. I just loved Dolly, and I thought it was a wonderful room.

I’m really glad that little piece of Roomza history exists today.

Her family has asked people who want to honor her to support Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. Roomza has made a donation in her memory, and if Dolly meant something to you too, I hope you’ll consider doing the same.

There’s no promotion here; no booking offer. Nothing to buy.

Just a sincere thank you, Dolly.

For the books. For the generosity. For the bigness of spirit, and of heart. For showing a weird little Southern kid that you could become exactly who you were supposed to be and still leave the door open behind you.

Go put some kindness out in the world for Dolly, and I’ll do the same. Like she famously said, “If you see someone without a smile, give them yours!”

God bless Dolly Parton.