Rocky Horror

The first time I ever heard of the Rocky Horror Picture Show was at a Jack-in-the-Box in Flagstaff. I was hanging out with my best friend Val and we were getting a burger . Or something like that.
Val sees someone wearing a black t-shirt with a huge pair of lips on it and the words Rocky Horror Picture Show in dripping blood.
Val says "Nice shirt, dude!" (I think she said dude. That was back in the late seventies or early nineties and Val was way hip).
The guy says thanks and asks if she knows that the movie is playing on campus that week.
Val insists that I go with her, promising me a night I'll never forget. She was right.
She also insisted on going to the store beforehand and picking up hot dogs, rice, and bread, then we went to her house and toasted the bread and got a newspaper, an umbrella and a squirt gun.
Thus armed we went early to the show and milled around and I saw my very first punk rockers and transvestites and general freaky mayhem.
I didn't really understand the movie, you can't hear a damn line of actual dialog. But people were yelling at the movie and there was a bunch of actors in front of the screen before the movie and during the movie acting out what was going on on the screen.
It was so much fun; instant addiction. We went back the next night but then it was gone.
It was only one weekend.
I somewhat forgot about it until I moved to Phoenix a year or so later. I'd remembered that Val had said she'd seen the movie at the Valley Art theater in Phoenix. I decided to go.
By that time I'd become a full fledged, card carrying Punk Rocker. I had a boom-box on my shoulder when I got in line to the movie, and it was playing the Sex Pistols. I had instant punk friends who were slam dancing and causing less outgoing patrons to flinch.
Once the movie started it was clear that I was not a Rocky Regular because I didn't know all the audience lines but I began to learn.
The punk friends I met introduced me to the punk underworld of Phoenix. I don't remember much of it, and none of it in detail good enough for my own satisfaction, but I did see a lot of shows at local venues or in parks, such as Iggy Pop, the Meat Puppets, Butthole Surfers...
we even sat near the front at a Plasmatics concert and for a long time after that I carried around a part of a television set that Wendy O. Williams had cut up with a chainsaw.
I've lost that piece of tv but I could tear me a piece off any old set and say it was that old piece, I've earned the right. The damn piece flew into my lap after all, all kinds of things were flying off that set.
We loved that concert, it was things crashing and banging and loud and chainsaws and afterwards we were drunk and went to a party.
Typical punk party: rich kids' parents are out of town, and he invites all his punk friends, and they invite their punk friends, and suddenly it gets out of control.
We arrived before it got too wild, so there was a seat on the couch and I sat with one of my friends and we drank beer, watching a band set up to play in the living room.
The band was good and I got up to slam dance but for some reason it was frowned upon, I'm guessing they didn't like girls slam dancing, or they didn't like DYKES slam dancing. At any rate someone brought their combat boot down HARD on my converse sneakers and did some damage.
I sat down again.
And watched some idiot scrawl their name on the wall in blood. I liked that. People started murmuring amongst themselves that the rich kids' parents were going to flip when they saw that, and then my friends and I realized that the rich kid was nowhere to be seen.
Opportunity only knocks once.. so we got busy trashing the house.
At least, the parts of it we could get to, there were so many bodies in there but some areas were uncovered.
Holes in walls, couch unstuffed, broken glass, expensive liquor found and stuffed into an overcoat...
sirens outside coming down the lane.
We bolted for our cars and made it out just in time.
It was a good night. I went home with a friend and he fell asleep in his futon bed and I spent the rest of the night drinking the stolen liquor and swimming in his parent's pool.
Back to Rocky Horror... eventually I moved from Phoenix and went to Richmond, Virginia to live with my sister.
First things first, I found where the Rocky Horror Picture Show was playing. The Biograph theater in the Fan district.
It was on Grace Street. My sister lived on Grace Street, but way down towards Willow Lawn shopping center. My brother in law loaned me his Vega and a map and I set out to find the Fan.
and some beer.
Once in the movie I noticed I stood out like a sore thumb because MY audience participation lines were way different than the ones in Richmond.
Eventually I fell in with the floor show cast and became one of them, but before that happened, I met R. and B.
R. was a high school student, somewhat stuffy and reserved, I thought. B. was British and giggly. They were best friends, I guessed, or they said so, I don't remember.
My memory again is faulty but it seems R. said something about hanging out with me. I think I was aloof. I do remember him talking to me in the parking lot across from the Biograph as I was putting something in the Vega.
And so began my punk history in Richmond. I'll have to write about that in yet another post; suffice to say that R. and I became close and eventually made a trip to New York to see Rocky Horror at the Eighth Street Playhouse. I was pretty drunk the whole time and don't remember a whole lot from that trip. Except that we got chosen to go into a fabulous club called 'the World'.
That place... I could have lived in that night and been happy. It was a huge cavernous opera house that had gone to seed and it was a huge gay happening with flourescent lights and people dancing half naked or perhaps naked on stage and sexual stuff going on and dental dams in dispensers in the bathrooms as well as condoms.
I don't know which I liked better, the World or the Eighth Street Playhouse...
As for the floor show;
I played Janet. This was only in order to get close to the guy playing Frank. It was played by different guys on different nights: but they were all hot in the costume. I got to know them all as friends.
The people who played Riff Raff, Magenta and Columbia all lived in the same house, and what a house it was.
I eventually ended up living there, amongst the freakiest people I ever hope to live with. One had her bedroom painted black and loved Edward Gorey and Bauhuaus and thought she was a vampire and was into all things occult and dark.
One was in love with her and hung on her every word and helped me paint the basement to look like a dungeon.
And the 'queen bee' of the house was a strange woman who I never really did understand. I was drunk the whole time and deeply in love with Tim Curry.
During my stay at that bizarre house (I remember R. coming over one night and claiming he cut his foot on some fossilized cat poop on the stairs.. it was NOT a clean house) I hocked my trumpet and bought a ticket for Amadeus at the National Theater in D.C.
We all went. We stayed with the vampire's parents. They were well off and lived in Georgetown; their reaction to us was... to lock us in the basement for the night.
We went 'trash-picking' in Georgetown, which was great fun. The things people throw away in that place! We loaded the car with cool stuff to sell at flea markets.
But the main event was of course Amadeus. Somehow I'd gotten fourth row seats in the center.
And suddenly there he was on stage in front of me, Tim Curry!
He was great. I started the standing ovation of course. Or at least I believed I did.
The next night I got a half-price ticket for SRO and saw it again from the back, and afterwards stood outside the stage door and waited for Tim Curry. Eventually he did come out, and I got his autograph along with Jane Seymour and Ian McKellan. And for some reason,
I gave Tim Curry a sword.
I just wanted him to remember me should we ever meet again, I guess. Who cuold forget being given a sword?
At any rate, I didn't talk much for hours after that. We went back to Richmond, and all I could talk about was Tim Curry.
I became a huge Mozart fan after that.
Had all Tim Curry's albums as well as a bootleg copy of him live at the Bottom Line.
Eventually the Biograph stopped showing Rocky and our little group disbanded but it was bizarre while it lasted.
The adventures that branched out from Rocky Horror, as I have said, will have to wait for another time.
And I'm sure that if R. reads this blog he will be able to jog some memories.