A Rocky End

The girl in short shorts and Doc Martens walked up to us on Church Street and drawled a question slow as corn syrup.

“Do you know if they let in animals?”

Hers was a red-tailed snake named Luna. We stroked it. We were ready for anything. It was our last Saturday night as college students, and we had chosen to spend it at a peculiar ritual, the midnight meeting of cinema and fishnet stockings and social castoffs that is known as “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” But first we needed our tickets, and answer if Luna the snake could get in.

The 1975 cult musical tells the story of an innocent couple stranded in a storm who seek help in a castle—but find instead rock, sex, and transsexuals. Maybe we were hoping for an awakening for ourselves. Casts screen and embellish Rocky in theaters from Israel to Paris, Las Vegas to West Des Moines.

The set-up here at the Harvard Square Loews arrived in 1984, just as we were being born. Four years had passed and we’d seen the freaks on Church Street but never sat with them.

“Yes,” I told the girl with the snake. “But hide it.”

YOUNG GOODMAN BROWN

The way it works, whether you’re in France or Iowa, is this: As Susan Sarandon and Tim Curry sing and swoon on screen, you—dressed in maybe a pink tutu or a leather corset—throw rice during the wedding scene, blow noisemakers during the party scene, and call out witty, often tasteless one-liners: “Susan’s on the ra-ag; now the rag’s on her head!” Somewhere between screen and seats, a cast of actors acts out what’s happening on stage, but perhaps with a twist, like (in Harvard Square) “Star Wars.”

The audience at Harvard is made up of suburban rebels dressed in all black and baby-boomers whose love of the Internet is only paralleled by their propensity to don drag. Not surprisingly, members of the Harvard community make up only about a twentieth of the audience at Loews, according to the show’s director.

I imagined the spectacle as something like “Young Goodman Brown,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1835 tale of a husband in Salem who encounters a nocturnal meeting where “the smile of welcome gleamed darkly on every visage.” Among the clergy and sanctimonious elders he glimpses is his wife, she of the pink ribbons, ready for induction into the world of sin Goodman so fears. Afterward, Goodman becomes a silent, suspicious man, not trusting his wife, Faith.

I had no wife, or faith, to lose; I could hope for a view-altering experience without fear. But the unholy ritual at Loews channeled less Hawthorne’s Salem than the New England of my day. Which is to say, Harvard.

THE UNIFORM

Long before the official midnight showtime, those who know are pulling on knee-high boots and leopard-fuzz bikinis. My friends and I came prepared, mostly. Between us we had a French maid apron, lace-up ankle boots, and a dress which ended, depending on one’s walking speed, somewhere around the crotch.

When we joined the Rocky crowd, our friends who hadn’t known the code looked at their own white skirt and plaid shorts, and seemed miffed. We were more familiar with Longchamp and Lacoste than S&M.

I had a camera with me, but I didn’t shoot any photos of the crowd. I didn’t want to stick out. I was wearing red and black fishnet tights. I could blend in.

THE VIRGINS

Just before the show began, relief flowed with the sink water in the women’s bathroom. Thank God, said one senior, they didn’t scrawl V’s on our foreheads for being new to Rocky.

She spoke too soon; in the first 10 minutes, the cast called Rocky virgins to the floor. We didn’t go, but the senior with the white skirt did, and so did a girl wearing suspenders and black pasties.

The cast ordered them to perform pelvic thrusts, model their fishnet dresses and man-dresses, and, finally, simulate an orgasm. A girl, referred to as “Tits” by the host for physical reasons, was allowed to do five jumping jacks instead. These tasks formed the criteria for a competition to be chosen as the show’s special virgins, allowed to briefly perform some of the screen mimicking.

Meanwhile, the audience steamed with hostility and desire, clapping their approval.

As the host sent one virgin after another on stage, I thought of our own social selections. I was glad I wasn’t up there.

THE MEETING

I continued to gasp at the show’s jokes (I’d paid $9.75 for this?) until the final scene. We were sleepily groping our way back to Lowell when I realized I’d left a Kodak disposable under my seat.

A security guard escorted me into the theater after hours. But it wasn’t empty. Men in black t-shirts slouched in the rows, and women with intense metal stud accessories stood among the rice and popcorn covering the floor.

What’s going on? I asked. One of the black t-shirts looked up.

“Staff meeting,” he said. “When the sex happens.”

The post-production meeting included much of the cast and crew, 55 people who not only volunteer their time but pay $5 each month to do so.

I thought of The Crimson, the long nights I’d put in and the food bought for the newsroom that would never be reimbursed.

We headed to bed. I hadn’t, Hawthorne-style, lost Faith. I decided I wanted to take off these criss-crossed tights and wear pink ribbons.