Monologues for women | "My Tattoo" by Gabriel Davis
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My Tattoo Monologue
Monologues for women
by Gabriel Davis
My daughter has sent me here with this voucher to get my tattoo removed. A “birthday” present she calls it. She thinks my tattoo is … This song … this song that’s playing … ! Oh, never mind … for a moment I thought it was a different song … I’m sure this is a fine song but …
You know a great song when you hear it. You hear such songs and suddenly you’re filled with joy or sadness or lust or rage or love. What is it about such a song? Its power to plumb the depths of our primal feeling. To call vivid flashes of sense and memory, to color our thought, alter the rhythm of breath, the beating of a heart?
A song can transform the world. It can set us free and bring down the walls that divide us.
For me growing up in East Berlin that song was “Looking for Freedom” sung by the incomparable David Hasselhoff. Before it reached #1 here on our charts, I heard it and I could not unhear it.
It haunted me, possessing my voice in the shower. I’d find myself compelled to sing it - loud as I could - and my boyfriend, often in there with me, he says “Greta, my ears are bleeding, please, please won’t you stop.” But I could not stop. I tell him, “Today your ears may bleed, but soon it will be your heart that bleeds as mine does for unity with West Germany. And he gives me that look that he gives me. But then he begins to sing it too.
We’re so loud together singing it that our neighbor, the old man in the next apartment, begins banging on the door telling us to shut up or he’ll call the police. My boyfriend runs out of the shower, grabbing the one clean towel, and opens the door still singing. He tries to explain to the old man why we sing, but the old man is yelling over him. I run out trying in vain to cover myself with a small washcloth while explaining why we sing … then the old man understands, or at least he’s excited, and he begins singing too.
This song made me, my boyfriend, this old man feel things we hadn’t felt for so very long. For my boyfriend and I, that feeling was hope. For the old man, it was probably hope. And soon it wasn’t just us singing Hasselhoff’s harmony of hope. Everywhere you went in East Berlin, people were singing it. It played on the radio day and night. It became our anthem.
And when the East German government announced that we would be allowed to freely cross the wall, I heard the news as if delivered to me by the baleful baritone of Hasselhoff himself.
New years eve, 1989. I stand with my brethren at the crumbled wall, East and West together. And there he is. Hasselhoff in a crane hoisted above the crowd. A god in the machine. My boyfriend grips my hand tightly. The old man grips my other hand tightly. I feel strange about it, but more than anything just pure, powerful joy.
And then he begins to sing the anthem “Looking for Freedom.” Many of us are crying, because we know that we have found it. We know the Americans laugh at him. They do not understand like we do this beautiful man, his perfect brown curling locks, his soulful melodic ways. But we do. We watch transfixed as he sings, moving about excitedly in his cool leather Jacket. A jacket so awesome it has flashing lights on it.
For we, we the formerly oppressed can watch such a sight without any irony, without any, what you now call “snark”. We are not “snarky” we are free.
Twenty years later, I look back on that moment, and I do not feel ashamed that I adored this man. I do not apologize for the way he moved us all.
My daughter and her American husband can laugh at it if they want. But I lived it. And, yes, I have the tattoo to prove it. I wear the face of Hasselhoff upon my left breast. I wear it with pride.
That is why … I am ripping up this voucher. And I am leaving.
You know a great song when you hear it. You hear such songs and suddenly you’re filled with joy or sadness or lust or rage or love. What is it about such a song? Its power to plumb the depths of our primal feeling. To call vivid flashes of sense and memory, to color our thought, alter the rhythm of breath, the beating of a heart?
A song can transform the world. It can set us free and bring down the walls that divide us.
For me growing up in East Berlin that song was “Looking for Freedom” sung by the incomparable David Hasselhoff. Before it reached #1 here on our charts, I heard it and I could not unhear it.
It haunted me, possessing my voice in the shower. I’d find myself compelled to sing it - loud as I could - and my boyfriend, often in there with me, he says “Greta, my ears are bleeding, please, please won’t you stop.” But I could not stop. I tell him, “Today your ears may bleed, but soon it will be your heart that bleeds as mine does for unity with West Germany. And he gives me that look that he gives me. But then he begins to sing it too.
We’re so loud together singing it that our neighbor, the old man in the next apartment, begins banging on the door telling us to shut up or he’ll call the police. My boyfriend runs out of the shower, grabbing the one clean towel, and opens the door still singing. He tries to explain to the old man why we sing, but the old man is yelling over him. I run out trying in vain to cover myself with a small washcloth while explaining why we sing … then the old man understands, or at least he’s excited, and he begins singing too.
This song made me, my boyfriend, this old man feel things we hadn’t felt for so very long. For my boyfriend and I, that feeling was hope. For the old man, it was probably hope. And soon it wasn’t just us singing Hasselhoff’s harmony of hope. Everywhere you went in East Berlin, people were singing it. It played on the radio day and night. It became our anthem.
And when the East German government announced that we would be allowed to freely cross the wall, I heard the news as if delivered to me by the baleful baritone of Hasselhoff himself.
New years eve, 1989. I stand with my brethren at the crumbled wall, East and West together. And there he is. Hasselhoff in a crane hoisted above the crowd. A god in the machine. My boyfriend grips my hand tightly. The old man grips my other hand tightly. I feel strange about it, but more than anything just pure, powerful joy.
And then he begins to sing the anthem “Looking for Freedom.” Many of us are crying, because we know that we have found it. We know the Americans laugh at him. They do not understand like we do this beautiful man, his perfect brown curling locks, his soulful melodic ways. But we do. We watch transfixed as he sings, moving about excitedly in his cool leather Jacket. A jacket so awesome it has flashing lights on it.
For we, we the formerly oppressed can watch such a sight without any irony, without any, what you now call “snark”. We are not “snarky” we are free.
Twenty years later, I look back on that moment, and I do not feel ashamed that I adored this man. I do not apologize for the way he moved us all.
My daughter and her American husband can laugh at it if they want. But I lived it. And, yes, I have the tattoo to prove it. I wear the face of Hasselhoff upon my left breast. I wear it with pride.
That is why … I am ripping up this voucher. And I am leaving.