Confessions of a Transylvanian (8 page)

Finally, the initiation was over and the no-longer virgins were led back to their seats. The performers filed into the room as Tony finished up the pre-show with a final, cacophonous cheer, bringing the energy level in the auditorium to its peak.

The show was about to begin.

So...pop quiz: What
did
n’
t
happen before the show? Did you catch it? Did you notice the
one thing
that appeared to be missing from the whole pre-show business?

Tha
t’
s right: Nobody had explained to me or to Steve just
what the hell we were supposed to do during the performance
.

Clearly, joining the Rocky cast involved on-the-job training. We were going to learn how to swim, but the teaching method this cast employed was to throw you in the deep end of the pool, lob an anvil at you and wish you good luck.

Needless to say, when we realized that we would be improvising as we went along, the blood froze in our veins. The very idea was utterly terrifying. Terrifying
and
exciting, perhaps. But definitely equal parts of both.

I checked in with Steve to see if he had been given any sort of guidance or advice to which I remained ignorant. “Do you have a clue what to...you know...
do
?” I asked him. “I mean, once the show begins? Anything?”

Steve looked about as shit-scared as I was. “No way,” he said. “I guess we just...figure it out, huh?”

Our eyes must have been as big as saucers when the lights went down.

Donny spotted the two of us huddled off to the side and corralled us just as the projector flickered to life.

“Hey, listen,” he said. “Yo
u’
re gonna be fine. Just find a few other Transylvanians and follow their lead. And try not to get in anyon
e’
s way. Understand?”

Steve and I bobbed our heads up and down vigorously. “Absolutely,” I stammered out. “No problem.”

“Great. Have fun.” Donny stalked away.

Steve and I looked at each other, each attempting to look calm.

“Here we go,” he said.

The lights had faded entirely. The projector was alive. The crowd roared.

It had begun.

4

Unconventional Conventionists

O
h, you thought the Rocky movie was going to start right then, did
n’
t you?

Not quite. I mean, whenever you go to the movies, just before the feature begins, yo
u’
ve got to have coming attractions, right? Things were no different at the Rocky show.

Well, things were slightly different. See, before
this
movie began, you did
n’
t watch previews for movies that were
about
to come out. You watched previews for movies that came out years and years ago.

The coming attractions at the Deerfield Ultravision midnight movie were all classic trailers. They ran previews for “The Blues Brothers,” “Animal House,” the Beatle
s’
“Help!”; films that most of us had already seen a dozen times. The audience went crazy for them. It put them right in the mood.

All during the previews, cast members scurried around in the dark getting ready. I did
n’
t really get a sense that the main event was about to begin until, at last, everybody stopped fussing and finally settled down. Half of the cast was making their way to the ramp under the screen so they could look up at the two girls performing the opening number. Steve and I, lemmings that we were, joined them. Donny himself was perched dead center. His approach to this ritual was almost religious, the way he sat cross-legged at the bottom of the ramp staring placidly up at the screen, a contented smile plastered across his face.

All of a sudden, the screen went black and the crowd started chanting, “
We want lips! We want lips! We want lips!
”

Then the opening music kicked in, and the bright red lips appeared, very small, on the screen. They continued to swell in size until the smile was fifty, sixty, seventy feet across. The audience was howling their approval.

Very slowly, the spotlight came up on the two girls center stage. At that moment, the lips on the screen parted…and started to sing.

The previous week, I had seen this pair go through their rendition of “Science Fiction / Double Feature” from about halfway back in the theater. It was a sight to behold, even at that distance.

But now, practically sitting in their laps, I could hardly stand it. They had sexual vibes pouring off them in waves and I was sitting at the epicenter of this erotic tsunami.

As before, they were sharply in sync with each other. They seemed to sense the othe
r’
s precise movements, down to the last detail, even before either of them moved. And it was
n’
t simply that they were performing pre-arranged choreography. It was more intricately detailed than that, their symmetry. There was the slight flick of the wrist here. A momentary turn of the head there. Their timing was impeccable. Watching them move together was a study in precision.

Despite all this, they each somehow managed to maintain their own individual style throughout the entire song. The one on the right, the smaller one, had this bad-girl, dangerous thing going on (which, um, really worked on many levels). She was the more aggressive of the two, slightly sharper in her movements but, in every way, completely sensual. But for all her obvious attractions I was—for reasons I could not explain—falling madly, deeply in love with the girl on the left. The Magenta. A girl whose name I did
n’
t even know.

