I Thought 9 to 5 Meant 9 to 5
By Gena Pass, Nuu-Muu owner
I’ve been thinking a lot about Dolly Parton lately.
Not just because she died recently. I’ve loved Dolly for most of my life, and having spent more than seven years living in East Tennessee—as well as many visits with family in Greeneville, Knoxville, and Nashville—she feels like part of the landscape of my own story.
But lately I’ve been thinking about one particular Dolly song.
“9 to 5.”
And I realized something funny:
I have my own 9-to-5 story.
It starts in 1999.
I was fresh out of graduate school and starting my first full-time job. I was young, ambitious, exhausted, and—apparently—adorably naive.
During my interview, the woman who was hiring me asked what hours I wanted to work.
I said:
“9 to 5.”
She looked at me like I had just announced that I planned to spend the workday lying on the floor.
Apparently, in the world of full-time employment, 9 to 5 did not necessarily mean 9 to 5.
I was expected to choose something like 8–5 or 9–6.
I remember feeling embarrassed.
Looking back, I mostly find it funny.
Welcome to the working world.
My first year on the job was also the year of Y2K.
Remember Y2K?
For those of you who don't remember—or who were too young to care—the world was preparing for computers to freak out when the calendar changed from 1999 to 2000.
Part of my job involved going through spreadsheets and code, finding places where years were stored as two digits, and helping make sure the systems would correctly handle the change from 1999 to 2000.
It was fascinating.
It was also a lot of work.
At the same time, I was finishing my graduate thesis.
I was tired. Really tired.
Sometimes I would take my one-hour lunch break, eat the lunch I had packed, and then take a nap in my car in the office parking lot.
Other days I would eat lunch and walk around by myself.
Apparently, my manager noticed that I was regularly disappearing from the building at lunchtime.
Years later she told me what she had assumed I was doing.
There was a covered picnic area where some of the smokers gathered during the day.
She thought I was going out there to smoke.
This still makes me laugh because I have only tried smoking a cigarette once in my entire life. I didn't even get one puff.
So there I was, exhausted from graduate school and Y2K, sleeping in my car during lunch, while my manager apparently thought I was outside smoking cigarettes with the cool kids.
I suppose every career has its mysteries.
And then there were the clothes.
This is the part of the story that makes me think about Nuu-Muu.
The office dress code where I worked in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1999 was what we would probably call business casual today.
But “business casual” came with some very specific rules.
Slacks were fine.
Skirts were supposed to fall below the knees.
If you wore a skirt, you were expected to wear pantyhose.
Open-toed shoes and sleeveless tops that exposed your shoulders were not allowed.
That shoe rule was a bigger deal to me than it might sound. I have severe bunions, and the kinds of closed-toe shoes that were considered “business casual” were often extremely uncomfortable for me—sometimes almost unbearable by the end of the day.
And then there was the temperature problem.
Summers in Louisville are hot and humid, which meant the air conditioning inside the office was often blasting. If you dressed lightly enough to be comfortable outside, you could freeze at your desk. If you wore long sleeves so you wouldn’t be cold inside, you could be miserably hot the moment you stepped outdoors.
The fabrics common in business-casual clothing at the time didn’t help much, either. They often weren’t especially breathable, forgiving, or good at hiding sweat.
I also happen to be an anxious person, and one of the ways anxiety shows up for me is sweat. A lot of sweat.
So there were days when getting dressed for work felt less like choosing clothes and more like trying to solve a complicated little engineering problem: What could I wear that was professional enough, cool enough outside, warm enough inside, comfortable on my feet, and unlikely to advertise every nervous moment I had that day?
And then there was the nail polish incident.
I had moved to Louisville from Bellingham, Washington, where I had grown up with a pretty relaxed attitude toward clothing and personal style.
One day I showed up at work wearing blue nail polish.
You would have thought I had arrived naked.
People near my desk actually commented on it.
Apparently pink or red nail polish was acceptable.
A French manicure was apparently the appropriate choice if you were going to a wedding.
But blue?
Blue was apparently a workplace emergency.
I remember thinking:
Really?
It seems hilarious now, but there was something underneath all of it that I didn't fully understand at the time.
There were a lot of rules about how a woman was supposed to look at work.
Some were written down.
Most weren't.
And somehow, you were expected to know them.
Eventually, I found my way to 9-to-5 freedom.
Within a couple of years, I was able to work from home.
And I loved it.
Partly because I loved the work and my co-workers.
But partly because I could finally wear clothes that felt like me.
I didn't have to think about whether my skirt was long enough.
I didn't have to put on pantyhose.
I didn't have to wonder whether my shoes were sufficiently professional.
And I didn't have to worry that someone was going to have an opinion about my blue nail polish.
I could work in comfortable clothes.
Gena, circa 2024, working from home using a headset in a Nuu-Muu dress.
And that little bit of freedom mattered more to me than I realized at the time.
I would spend the next 26 years building a career.
