It Was Great When It All Began . . .

The Rocky Horror Picture Show just turned 35 years old.  Here's my thoughts on the subject:

I was fifteen years old, and I was a sheltered Christian kid who had somehow landed a girlfriend who was 1) a year older than I, and 2) one of two goth kids in the entire town of Prescott, Arizona.   She listened to The Cure and Bauhaus and wore black lipstick.  I listened to DC Talk and the Newsboys and wore shirts with a Jesus fish on them.  Yeah. I don't get it either.

A few weeks before she let me touch her boobs (!), and a few weeks before she gave me a little vial of her blood to wear around my neck,  she asked me if I had ever seen the Rocky Horror Picture Show.  I hadn't.  R-rated movies were forbidden in our household, and even if they weren't, the picture on the cover of the VHS box she showed me certainly would never have gotten in the door.  There was a man dressed in women's clothes, with high heels and fishnets and a full face of makeup.

She invited a couple of friends over to her house, and put the movie on.  I expected we'd sit and make out the whole time, as usual, but she was  really into the movie.  It seemed like she knew the script backwards and forwards; she knew where every pause in the dialog was, and she had something witty to say at every one.  She and her friends even knew the Time Warp dance.  For my part, I just sat and stared, transfixed.

The songs!  I'd never heard anything like it!  They had the sexy swagger of the rock music I was just starting to listen to, but the clever lyrics of a Broadway musical.   Then there was the lingerie, the transvestism, the homoerotic undertones, the Susan Sarandon in a bra and panties . . . I was sold.    Then, after I had thoroughly enjoyed the whole thing, my goth girlfriend told me I *had* to see it in the theater to get the full experience.

Months later, after the girl left me to sleep with some dude at band camp (I felt a weird pang the first time I saw American Pie), I finally got a chance to drive the two hours to the big city of Phoenix to see the movie in a theater.  I borrowed a leather jacket from a friend of mine (who told me that Rocky sucked, but I could use the coat if I wanted) and pulled together a half-assed Eddie costume.

I want to say that seeing Rocky with a live cast, in a theater full of like-minded drama nerds, was some kind of revelation, an awakening, a feeling of being in harmony with fellow outcasts -- I want to say that because that's what most people say.  It was definitely a blast, and it definitely demonstrated that there were far stranger things on earth than a girl who wears black lipstick and listens to the Cure.  It didn't feel like coming home, but it did feel like a much-needed expanding of my small-town mind.  Queers!  Transvestites! Boys kissing boys kissing girls kissing girls!  Jokes about people masturbating in the back row!  The girl playing Columbia wearing a thong!  But at the heart of it was still that clever, fun movie, where the hero is maybe the bitchy queen who isn't so great at relationships, but really just wants to expand everybody's mind and have a good time.

Even though people made fun of "I'm Coming Home," my favorite song, I still wanted to go back.  I downloaded a script and studied the call-and-response lines and added a few of my own.  For the next couple of years, my buddies and I made the trek down to Phoenix at least once a month, catching the midnight show and driving home as the sun was coming up.  I bought the anniversary edition soundtrack, the karaoke CD, some posters, the VHS video, the DVD . . .and through the years, I saw the live show as often as I could.

The last time I went to see Rocky live, I was in the cast.  There I was, 30 years old, my wife eight months pregnant, and I strapped on the high heels, the fishnets, the bodice, and performed an energetic (if imperfect) rendition of Frank N. Furter.  I'm sure some people were embarrassed on my behalf.  I know my wife was -- she still mentions it occasionally. 

But for me, dreaming that character and being that character, running around a theater dressed like Frank N. Furter, felt like a last step from that small-town kid to a grown man who knows his place in the world.  And for that, I will always love the Rocky Horror Picture Show, one of the many guides through the turbulent passageways of growing into myself.

Hey.  I belted out "Sweet Transvestite" while DANCING on four-inch heels in front of a hundred people.  I fear absolutely nothing after that.