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. She is a touring artist for the Alabama State Council on the Arts, a speaker with the Alabama Humanities Foundation, and a member of the Southern Order of Storytellers. Her six 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 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.
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.
In her spare time, Dolores teaches Cajun and zydeco dancing, and is a founding member of ACME, Birmingham's Association of Cajun Music Enthusiasts. For information about this lively group or Cajun dance classes, visit www.acmedance.org.
To schedule Dolores for your special event, or for more information, e-mail dolores@storypower.org or call Dolores at 205-951-7757.
Photo above by Derek Snow.
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