Her hair was impossibly curly and just rained down around her shoulders. She had a thin, aquiline nose and these secretive eyes that looked right through you. Her face, as was required of Magentas, was a deathly pale, slashed through with a bloody red mouth. And while she was deadly serious at her task, moving through her movements to accompany and accentuate the song, there was a smile playing around her lips that seemed to say, “Hey, is this fun or what?”

I understood Donn
y’
s attraction immediately. Who would
n’
t want to spend the rest of their lives sitting here, drinking in this smoldering post-pubescent display of forbidden desire?

For my part, I wanted nothing more than to stay right where I was for the whole number, but about three-quarters through the song, I felt a tug on my jacket. Steve was motioning to me to follow him, so I reluctantly scooted down the ramp and made my way to the stage-left side.

Steve hissed at me, “
The wedding!
”

I had completely forgotten, in my reverie, that I actually had a show to perform.

“
Right!
” I whispered back. “
I’
m all set
.
Where do we go?
”

I stumped him there. He had
n’
t the slightest idea.

We looked around and finally spotted a cluster of people gathering in the dark at the top of the ramp to our right. We thought it best to join them and sidled over. And since no one screamed, “What the fuck are you doing here?” we figured we were in the right place.

And, you want to know something? That, in a nutshell, is exactly how a young performer learns to do the Rocky show. You get up on stage, you go where you think you should go and, unless someone says, “What the fuck are you doing here?” yo
u’
re doing an excellent job.

Apparently, we did an excellent job. Well, through the wedding scene, anyway. Steve and I stayed in our little cluster of guests and when the others on stage posed for the wedding picture, we struck a pose and smiled. When they waved to Ralph and Betty as they “drove” off, we waved, too. And when the other guests eventually wandered away, we wandered with them.

Then…the scene was over. We had survived. We did
n’
t bump into Brad or Janet or anyone else. We had
n’
t engendered any harsh, urgent whispers, we had managed not to step on anyone and, best of all, we had not been invited to go fuck ourselves. Steve and I, for the first time in our lives, had performed in a scene in “The Rocky Horror Picture Show”...

…and we had not, as far as we knew, sucked at it.

Before we move on to the rest of this evenin
g’
s festivities, there is another very important thing about the Rocky experience that I feel compelled to relate and, really, there cannot be too much emphasis placed upon this aspect of the performance:

The costumes. The costumes have to be absolutely, dead-on right.

Now, Steve and I—like most of the people up on the stage—were dressed similarly at the top of the show. We had the Transylvanian uniform
I’
ve already described: black jackets and pants, white shirts and neckties, various party hats, dark sunglasses and, of course, our buttons. Our hundreds and hundreds of buttons. But our pseudo-uniformity should have been the big tip-off that we were the lowest rung on the ladder. After all, we were
n’
t even under an obligation to bother looking like anyone in particular on the screen. We just had to look like w
e’
d
fit in
with that crowd. We were the Rocky equivalent of wallpaper.

But the principals? Well. That was another story altogether.

In case you need one last refresher, here are the main characters in the movie, in no particular order: Brad and Janet (the hapless couple who stumble into this adventure), Riff Raff and Magenta (the servants at the castle), Columbia and Eddie (a groupie and her beloved biker dude), Dr. Scott (a professor), Rocky (the Creation), the Narrator (a narrator) and, of course, the Big Kahuna himself, Dr. Frank-N-Furter. As I said, there were some additional incidental players, like Ralph and Betty Hapschatt (the couple who get married at the top of the film), but the principals were- forever and always- the primary focus.

This was the varsity squad. And as with any group of A-Listers, you had to
earn
a spot on that team. I very soon discovered that achieving this goal could take months. Years, even. If it happened at all.

But back to the costumes: If the Transylvanian
s’
outfits were acceptably slapdash (nobody seemed to care if, for example, your suit jacket even matched your pants or gave a flying crap what your buttons said), the principal
s’
costumes were subject to a level of exactitude that would have impressed a drill sergeant.

