Rocky Horror Picture Show

I suppose it’s appropriate to follow up the last blog, RennFair, which concerned a mass of strange people dressed extravagantly odd, with this one – about at least one cross-dresser. Last weekend I went into Manhattan and saw this again for the second time, the first being back at College Park, Maryland, during college.  Both shows were at midnight.

 Movie.  Essentially it’s a musical movie for which the audience tends to participate rather extravagantly. 

Plot: a couple, Brad and Janet (Barry Bostwick and Susan Sarandon) find themselves seeking assistance at a dark and stormy castle when their car breaks down.  The castle is inhabited by a variety of freaks, the leader of whom is a mad scientist, Dr. Frank-n-Furter (hereinafter, “FnF”), played by Tim Curry…as a transvestite. “Transsexual” seems inapplicable as he seems 100% male; “bisexual” sounds more appropriate, but escapes the colorful alliteration. 

            They do a dance called the “Time Warp”; FnF seduces not only Janet but also Brad; Eddie (Meat Loaf) breaks in on a motorcycle and FnF kills him; FnF brings a handsome monster to life (Rocky) who ends up hooking up with Janet, much to FnF’s anger and jealousy; Eddie’s uncle, Dr. Scott, a wheelchair-bound scientist (not quite mad) arrives; FnF turns everyone into a statue with a “Medusa” ray; all of them come back to life in lingerie; and finally Riff-Raff and his sister/GF Magenta reveal they are actually aliens, and after defeating FnF and evicting everyone, take the castle into space back to their home planet, leaving Brad, Janet, and Dr Scott alive amidst the ruins.  The movie is interrupted several times by narration by Charles Grey, who we recognize as Blofeld from several James Bond films.  There is actually very little nudity, mostly Rocky’s beefcake and some modest cheesecake from Janet.  The music sounds like Meat Loaf’s Bat Out of Hell album, poppy and not particularly memorable.

 Audience Participation.  The film did so-so on its original theatrical release in 1975, and was brought back for midnight movie showings in 1976, starting at the Waverly Theater in New York City; it’s still there, now called the IFC Center down on 3^rd St. & 6^th Ave. in Greenwich Village, but nowadays RHPS is based at the Clearview’s Chelsea on West 23^rd Street.  Several different people claim credit for starting this “shout at the movie” business.  The most common elements are:

1.         Audience members dress up as movie characters (Brad, Janet, FnF, Riff-Raff, Magenta, Columbia, Eddie, Dr. Scott, Rocky) and pretend to follow along.   At the NYC show, every character was represented, but FnF was done by a woman (!).  The degree to which these people succeed at emulating the cast seems variable at best.  At NYC I’d give “FnF” an A for effort (despite being a ringer – a woman portraying a male transvestite..tres “Victor Victoria”!), with “Dr. Scott” being close to dead-on.  “Riff-Raff” was not bald (another audience member had the right wig), “Columbia” and “Magenta” were OK, “Rocky” was so-so, and “Brad” was so geeky that he made Barry Bostwick look like Arnold Schwarzenegger.  The “Janet” was actually hotter than Susan Sarandon. 

2.         The audience throws rice at the wedding at the beginning

3.         The audience covers their heads with newspapers as Brad and Janet approach the castle in the rain

4.         The audience shouts “Slut” when Janet first appears and “Asshole” at Brad

5.         Anyone there for the first time is emphatically denounced as a “virgin”

6.         Toilet paper is thrown as Dr. Scott enters the lab

7.         Cards are thrown when FnF sings “cards for sorrow, cards for pain”.

 Remarkably, I found that the College Park crowd was far more in tune with these standard elements than the NYC crowd, but the NYC crowd had more complete coverage of the “cast”.  The CP crowd was more conventional in the callbacks, whereas the NYC crowd was pretty much just shouting nonstop, the same three jerks who wouldn’t SHUT UP.  In other words, the NYC crowd felt that since it was NYC, whatever they did was “Rocky Horror”, vs. the College Park crowd felt like faithfully following a tradition someone else had established. 

