Dolores Hydock In Her Own Fashion

Leeds Arts Council is proud to present Dolores Hydock’s  In Her Own Fashion at 7:00 PM on November 14, 2015 at the Leeds Theatre and Arts Center.

Tickets are $20.  Reservations are required; call 205.699.1892, email leedsartscouncil@windstream.net, or message us on Facebook with your name, phone number, and number of tickets you need to secure your reservations.

About In Her Own Fashion, from Ms. Hydock’s website:

“They finally let me out of the basement.”
So begins the true story of Ninette Griffith, a 96-year-old Birmingham native with a silk-and-chiffon Southern accent and a brass-and-iron spirit. Funny, irreverent, ambitious, and unflinchingly honest, this elegantly independent woman lived a life that followed no one else’s pattern, a life that unfolds in these stories of reckless romance, celebrity hi-jinks, fashion disasters, and heartbreaking loss.
Ninette Griffith was Fashion Coordinator for Loveman’s Department Store in Birmingham, Alabama in the 1950s and 1960s — a time when the downtown department store was a temple of style and fashion, and Loveman’s was one of the biggest, most influential stores in the Southeast. It was also a time when not many women had a full-time, high-profile job, a husband in the military, and a child at home, but Ninette juggled it all. “I didn’t know I couldn’t do it, so I did it.”
But Ninette’s story goes far beyond her career. Born in 1913, she was witness to the 20th century in the South, and her stories span the lively times of the 1920s, the dark days of the Depression, the war years of the 1940s and 1950s, and the social upheavals of the 1960s. They include tales of an eyebrow-raising love affair, hilarious blunders at home and at work, and the triumph of humor and spirit over mistakes, pride, disappointment, and loss.
Actress and storyteller Dolores Hydock collected Ninette’s stories during a series of interviews over 18 months. Now, Dolores brings these funny, tender, surprising stories to life on the stage in this remarkable one-woman play, In Her Own Fashion. Yvette Jones-Smedley, Performing Arts Program Manager for the Alabama State Council on the Arts, called it “…an exquisite evening of theatre.”

About Dolores Hydock, from Ms. Hydock’s website:

Dolores Hydock is an actress and story performer, whose work has been featured at a variety of concerts, festivals, and special events throughout the U.S. Her ten CDs of original stories have all received Resource Awards from Storytelling World Magazine.
Dolores is originally from Reading, Pennsylvania, home of the Reading Railroad and Luden’s Cough Drops. Her hometown is where she won her first blue ribbon in storytelling in a local contest at the age of 5 – the real gold letters on the blue ribbon convinced her there was obviously a fortune to be made in the performing arts. She continues to hope. 
As an actress, she has been featured in the one-woman plays Tony Curtis Speaks Italianand All I can Say is ‘I Love You,’ Take a Ride on the Reading, Shirley Valentine, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe, Fully Committed, Talking Heads, The Lady With All the Answers,and Nothing Sacred: An Evening of Stories by Ferrol Sams. Her early theatrical career included portraying the Statue of Liberty in a Fourth of July pageant. The role required her to stand on a float in the middle of a pond, wearing a 20-pound electrified crown on her head. She somehow managed to survive that role without drowning or electrocuting herself, but has avoided historical dramas ever since.
As a storyteller, she has been a featured teller at the National Storytelling Festival in Jonesborough, Tennessee, and at other story concerts, festivals, and special events throughout the U.S. 
Dolores lives in Birmingham, Alabama. In her spare time, she tends a garden that includes a pomegranate bush, muscadine vines, blueberry bushes, a 20-foot jujuba tree, and a family of slugs the size of cheap cigars. She’s held a wide variety of jobs – she’s been a house parent at a halfway house for juvenile delinquents, a blues DJ, an au pair in Paris for three small children, a computer sales representative for IBM, a cookbook copy editor, an acting teacher at Birmingham-Southern College, and a teacher of Cajun dancing. If anyone questions her strange path through such a variety of jobs, she simply says that it’s all just material for her stories.

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This message is brought to you by the Leeds Area Chamber of Commerce. For more information about Leeds, Alabama, the Leeds Area Chamber of Commerce and how the Chamber can support your business, please contact Sandra McGuire, Executive Director, at 205.699.5001 or Sandra@LeedsAreaChamber.com.