83. Hassle the Hoff

For some strange reason, Vienna loves David Hasselhoff, the actor made famous by his role in Baywatch and of questionable musical fame. Go to his website. I don’t think it’s possible to be disappointed. This is the Hoff in his glory days, but that’s not to imply that he’s not currently in his glory days:

For a little more context on his musical stylings, please watch this video. It is evidence that either 1) the man has no pride or 2) that he is one of the four horsemen of the impending apocalypse. Actually, both are probably true.

So, David Hasslehoff is on tour in Europe, and he was performing in Vienna on Friday night. There is no possible scenario in which I would pay money to see this man in concert. However, the Minkus and I got wind that there was also going to be an autograph session at a mall before this, so we met up to see if we could actually see the Hoff in the flesh. We got there about an hour and a half before he was even slated to begin signing ladies’ breasts and giving away vials of his blood (or whatever it is that celebrities usually do at these types of things), but there was a giant line already — about which I was immensely confused.

Were these people all taking the Hoff seriously? Was this an example of one of those cultural differences between Europe and North America, or was I just pathetically out of the loop about the inherent awesomeness of this man? Or were they all there to be amused by the extreme irony of the situation in the usual hipster fashion (which, admittedly, was my own motive)?

I suppose I’ll never know for sure.

Mink and I bought a couple of Heinekens from KFC to fortify/distract us from the inevitable banality of waiting in a line, and were amused by the boys dressed as Baywatch Hoff (complete with afros, sunglasses, tiny red swim shorts and lifeguard buoys). I attempted to get a photograph with a rather large, smelly, balding, lazy-eyed gentleman with a Baywatch t-shirt and his own lifeguard buoy, who was presumably also hoping to be rewarded with his own moment of reflected fame by getting close to the star. My valiant struggle to communicate with this man in German, however, was quashed by a security guard telling me that I wasn’t permitted to be waving my beer bottle around with such cheerful abandon, as if this was some high school grad party. This exchange was also in German, so that’s the gist of what he said, at any rate.

Disappointingly, we waited patiently for a couple of hours only to be turned away at the doors. Had we arrived a mere ten minutes earlier, we lamented, and we could have seen the guy up close! Offered him some tepid beer! Sang a few bars of “Hooked on a Feeling” together!

Our feelings of failure were somewhat assuaged when I successfully snagged the penultimate David Hasselhoff poster, and we did see him from about 30 feet away through the store’s windows. And, thanks to the wonders of the Internet, we will always have pictures like this:

Hooked on a feeling, indeed.