 Even earlier than College Park, I saw the movie “Fame” on a school trip to Italy.  There’s a scene in the movie where the characters go to RHPS and essentially “let down their hair.”  Sure enough, I recognized many of the College Park audience from the “introvert dorm” (Hagerstown Hall).  Likewise, the NYC crowd was somewhat charming (acting out characters) and downright annoying (ad-libbed callbacks from those three jerks).     

 To borrow from Dave, “have I mentioned how much I hate these people…?”

The Renaissance Fair

Last weekend I went to the Maryland Renaissance Festival for what must have been the third time.  As always, I had a good time, especially since the weather was spectacular and the crowds were cooperative – not excessive, and entertaining in their own, sometimes unintentional, manner.

 Renaissance.  This would merit its own blog entry, but I’ll keep it brief.  This is essentially a European thing.  Literally “rebirth”, it marks a major change in European history, when the Catholic Church lost its iron grip on the continent, allowing science and reason became predominant.  It was political writers of this era, particularly John Locke, who inspired the Founding Fathers to reject the divine right of King George III to rule the colonies and rebel against English rule and start up a brand new republic which we know of today as the United States.  The Renaissance began roughly around the 15^th century and continued until the Industrial Revolution in the early 19^th century.

 Maryland’s RennFair is in Crownsville, right outside Annapolis, at a permanent site, designed to resemble a 16^th century English village, Revel Grove.  The fair has been held annually in the late summer, early fall, since 1977.

 There are a few “free” events:  sword swallowers, jugglers, and acrobats, even short parodies of Shakespeare plays; by now I’d imagine his material is public domain.  The most famous exhibition is the joust, which I saw a few years ago:  a pair of fully armored knights on horseback charging at each other in lanes facing each other, attempting to knock each other off their horses with huge lances (presumably this variety is not fatal). 

 But 80% of the “spectacles” are vendors selling a variety of Renaissance themed items.  The huge turkey legs – which we commonly imagine Henry VIII gnawing upon – are here, and they sell mead, which seems to taste like a cross between beer and cider.  Other vendors sell clothing, jewelry, glass, honey, hats, walking sticks, magic wands (a la Harry Potter), swords (wooden mock swords and real steel ones), armor, armored lingerie (!!!), woodprints and maps, even furniture.  In fact, the event might be more accurately described as a Renaissance Mall, since the “we’ll sell you stuff” element is about 90% of the festival and only 10% is actually free (net of the admission fee for the fair itself, of course).   A few years ago I rode on an elephant, which has a huge platform on top and wallows around a small circle slowly; it’s not very comfortable as you sit with your legs spread wide apart.  It was interesting enough for one shot, but not worth doing more than once – especially since it’s not free and has a long line anyway.

 Costumes.  About 50% of the festival attendees – leaving aside the park employees themselves – seem to come in costume.  Jack Sparrow, a popular character, was absent this year, as was Henry VIII.  Kilts are very popular – “yes, I’m Braveheart!”  Some doofuses wore top hats to complement costumes which were otherwise mostly correct; they seem to be less concerned with being authentic and more concerned with looking cool.  I see very few people dressed as peasants; the affair is 95% “chiefs” (kings, queens, princes, nobles) and 5% of the 99% (Mitt Romney was absent).  Vikings, Picts, and Ravens fans are also common.   I don’t see many “Crusaders”, and have never seen a Saracen.  If you’re of Japanese descent, perhaps a samurai or geisha would be the appropriate costume.  Women seem to love dressing up as much as men do, particularly to wear provocative bodices pushing their boobs up and almost out.  Buxom wenches, I presume.  A meat market?   The Society for Consenting Adults?  Overall, the Food Court Druid brigade is well represented at the fair.  And fortunately the Black Plague (as mentioned earlier), while a completely period-appropriate ingredient, is absent from the Fair.  Best to focus the positive, I would say.

