This has been a strange and heavy week.

Dolly Parton died. Tim Curry died. Jaye P. Morgan—the wonderfully unpredictable singer and Gong Show panelist—died. And Yayoi Kusama, the revolutionary Japanese artist who covered the world in polka dots and invited us into infinity, died at 97.

Four remarkably different people. Four lives that should never be squeezed into the same tidy category.

And yet, here we are.

But I don’t want to write another article about everything we have lost. I want to talk about how extraordinarily lucky we were to be here for it.

Other Generations Had Their Stars

Of course, celebrity didn’t begin with television.

Other generations had Josephine Baker dancing in Paris, Edith Piaf singing about love and regret, Charlie Chaplin turning silence into comedy, and Louis Armstrong changing the sound of American music. They had Greta Garbo, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Maria Callas, David Bowie, Prince and countless others whose influence became larger than their individual lives.

Every generation has produced people who seemed to arrive carrying something the rest of us needed.

But our generation experienced them differently.

We didn’t simply hear that someone was magnificent. We watched them become magnificent.

Television brought them into our living rooms. Records let us play their voices until the grooves wore thin. Magazines gave us photographs to study. Movies made certain performances part of our personal histories. Then cable television, home video and the internet made it possible for their work to follow us throughout our lives.

Some of these people became more than famous. They became landmarks in our own timelines.

We remember where we lived when we first heard Dolly sing. We remember the theater where we saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show. We remember laughing at the glorious foolishness of The Gong Show. We remember experiencing one of Kusama’s Infinity Rooms and being filled with wonder.

They Gave Us Permission

Dolly Parton taught us that kindness and ambition could occupy the same spectacularly sequined dress. She could laugh at herself without ever diminishing herself. She understood that glamour could be armor, theater and pure joy—and that generosity mattered more than being taken seriously by everyone.

Tim Curry strutted into popular culture as Dr. Frank-N-Furter and helped generations of people discover that gender, sexuality and self-expression could be playful, theatrical and deliciously defiant. For many queer people, Rocky Horror wasn’t simply a movie. It was one of the first places where being different looked like the beginning of the party instead of the end of the world.

Jaye P. Morgan came from another era entirely, but she carried a wonderfully mischievous refusal to behave herself. She was talented, quick-witted and famously unpredictable. Long before anyone used phrases like “living authentically,” Jaye understood that sometimes the most memorable person in the room is the one willing to ignore the rules—and occasionally flash The Gong Show.

Yayoi Kusama turned the private visions that haunted her into art recognized around the world. She transformed repetition, obsession, pumpkins, mirrors and polka dots into a visual language entirely her own. She also staged provocative anti-war performances involving nudity during the 1960s, using the uncovered human body as both art and protest. She didn’t wait for the world to understand her before becoming herself.

That may be the thread connecting all four of them.

Each created a world that could not have existed without them—and then invited the rest of us inside.

We Didn’t Just Watch Them. We Grew Up With Them.

For many of us in the GoNaked community, these weren’t distant historical figures discovered in documentaries. They were part of the cultural atmosphere surrounding our lives.

They were there while we were trying to understand our bodies, our sexuality and the people we wanted to become. They entertained us while we were falling in love, coming out, hiding, starting over, getting older and slowly becoming less interested in other people’s approval.

People sometimes dismiss popular culture as frivolous, but art and entertainment help us imagine what might be possible. A song can make us feel less alone. A ridiculous television show can give us permission to laugh. A movie can introduce us to a kind of freedom we don’t yet have words for. A mirrored room covered in lights can remind us that one small human being still contains something infinite.

That is not frivolous. That is how culture quietly changes people.

The Real Gift Was Seeing Them Fully Become Themselves

Perhaps this is where their lives connect most naturally to ours.

GoNaked has never been only about taking off our clothing. At its best, it is about taking off some of the fear, shame and performance we have carried for far too long. It is about allowing ourselves to be seen as we actually are—not after losing weight, becoming younger, getting braver or receiving permission.

Dolly didn’t tone herself down.

Tim Curry didn’t make Frank-N-Furter safer.

Jaye P. Morgan did not become more predictable.

Yayoi Kusama did not stop painting dots because someone else failed to understand them.

They leaned into what made them unmistakably themselves.

That may be the most valuable thing any public figure can give us: not simply entertainment, but evidence. Evidence that individuality can survive. Evidence that strangeness can become beauty. Evidence that a person does not need to be universally understood to be deeply loved.

We Were Here for It

There will be sadness. There should be. When someone has occupied a corner of our cultural world for decades, their absence creates a silence we can feel.

But grief is not the only honest response.

Gratitude belongs here too.

How lucky were we to live in a time when Dolly Parton was singing, laughing and building libraries? How lucky were we to hear Tim Curry purr his way through “Sweet Transvestite”? How lucky were we to witness Jaye P. Morgan gleefully refusing to behave? How lucky were we to step into Yayoi Kusama’s dazzling, dotted universe?

They lived. They created. They took risks. They left behind work that will continue reaching people they never met.

And for one brief stretch of history, we got to share the planet with them.

That is not merely something to mourn.

That is something to celebrate—and perhaps a gentle reminder to the rest of us: Your time is happening now. Take up some space. Make something. Love somebody. Be ridiculous. Get naked. Let yourself be seen.

After all, someone may someday say how lucky they were to have lived in the same timeline as you.