Jolene Hunnicutt

Jolene Hunnicutt is a fictional character in the television series Alice. She was played by theater actress Celia Weston.

Jolene was from the apparently fictional Myrtle Point, South Carolina, and had quite a family. She was distantly related to the infamous Jefferson Davis Hogg, better known as Boss Hogg from the series, The Dukes of Hazzard. Her most memorable, and most spoken of, relative was her beloved Granny Gums (the "Gums" in her name was a nickname resulting from the fact that she had only three or four teeth in her mouth). Granny Gums helped raise Jolene as a child and was quite a colorful character as Jolene told it.

When she was introduced in the fifth season, Jolene Hunnicutt and her troublemaking trucker partner, Bert, had eaten at Mel's Diner, when Jolene got angry with him because he had made an unwanted pass at her, and locked herself in the ladies room. It appeared to be a somewhat hastily written and filmed episode (obviously at the rather sudden departure of Diane Ladd's Belle), but it is one to be remembered as well.

Worried about what would happen, Mel Sharples and his other waitresses, Alice Hyatt and Vera Louise Gorman-Novak tried to talk her out of quitting her trucking job.

It almost worked. But Jolene knew Bert was up to no good, and she knew that he would only make another pass at her again if she went back on the road with him. In a fit of anger at Bert, she threw some of Mel's prized "M"plates at him, which Mel certainly didn't like. (He had just bought these plates from a Japanese restaurant that had closed down which had been called Watanabe's, the big "W" on the front of the place simply being turned upside down to become an "M".)

Jolene agreed to work off the damage to Mel's destroyed plates by becoming a "temporary" waitress until a new one came along, since former waitress, Belle Dupree had left Phoenix for Nashville, Tennessee. One never did come along, and Jolene remained until the end of the series. All in all, Celia Weston's Jolene was featured in more episodes than either Polly Holliday as Flo or Diane Ladd as Belle. By Jolene's third season (the series' seventh season), she was getting more laughs than most of the other characters in many episodes and had a big following.

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