 Opie & Anthony.  Years ago, when they were still on regular non-satellite radio, this pair described their visit to the NY area fair (perhaps the one in Tuxedo).  Opie talked about being in line for mead or a turkey leg, and the vendor – dressed in costume – broke character and recognized him.  “Mead for m’lord or lady, as you wish – HEY, OPIE, MAN!  I love your show!”  

My First Car

…was a 1984 Chevrolet Cavalier.

 I had learned to drive during the summer of 1986, when I was 17 years old and about to start at the University of Maryland, College Park.  I was going to live on campus, as I did for the entire 4 years of college.  UMCP had a parking situation such that freshmen and sophomores living on campus were not permitted to park cars on campus, so I had to wait until I finished my sophomore year in May 1988 to look for a car.  I had $2000 saved up from summer jobs and my parents told me they’d match it dollar for dollar, so my “budget” was in fact $4,000.   For this amount of money, I was told, I could purchase a late 70’s Trans Am in excellent condition (not a rusted out basket case).  I set about looking for prospects and was going to have my uncle bring the candidates to mechanics to verify their roadworthiness.

 Alas, I never reached that point.  After 10 days without a phone in between spring semester housing (Talbot Hall) and summer housing (New Leonardtown), and without a way to do my car search, during that time, I finally had my phone hooked up again and called my parents.  Their response: “Oh, don’t bother looking for a car.  We bought you one.”

 Not a Trans Am, a 1984 Chevy Cavalier.  Blue/grey, four door sedan, automatic, with A/C and a tape deck (auto reverse).  It had 49,000 miles on it.  Recall this is 1988, so the car was 4 years old at this point.  It was not a Type 10, a coupe, convertible, nor a Z24 (SCCA Cavalier?  I don’t think so!) – simply the sedan.  It was fairly clean, and the paint was OK.  The tape deck still worked, and even the A/C worked too.  For a car to tool around in, it was actually pretty good.  I recall the engine was “2.0L EFI”, though since I knew little about cars I rarely popped open the hood.  It was probably throttle-body injected. 

 The major pluses of this car were space and mileage.  The largest single item I had in college, which had to be moved into storage during the summer (except ’88, when I simply took it to summer housing) was my 4 cubic foot fridge.  This JUST fit in the back seat of the Cavalier; I can’t imagine it would fit anyway, anyhow, into a ’70-81 Trans Am.  We had a storage unit over by GMU main campus.  As for mileage, Phil and I drove to Ocean City (3 hours), back (3 hours), Greenbelt (5 minutes each way) and Baltimore (30 minutes each way) (Hammerjacks, to see Honor Among Thieves) all on ONE tank of gas.  Unbelievable.  Again, a feat inconceivable in a V8 muscle car, least of all one with a carburetor.    

 In retrospect, I didn’t know nearly enough about cars to have the correct discernment on Trans Ams anyway.  By 1992 I had purchased my first new car, a 1992 Pontiac Firebird (base model), and then learned all about Firebirds from 1967 to then – and by that time the 4^th generation (1993-2002) weren’t even in the showrooms.  What I learned was that black Trans Ams were only made from 1976-81, but by that point the performance had taken a nose dive.  The best Trans Ams were ’71-74 with the 455 cubic inch V8 (7.5L).  ’71-72 455 HO T/As were either white with a thick blue stripe down the middle, or blue with a white stripe, not the best color choice.  ’73-74 Super Duty T/As came in white, red, and either dark green (’73) or dark blue (’74) but by this time the much revered/reviled “Screaming Chicken” hood bird had finally made its debut.   I can’t imagine, as I write this today, that even had I known all this about Trans Ams back in summer 1988, that my $4000 budget would allow me to buy an early ‘70s T/A in decent shape.  However, it may have been sufficient for a ’67-68 Firebird 400 hardtop in good condition, had I been well-informed enough to search for one.  I was vaguely aware of them at that time: one of the guys who used to live on my floor in Hagerstown Hall appeared to have moved to Old Leonardtown and had a ’67-68 Firebird.  These cars have a much different body style (first generation F-Body) and that remarkably OLD Indian style bird.  As of now, I’d rather have a ’67-68 Firebird 400 than any Trans Am, aside from – possibly – a ’74 Super Duty T/A in blue.  Forget the Bandit T/As (Special Editions) of ’77-81, to me a ’74 SD T/A in blue is the ultimate Trans Am. 