I moved around the country. I got married. We had kids. I eventually returned to Bellingham and worked from home while raising our family.
And somewhere along the way, I became a woman who cared a lot about comfortable clothes.
Which brings me back to Dolly.
Dolly's 9 to 5
When Dolly released “9 to 5” in 1980, she wasn’t simply singing about the hours on a clock.
The song and the movie were about working women trying to navigate a workplace where the rules weren’t always fair—and where a lot of those rules were written by somebody else.
Even the movie’s title had roots in the real working-women’s movement: 9to5 was the name of an organization founded in the 1970s to advocate for fair pay and equal treatment for women in the workplace.
And in another poignant coincidence as I write this, feminist leader Gloria Steinem—one of the most influential voices for women’s equality of that era—died just days ago, on September 2, 2026. Her passing, only eight days after Dolly’s, makes this history feel especially close to the present moment.
Dolly starred alongside Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin in the movie 9 to 5, and her title song became an anthem for generations of working women.
And now, decades later, I find myself hearing that song a little differently.
Because I have lived a very small, very personal version of the world she was singing about.
Not the same story.
Not remotely.
But I understand something about what it feels like to walk into a workplace and discover that there are rules you didn't know existed.
Rules about your time.
Rules about your clothes.
Rules about how you're supposed to look.
Rules about what is considered appropriate.
And eventually, I learned that sometimes you get to decide which rules you want to keep.
And then I found Nuu-Muu.
Years later, I discovered a little dress company called Nuu-Muu.
At first, I was simply a customer.
Then I became a very enthusiastic customer.
I bought more dresses.
And more.
And more.
Eventually, I had a closet full of them.
One of the things I came to love about Nuu-Muu was how many of those old clothing problems simply disappeared.
The fabric is stretchy, breathable, quick-drying, and remarkably forgiving—and, in my experience, very good at handling sweat without making me feel self-conscious about it. Most of the dresses are sleeveless, which works beautifully in warm weather, but they are also easy to layer with a cardigan or jacket when you need warmth—or when your environment requires your shoulders to be covered.
That versatility matters to me. A Nuu-Muu can move from a hot sidewalk to an over-air-conditioned room, from work to errands to travel to an event, without requiring an entirely different outfit.
I think of Nuu-Muus as wonderfully modular clothes for real life.
And after years of trying to dress myself around the rules, the weather, my feet, my sweat, and everybody else’s idea of what “appropriate” looked like, that kind of freedom felt pretty wonderful.
I wore Nuu-Muus for work, for gardening, for exercising, for traveling, for running errands, for hosting events, for sitting around the house—and basically for whatever else life decided to throw at me.
I didn't have to think very hard about getting dressed.
I could put one on and go.
And somewhere along the way, something clicked.
This is what I had been looking for.
Not another set of rules about how a woman should dress.
Not clothes that required me to arrange my day around them.
Not clothes that made me wonder if I looked "appropriate."
Just clothes that let me get on with my life.
That idea eventually became much bigger for me than simply finding something comfortable to wear.
And, as you may already know, I eventually went from being a Nuu-Muu customer to becoming the owner of Nuu-Muu.
But that's another story.
Actually...
It's several stories.
And I think it's time I started telling them.
Gena, in 2026, at the Northwest Washington Fair in her RedHott Nuu-Muu dress.
So this is me, officially, starting.
I've spent a lot of time since becoming the owner of Nuu-Muu thinking about the stories behind this little company.
The women who wore these dresses.
The women who designed them.
The women who founded this special company.
The women in California who sewed them.
The women who modeled them.
The women who bought one and wore it until it practically became part of them.
And the women who have found their own reasons to love them.
There are stories everywhere.
Some are funny.
Some are sentimental.
Some might make you cry.
And some are completely ridiculous.
Some are about clothes.
Some aren't really about clothes at all.
But they're all part of the life of Nuu-Muu.
So I'm going to start sharing them here.
And maybe that's fitting, because after all these years, I've finally figured out what 9 to 5 means to me.
It means that somewhere along the way, I got to decide what I wanted my life—and my clothes—to feel like.
Comfortable.
Capable.
A little bit unconventional.
And entirely my own.
And if Dolly taught us anything, I think it’s that you don’t have to fit somebody else’s idea of what a woman is supposed to be.
You can work hard.
You can dream big.
You can dress like yourself.
And you can be yourself.
Welcome to my Nuu-Muu story.
A Dolly P.S.
I thought I’d share this this Dolly tribute graphic that popped up in my Facebook feed today, September 5, 2026. The original creator is unknown to me—if you know the source, please let me know so I can properly credit them. I also can’t verify that the statements in the graphic are direct Dolly Parton quotes.
For those reading this blog post years from now, it is worth noting that the world lost our beloved Dolly from this physical world on August 25, 2026. But she will live on—and thrive—in the hearts and minds of millions for many years to come through her music, her good deeds, her humor, and the inspiration she gave to so many.
