Dorothy's Dramatic Monologue #1

[Dorothy]

DRAMATIC MONOLOGUE - ACT I "Working" STUDS TERKEL

Roberta Victor

I didn't want to become a housewife like my mother and sisters. I
think I've always known I wanted... "more" out of life. I was fifteen, I
was sitting in a coffee shop when a friend came by and said: "Hurry up
- I've got a cab waiting, you can make a hundred dollars in twenty
minutes." We went to a penthouse. The guy up there was quite well
known. He wanted to watch two women do it, and then he wanted to have
sex with me. It was barely sex. He was almost finished by the time we
started. It was a tremendous kick. There I was, doing nothing, feeling
nothing, and in twenty minutes I would walk out with a hundred dollars
in my pocket.

Just out of curiosity, how many of you make a hundred dollars for
twenty minutes work? And I was still in high school.

It's a marketplace transaction. Somehow I managed to absorb that when
I was quite young. I was a precocious child. Actually, I was sort of
lonely. I didn't experience myself as being attractive. I didn't look
like a Calvin Klein ad. I was bright, and I didn't play by "The
Rules." Guys were mostly scared of me. They didn't want to get
involved emotionally, but they did want to fuck. For a while, I was
willing to accept that. It was feeling intimacy, feeling warm...
feeling.

You become your job. I've become a hustler. Even when I'm not
hustling, I'm a hustler. What you do is what you are. I don't think
it's terribly different from somebody who works on an assembly line
forty hours a week and comes home cut-off, numb... people aren't built
to switch on and off like water faucets.