 ** In October 1995 my friend Phil and I drove up to Flint, Michigan, in an attempt to buy a 1968 Pontiac Firebird 400 hardtop.  Despite the owner’s earlier claim, the car was not roadworthy, and I could not get a tow truck to get it back home.  This was even more frustrating as it was a California car with no rust.  I wonder where it is now.

 I also had to relearn how to drive, that summer of 1988.  What I knew to survive the driving test at the MVA in July 1986 was basically how to do a three point turn, parallel park, come to complete stops, and use turn signals.  This was well below spec to drive a car on the Beltway at highway speed, or at night.  Fortunately during the summer, campus at UMCP is almost dead, so there were few enough people to run into.  I worked my way to driving on Route 1, then took the Beltway all the way around to Burke, VA.  This gave me confidence and essentially began my driving experience.  I even had my first accident, a minor crash with a UMCP utility truck (“don’t worry, we won’t be filing a claim,” explained the driver). 

 In August 1991 my sister began learning to drive, in the same 1984 Cavalier, which by then had about 100k and was beginning to fall apart.  What had been working fine in 1988 was anything but.  She crashed it into a parked car 1000 yards from our house in Gaithersburg – boom, it’s totalled.  We replaced it with a 1991 Toyota Tercel.  RIP Cavalier.

 While I’m at it, I might as well share my early memories of my family’s cars.  Despite growing up in the US in the 1970s, I was too young and inexperienced to take in what was undoubtedly a plethora (si, El Guapo) of 70s muscle cars.  Now I have to look back the pictures without being able to actually be there.  Anyhow.

1.         Early 70s Chevy Malibu (can’t remember the color).  This was not a Chevelle SS.  My mom laughed when I mentioned that.  “You kids would have stayed at home and not eaten.  We couldn’t afford any SS car backthen.”  Since my dad was never a “car guy” he would have ignored the Chevy guy had he tried to sell us anything with a V8 under the hood.  His last V8 experience was his ’55 Belair he bought new in 1955 as a priest.  It was black.

2.         Mid 70s Ford Gran Torino (poo brown).  Think “Starsky and Hutch” but brown and four doors.  Somewhat less cool.  I imagine this had a six cylinder and not a 460.  Again, my parents were not car people.  I can’t remember why my parents bought this car, but I’m fairly certain “Starsky and Hutch” had nothing to do with their decision.

3.         Late 70s Volvo station wagon (orange).  This did not have the flip up seat in the back (sorry). 

4.         Chrysler-Simca.  When we moved to Paris, we had to get a car (my parents: “it’s not worth the bother shipping the Volvo overseas”).  This was one of those weird American-European cars, like Opels.  This was a burgundy color.  I can’t even remember the model.

5.         Peugeot 505.  The driving age in Paris is 18, unlike 16 for the US.  Also, 99% of European cars – at least at that time – were manual transmission.  It’s bad enough trying to learn how to drive, let alone trying to master a manual trans at the same time.  My dad and I drove around the block in this, as much trying not to stall out as avoiding other cars.  The car itself was fairly decent.

6.         Mazda 323.  When we returned to the US for summer 1986, we borrowed our relatives’ Mazda to drive around.  Imagine a family of 5 in this small vehicle with no A/C - in DC in July and August.  And it was stick shift, so we could barely learn to drive on it.  Only by the end of the summer was I informed about “play” in the clutch, a little detail which greatly facilitates correctly letting out the clutch on a manual trans car. 

 Having exhausted my readers’ patience by now, I’ll pass on descriptions of the Tercel, Sentra, Pulsar, Catera, Cadillac, or even the base Firebird.  The Neon and Formula have already gotten enough publicity.  Amen.

