Day 30: "The Ultimate & Best of The Rocky Horror Show" - Various Artists
No matter how hard you try, you're going to unavoidably end up with something in a music collection that you didn't really want and doesn't belong there. Why? What happens is that lazy relatives who don't really know what to get you for Christmas latch on to a thing, then make the worst possible choice of how to turn that thing into a gift, and then you have to live with the consequences of their actions for the rest of your life.
Instead of listening to this travesty, here's a link to the Original Cast Recording instead. Much better.
OK, let's get some things out of the way early. I'm 99% sure this is a gift given to me one Christmas by my sister. I understand the intent behind it, but if you'll pardon the pun, this is some kind of weird unofficial Frankenstein release of "here are some Rocky Horror songs, but not all of them, and in a weird order, and with 3 different remixes of 'Time Warp' because that's all anyone knows from this show, right?". In addition, the cover art is some of the most unintentionally horrific design I've ever seen. Nothing builds my enthusiasm for listening to this more than a photoshopped image of Tim Curry sliding off the hood of a car covered in a purple bedsheet while the right side of his face melts. I listened to this entire album this morning, and it's the laziest set of edited songs from this show that you could possibly imagine. It's awful.
OK, now we've dealt with the specifics, let's talk a little about Rocky Horror in general.
"I hate it! It's boil-in-the-bag perversion for sexually repressed accountants and first year drama students with too many posters of Betty Blue, The Blues Brother, Big Blue and Blue Velvet on their blue bloody walls!"
I came to the Rocky Horror phenomenon in somewhat of a roundabout way. My first exposure to it was a cassette recording of a Rocky Horror Picture Show (the film, rather than the stage play) showing which included audience participation lines throughout, which my friend Hado had copied from his older, cooler sister (being cooler than us was not really a high bar to meet though, to be fair). He'd somehow decided to put it on in the background while we were doing something else - if we were at Hado's house, the high likelihood is that we were probably drinking cheap beer while playing Tekken 2 or WipeOut in preparation for going out to the pubs in Chesterfield where we knew we would get served without question.
It's kind of mind blowing to me now that Hado would have thought at that time "What is appropriate background music for this gathering of people? I know, this weird and slightly transgressive recording of a film showing with the audience shouting lines at the screen." However, whatever reasons he had for doing so, the thing stuck with me. I loved the call-and-response interaction between the audience and the performance, and the songs were cool and campy, and so I asked him to copy it for me, and so I ended up owning a scratchy, second hand copy of the same cassette.
It's probably safe to say that I knew every word of that cassette, including the unofficial audience parts, long before I actually saw the film it was based on. This was somewhat confusing as the cassette was just an audio-track of the movie, which has a lot of elements which are mainly visual in nature. Let me tell you, the version of what was happening in that movie in my head based on sound alone was very different from what appears in the actual film.
It wasn't until several years after that when I first saw the stage production at the Sheffield Lyceum Theatre, with Jason Donovan as Frank N Furter. By this time, most of us had moved out, I was living with Dave, and Hado was sharing a house with a couple of other nerd friends, Tim and Kev; This was before I had met Alex, and before I'd had any kind of real relationship, but there were still several young women we knew, girlfriends and friends of girlfriends who were into the whole Rocky Horror thing, and so when the tickets were announced, we bought a group of the cheapest seats in the balcony, and made our preparations.
Now, I've mentioned before that I had a tremendous lack of shame, an exhibitionist streak, and very few preconceived notions of masculine behaviour, so for me the idea of going in the full Frank regalia to the performance seemed like a no brainer. I asked for some help picking out appropriate costume items from a young woman I knew named Steph who I did amateur dramatics with, and had a crush on at the time (which ended up going in all sort of weird and messed up places later in life, especially when it became apparent my housemate Dave was also madly, forlornly and unrequitedly in love with her), and she was happy to help me shop for corsets and suspenders and stockings and makeup. Oh, and shoes, picking out some gaudy, sequinned 6 inch platform high heel strappy affairs that somehow fit my size 9 feet.
The one thing I hadn't quite counted on was how to manage the trip into Chesterfield Town Centre and catching the train; I normally walked the 25 minutes from my house to the station, and Sheffield station itself was several minutes walk uphill to the theatre. Eventually, I settled on a half-way compromise, and so, with eyeshadow and eyeliner disguised with sunglasses, and corset, stockings and suspenders hidden by a loose button up shirt and jeans, and with wig, lipstick, and high heels in a bag, I walked across town with only my painted nails to give me away. (Incidentally, this make up practice, combined with several other trips to Rocky Horror in costume in the following years, was great when my goth phase rolled around and I was already a dab hand at applying eyeliner and lipstick in the mirror of a skanky toilet of a basement nightclub).
We arrived at the theatre, met up, went to the coat check, and I spent an awkward 5 minutes in the mens bathroom finishing my costume. My memory is that there weren't THAT many people dressed up there, but its possible that just my adolescent self-conscious memories erasing everyone else there who might get stared at more than I did that night. I'll also say that walking up 3 flights of stairs to our balcony seats, and then dancing throughout the show in my ridiculous high heels, gave me a pointed appreciation for how much those things suck. The following morning my calves hurt so bad it was almost impossible for me to get out of my bed and walk down the stairs.
The night was a great fun, and my sense of self-consciousness melted away as soon as the performance started. Despite Tim Bisley's opinions, if you're not having fun at Rocky Horror, you are probably taking it, yourself, life, or all three too seriously. I've seen the show in theatres four times now, and have been in costume for all of them, though never again going the full Frank.
It's when I think about stuff like this that I feel mostly glad that I was part of the last age of people where permanent records of these kind of outings no longer exist strewn across the internet. I'm not forced now, as I reminisce, to look back at old Facebook photos of me in drag and think "oh God, did I really think I looked good like that?". As far as I know, to this day there are no recorded photos of my at any of the Rocky Horror Shows I've been to, nor any really of me during my darkest Goth phase.
For the sake of my own self-respect, that's probably for the best.
