Thursday, February 02, 2006

What's a billboard doing in a cemetery?

This past weekend, I went to my local music emporium* to seek out one, or both, of two CDs: the soundtracks to Munich and Tristan and Isolde. However, I found neither one, and thus I took advantage of the opportunity to fill a long-standing hole in my music collection: I bought the soundtrack to The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

I've only seen Rocky Horror once, all the way through. This was a screening held at my college, and while a lot of the "audience participation" stuff was observed, it felt slightly sanitized; after all, there's only so much that you're going to get away with at a small Lutheran liberal arts school. I've always regretted not finding a way to get to an actual theater for a midnight showing with people who knew what was going on.

At the screening I attended, we threw rice and squirted water and ducked under newspaper and the like, but at other points, it seemed that a lot of the people in attendance mistook audience participation for audience mocking. Thus, people would shout jeers to the screen and basically try to do the MST3K thing (although this predated MST3K). More than a few people left the screening room complaining about how stupid the movie was. Talk about missing the point, eh?

My first familiarity with Rocky Horror, though, didn't come in college, but at the summer music camp I attended each summer for a few years at the end of high school (and at which I was a counselor during my college years). I don't recall who was the driving force, but at one point, the "Time Warp" became our "signature" dance during the mixer that ended each evening at the camp. I still wonder why the camp's adults, some of whom were fairly conservative, allowed a dance that prominently featured a pelvic thrust, but hey, you never know.

"It's just a jump to the left!"

* Yeah, I could say "store", but I like the word "emporium" and try to dust it off every once in a while.

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