Obviously, the goal was to look as much like the on-screen character as possible. Janet, up on the screen, walks through the rain in a pink dress and white sweater so, naturally, the goal of our Janet was to find a similar pink dress and white sweater. Sounds easy, right?

Not quite. Jane
t’
s pink dress also had to have a pink gingham collar, feature a gold script “Janet” necklace and had to unzip down the back (let me emphasize:
had
to unzip down the back). Plus the barrettes. And the
collarless
white sweater. Not to mention the underwear. Once could write a book about the underwear
alone
. (In fact, one should.)

So, while I had spent two minutes, tops, in the thrift store looking for my black suit, young girls aspiring to be up-and-coming Janets would spend months scouring South Florid
a’
s second-hand stores for just the right dress, hat and underwear combo. For them, nailing Jane
t’
s look
precisely
was serious business and they did everything they could to look as much like Susan Sarandon as it was possible to look.

Then there was Brad. Bra
d’
s jacket and plaid cummerbund had to be the
exact
design as the one Barry Bostwick wore. Wha
t’
s more, for the approach to the castle, the windbreaker Brad sported in the rainstorm had to match up perfectly, down to the Denton High School patch on the front. Ditto the tighty-whitey underpants revealed in the undressing scene. And, of course, the glasses.

But for the really, really serious Brads, you also had to have a picture-perfect blue kimono to be worn in the latter half of the film (the post-bedroom scenes). The
truly
efficient and studious Brads even went so far as to find the exact same pair of
socks
. (Come to think of it, Brad had a
lot
of costume changes. Tha
t’
s a ton of work for a guy who gets called an asshole all night.)

The character of Rocky was a breeze, comparatively. All he needed was a pair of skin-tight, gold hot pants. Pretty easy there. But the part also required a nice pair of pectoral muscles as well and let me tell you—those are
n’
t easy to find.

Magenta needed a hot maid outfit but, happily, the
y’
re sold everywhere. Sexy maid outfits, it will not surprise you to learn, are
very
popular. But the trick was: You had to look
good
in it. Think tha
t’
s easy? Try it.

Riff Raff sported a ripped-up tux jacket—with tails—and a white vest that looked as if you had pulled it out of the wrong end of a rhino. Cool boots were also a big plus. The skull cap was optional, but preferred. And brown gloves with no fingers. Those were a necessity.

Eddie sported a basic biker look. Motorcycle boots, jeans, leather jacket and a Gestapo-looking helmet. But the jacket had to be tricked out just right—sleeveless, with a sun flare painted on the back along with the word “BABY” across the top, the chains draped below and, if you could manage it, a bit of leopard fur peeking out the front. Most important, the saxophone, which Eddie uses to great effect during his song. A final touch is a bizarre slingshot-looking necklace draped on his chest, but only the hardcore Eddies remember to include it.

Dr. Scott? Piece of cake: button-down shirt, tie, dark suit, glasses, mustache. Oh, and one fishnet stocking. Just one. (Keep Dr. Scot
t’
s fishnet stocking in mind, if you would. It will figure prominently later in the story.)

So clearly (and to varying degrees), the costumes for the Rocky principals are extremely difficult to put together. That said, there is no question that the toughest costumes to acquire in the entire cast were the outfits worn by Columbia, Frank-N-Furter and the performers in the Floor Show.

Columbia was, essentially, a walking sequin. She sported a rainbow-sequined vertically striped tube top, vertically striped rainbow shorts, flawless fishnet stockings (no rips), black-rhinestone-studded tap shoes, a gold-sequined tuxedo jacket with black trim, pink-sequined bowtie and a gold-sequined top hat. Oh, and if you could manage it, shocking pink-red hair.

These days, you can find an outfit like that on eBay and in a few clicks have it delivered to your doorstep. But back then, girls had to
make
them.

Frank-N-Furter was clad in full-on transvestite gear, of course. From bottom to top, it went a little something like this: black and silver high-heeled platform shoes, fishnet stockings, garters, black underwear, black bustier (red corset for the Floor Show), long, black fingerless gloves, a string of oversized white pearls around your neck and, naturally, a black wig that did
not
, if you could avoid it, make you look like Cher after a round of shock therapy. Plus-sized actors playing Frank had a hard time finding appropriate outfits for the show. But somehow or other, they appeared.