The Black Plague

And here I was, wondering what I was going to come up with for a topic for this Friday’s blog, when Yahoo News gave me my inspiration: a story about a girl in Colorado who survived the bubonic plague.  Yes, the same plague which wiped out millions in Europe in the Middle Ages.  It’s also known as the Black Death or Black Plague.

 Spread.  According to the story, it came on ships from China (the disease itself originating in Yunnan Province) in the early fouteenth century and quickly spread through Europe, even England.  Oddly, Poland was spared.  Rats & fleas were the means by which the disease initially spread, then from human to human.  To the extent that a secular, scientific or biological cause was considered (as opposed to some “scourge from God”), the diagnosis was “bad air”, but how that related to rats, fleas, and humans was nowhere close to understood.  Science was in its infancy and the Ptolemaic solar system – the Earth at the center, with the Sun yet another “planet” – still reigned.  The Renaissance was centuries down the road.

 Symptoms.  The main symptoms were high fever, delirium, vomiting blood, and “buboes” (large, nasty bulges) in the groin and armpits.  There was no known cure, though almost everything – including drinking urine – was attempted.  Death was all but certain within 2-7 days.  The disease spread rapidly; efforts at quarantine started in Dubrovnik in 1377.   In addition to the bubonic plague, there is also pneumonic plague and septicemic plague as well, which have far higher mortality rates than the bubonic variety.  However, such a high rate also limits the ability of the plague to spread, as it kills the victims before they can spread the disease to others. 

 1349.  The peak in Europe was 1349, although subsequent outbreaks occurred into the 19^th century, and continue even today on very limited occasions (e.g. the isolated case of the girl in Colorado recently). 

 Dance of Death.  Pictures from the period show victims dancing until they died, or dancing with skeletons – somewhat macabre.  With no cure and no escape, the plague drove many to insanity.  The “flagellants” whipped themselves in remorse to atone for whatever grievous sins much have brought this heinous scourge upon them.  Others went to the other extreme, wallowing in depravity and promiscuousness as the end was near. 

            Aldous Huxley, in The Doors of Perception, had a further theory.  He argued that the idiosyncrasies of the deficient medieval diet encouraged madness and hallucination.  Possible ergot fungus poisoning, and the delirium caused by high fevers, no doubt also fueled the fires of insanity among these poor lost souls. 

            I wrote earlier about nightmares and delirium.  How much worse must it have been for these people.  Even without the plague, their life expectancy was 30+.  Their church hammered them about Satan and Hell constantly.  They had terrible doctors who couldn’t cure anything.  Now this horrible disease struck them and they had nowhere to go.  The worst possible nightmare, come to life.  Hell on earth – no wonder those Bosch and Brueghel paintings were so weird.

 Plague Doctors.  As if the plague itself wasn’t weird enough, leave it to the medieval mind to make it even stranger: the “plague doctor”, who claimed to specialize in curing the disease (difficult without suitable hygiene or antibiotics) wore long frock coats, a wide brimmed hat, and a long-beaked bird mask.

 “The Seventh Seal”.  The 1957 black & white film with Max von Sydow (still making movies, by the way!) as a Crusader returning to Sweden and finding it in the throes of the Black Death.  The typical fixation people have with this film is the knight (MvS) playing chess with “Death”, but I find the madness of the locals faced with imminent death from the Plague to be a more compelling element of the film.  I also found it intriguing that Death either cannot or will not tell the Knight what form, if any, the afterlife will take.

 Prevention vs. Cure.   Because the plague is caused by bacteria, really the cure is antibiotics, which are a fairly recent invention, e.g. penicillin.  However, since the plague is spread by rats and fleas, the general improvement in personal and urban hygiene tended to reduce the occurrence of the disease.   Typically modern outbreaks tended to coincide with breakdowns in hygiene.  Theoretically an antibiotic-resistant strain could mutate and give us 1349 all over again, but this is thankfully very unlikely.