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When she founded the Colgate/Dinah Shore Winner's Circle Golf Championship in 1972, Dinah Shore raised the stakes in golf, literally. She used her influence and charm to make the championship the first important money-winning women's tournament in the country. But she hadn't a clue what her hard work and name would eventually morph into.
Had Dinah known her golf classic would become a rather dull backdrop to one of the most popular lesbian parties on the planet, would she have agreed to put her name on it? That's hard to say for sure, but probably not. It's clear that the way Dinah lived her life couldn't be further removed from the largest party to ever acknowledge it. 
Dinah Shore was a proper southern lady with only decent intentions.
Unlike the thong-and sports bra-clad lesbians that flock to the desert every spring for the tourney cum drunken orgy, Shore wasn't the type do body shots off of beautifully tanned strangers at eight in the morning. She reeked of class. She sipped lemonade from crystal goblets, I imagine, and owned a lot of collared shirts.
Throughout her career as a singer and talk show host, Dinah Shore was the quintessential girl-next-door—pretty, white (although rumored, detrimentally, to have African-American ancestry), wholesome, well mannered and cheerful. She is remembered by those who knew her as a woman who oozed goodness straight from the center of her cardigan-draped heart.
If Dinah Shore had a constant craving of the k.d. sort, it was, and still is, a very well kept secret. The only sexually risqué thing that's ever been written about her is that in the 70s she rose to Demi Moore-like status for being Burt Reynolds' “older” girlfriend.
Still, she'll always be remembered as more Mary Tyler Moore than Demi Moore. And that's important for one reason only: The Mary Tyler Moore Show theme song provides a nice segue to the lesbian invasion of Shore's once homophobic, but well-manicured, turf.
“Love is all around, no need to waste it.
You can have a town, why don't you take it…”
Um, okay. How about Palm Springs ?
One can try to argue that Dinah Shore, despite her indifference to lesbians, gave us a gift like no other — a reason to gather annually and party like love children of Sappho and Robert Downey Jr. But she really didn't even do that.
Who did? For the answer to that question we have to go to the drama department. Every large lesbian party has one and Dinah is no exception.
Three
women, former business associates, are all responsible for the
Dinah we know today — Mariah Hanson of Club Skirts fame, and
Robin Gans and Sandy Sachs, the Girl Bar babes. Together they
turned the homo-dry Palm Springs desert into a mecca for lesbians,
complete with pulsating beats that call us to pray over rivers
of alcohol from which we drink heavily—very heavily. Because
of them it's believed that all adult lesbians must make the
pilgrimage to Palm Springs at least once in their lifetimes.
Okay, as often as possible.
Anyway, it was very Bugsy Siegel of them, only no one got shot.
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