a disguise reporting a disguise
a transvestite purse snatcher, a drug addict with a criminal record all too well known to public officials, bizarrely outfitted in a strapless cocktail dress, spike heels, tattered feather boa, and auburn wig
Context
The one published article by a man in a dress is about a man in a dress. Steeply — electrolysis-rashed, strapped into "Helen" — files copy on Poor Tony's purse-snatch in full drag, and the prose never notices the mirror it is holding up. The auburn wig here is the same class of apparatus Steeply's own persona runs on, and the article's comedy of misrecognition (bystanders reading the chase as "yet another alternative lifestyle's relationship gone sour") is the book's whole surveillance joke in miniature: the disguise that works is the one nobody bothers to look past.