NEIGHBORS
Neighbors Beneath the Masks
A profile of Hyde Parker Dorothy Green BY PHILANA WOO
D
orothy Green likes to ride hands free, sometimes while standing on her pedals, cruising down the middle of empty streets. She’s the kind of cyclist who will zigzag into a packed car lane and chance red lights at a busy intersection. Her ride is a restored vintage blue Schwinn with yellow handlebars, her bag of choice a reflective fanny pack she slings across her chest, and her soundtrack—at the moment Australian post-punk—blasts from a mint green portable stereo she bought for $10. Her riding style reminds me of her standup comedy: combative, playful, haphazard. As she tells it, she used to do a bit where she picked a random man in the audience and started screaming, demanding he answer whether he would be able to fight the army of sons she planned to sire with multiple women. This was a few years ago, when she still lived in St. Louis and before her transition, when she presented as male. “I started being like okay, I’ll go to weird open mics as a weird skinny little eighteen-year-old and start doing what’s funny to me, and unfortunately what’s funny to me is just weird shit,” she said. In a way, this is the Dorothy I know, the performance artist who likes to challenge strangers to a fistfight while simultaneously daring them to love her, or at the least, to acknowledge her. Dorothy is twenty-two and five-foot-ten; she has 6 SOUTH SIDE WEEKLY
shoulder-length wavy hair with bangs dyed orange, and a Cheshire Cat grin. She speaks with the languorous drawl of an old Hollywood actress and chainsmokes like one as well. Her fashion sensibility is part hippie cowgirl, part riot grrrl. She captioned a recent Instagram selfie: “Goes to the goth night dressed like a slutty country bitch.” I first met Dorothy at Open Produce, where she works. Open Produce is a compact grocery store two blocks from the apartment I sublet in Hyde Park. I had moved here from New York City in the middle of the pandemic to attend graduate school and missed late-night bodegas. Open Produce is open until 2am. With little else to do during lockdown, I found myself stopping in nearly daily, sometimes just to browse. I looked forward to seeing Dorothy on her shifts, a few times a week and usually in the evenings. She posts a new handwritten index card by the register every shift she works; it bears the tagline “The clerk is a girl,” followed by a punchline. A classic one reads: “The clerk is a girl. She was also surprised when she found out.” Sometimes the vibe is sad: “The clerk is a girl. She’s already cried 3 times today.” Other times defiant: “The clerk is a girl. She’s wearing a dress + has a big knife.” I like all her index cards, but perhaps my favorite are the slightly wistful ones: “The clerk is a girl. If you keep quiet, she’ll stay like this forever.”
¬ AUGUST 19, 2021
PHOTO BY PHILANA WOO
“Your body stops being a thing you’re self-conscious about and starts becoming a tool for you. It does what it’s told. Pedal faster, speed up. Don’t pedal, slow down.”
