first year - Feb. 13, 2014 - Feb. 12, 2015 second year - Feb. 13, 2015 - Feb. 12, 2016 third year - Feb. 13, 2016 four year Feb. 14, 2017- today!
I've continued with a monologue a day until the spirit moves me to stop - if you have any ideas for a monologue you want me to write, please let me know at tigerteam1@gmail.com.
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A monologue by Janet S. Tiger (c) 2018
tigerteam1@gmail.com all rights reserved
(Actor enters with newspaper)
I read another obituary this morning.
I read them now like the comics - some are funny, others have a great story.
But this man, I knew.
Maybe not in reality, but through the six degrees of separation....maybe.
He was a U-boat commander, born in Bremen, Germany, died in Bremen, Germany.
(Actor folds the newspaper and exits.)
I was born 10 years after the war finished...in the United States. So, how did we meet?
We didn't. Not physically. But we did meet.
Through my mother.
She grew up a few feet from the Atlantic Ocean, in Belle Harbor, NY, also known as part
of the Rockaways.
And this obituary was about Reinhard Hardegan, who was a U-boat captain, head of Operation
Drumbeat, the Nazi plan to interrupt shipping on the East Coast of the United States.
My mother told me that during the war, there was a fear of light. She remembered vividly
about the blackout curtains, and not being able to drive with
headlights on, and the streetlights hooded, so the enemy could not see well in the
night. But that was not at the beginning of the war, when people felt the fighting was far away,
across the Pacific. So Hardegan did see some lights. How?
He took his U-boat up only at night, when,
using guidebooks, "he surfaced and followed the Southern shore of Long Island
and Queens, glimpsing the lights of homes and cars in the Rockaways."
So, one night when my mother stood on the boardwalk, looking at the sea, there's a chance
that Reinhard was there, looking back. She had told me about the submarines, and
the ships they had sunk nearby - and her friends who went off to fight - and
the ones who never came back.
She was in the High School class of 1941, December - just after Pearl Harbor, and
all her male classmates - and some of the female, too - signed up.
My mother was the youngest in her class (she had skipped two years) and she
is 92 now. Reinhard was 105. He was a young man when he passed by close
to my mother - and she was a young woman.
Does that count as knowing someone? Is it part of the degrees of
separation?
Or is there really any separation on such a tiny planet as we are on - in such
a big universe.
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True story about Reinhard click here
And true stories including the Rockaways click here and here
but these are places I knew myself as a child - (I played at Riis Park!)
On the next evening, the U-123 was following a parallel course westward along the south shore of Long Island, towards New York City. The submarine almost itself beached on the Rockaway shore, as the crew did not have detailed charts of the area and did not anticipate the southward curve of the Rockaways. From the reports of the area including the description of " a hotel, shore lights, and sand dunes backed by low, dark woods", the U-123 probably came close to beaching on the shores of Fort Tilden or Jacob Riis Beach. Fort Tilden is the only part of Rockaway with dunes backed by woods and the Bathhouse building a Riis Park does look like a hotel. Later that night at 10 p.m., Captain Hardegan was viewing the lights of the city of New York at 330 degrees, and the Parachute jump and Wonder Wheel of Coney Island from the U- 123. The men of Fort Tilden posted as lookouts in the 100 foot tall towers at Fort Tilden and Arverne did not spot this target and no action was taken by the shore defenses or patrol aircraft.
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* Note: A few words about 'free' - all these monologues are protected under copyright law and are free to read, free to perform and video as long as no money is charged. Once you charge admission or a donation, or include my work in an anthology, you need to contact me for royalty
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Janet S. Tiger 858-736-6315 CaregiversAnon.org
Member Dramatists Guild since 1983
Playwright-in-Residence
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