In my review for The Rocky Horror Picture Show, I mentioned attending the live screening with New York’s shadow cast as well as the overall audience participation. In that spirit, I’ve collected a couple stories from friends and acquaintances with their own *RHPS *stories to tell; including two members of New York’s shadow cast, who were gracious enough to share their perspective with me. I have two stories of my own, which I’ll also sprinkle throughout this collection.

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Being a Rocky Horror shadow-caster brings a lot of interesting opportunities into people’s lives, and I have learned that very well over the past 9 years of imitating this silly movie. From midnight shows every weekend, to 6 am booze cruises, shows at dive bars with 50 people and Broadway theaters with two thousand people, the occasional TV slot, and multiple documentary features later, I can say that Rocky Horror has brought the phrase “don’t dream it, be it” to a whole other level.

One of the Janets on my cast ran into Susan Sarandon at a restaurant and told her she was on the OG New York City Rocky cast. Susan ended up coming to one of our shows, which is absolutely insane, and liked us enough to book us for a private gig with her. Soon after, we also booked shows with Little Nell (Columbia) and Barry Bostwick. Below is a picture of Susan and I, at the gig she hired us for (I was playing Janet).

This year I was at the 50th anniversary convention in LA. I got to see Tim Curry in the flesh two days in a row, talking about all things Rocky. Then I got booked as Janet to perform at New York’s Town Hall on Broadway, with Barry, Pat and Nell! Now that the 50th anniversary whirlwind has died down, reflecting back on everything I did has me so grateful to be given those opportunities, grateful to be a part of something that means so much to so many people, grateful to my AMAZING cast of the most talented Rocky horror performers that I have ever seen, and grateful to my parents who were fans since the 70’s, who raised me on rock n roll and Rocky horror.

• Kristin Hutchins, New York City, NYCRHPS Cast

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I’ve been to New Orleans for Mardi Gras a couple times. The first time I dared to join the crowds in the French Quarter on Mardi Gras night, and at one point that night did the Time Warp on a Bourbon Street bartop along with three women from Minnesota. They all marveled that “that was amazing, you knew the dance!”

I was too full of drunken good will to point out that the lyrics *tell you *how to do the Time Warp.

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Rocky Horror was a big feature of my college experience. I was A Random Transylvanian all four years – which meant I got to dress up in fishnets, a tux jacket, and a sparkly top, do the Time Warp, yell call backs, and offer candy to audience members. I still remember the choreography.

I went to see the play Rocky Horror Show on opening night when it hit Broadway in 2000. Dick Cavett was the Criminologist, and there was a pause the first time he said “Brad Majors” – and then some intrepid soul yelled out “ASSHOLE!” and the audience started laughing. And then it came to Janet Weiss, and you know what someone yelled.

Mr. Cavett waited a beat and said “She was a slut from a very good family.”

• Elizabeth, New York City

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In about 2000, I had just met a new group of friends and started hanging out with them. We used to do dinner & movie afternoons at someone’s apartment; everyone brought food and we’d cook together and watch DVDs. I was still kinda getting to know them, and I’m naturally rather shy and quiet – even to this day I’m “the quiet one” of the bunch.

Once they put on a DVD of Rocky Horror. The movie started, and I shouted from the back of the room: “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away – God said, LET THERE BE LIPS!”

A living room full of 30-something gay men all slowly turned around and looked at me, “the quiet one.” “What?” I said. “It’s Rocky Horror. You don’t just sit there and WATCH it.” I then proceeded to do the entire audience participation routine, solo.

The event is now a legend among the group, one of those “remember that time when…” stories that gets told over and over.

• “Dnash”

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I’m a Rocky Horror shadow cast performer, currently in the NYC cast, but I’ve been in casts in Oregon and Washington as well.

I’ve really loved being a part of Rocky Horror because as I’ve moved to different parts of the country, I’ve been able to find community everywhere I go. It’s like having a built-in friend group in every city that’s centered around theater, film, costume, clownery, sex, aliens, and glam rock. The movie itself is like a beacon for all manner of freaks. Seriously, you don’t even really have to advertise the show. Especially around Halloween and Pride, however many shows you put on are how many will sell out. No wonder we keep doing it.

I also do theater and cosplay and things like that, but they’re not the same in terms of instant friend-making. I’ve never met a Rocky Horror cast that didn’t party together. People always wanna know what it is about Rocky Horror, a second-rate satire movie musical, that lets it have such a strong cult following. I think that it’s just the right kind of signaling for a certain kind of freak that a lot of people are. It lets people experience a little mini sexual revolution every Saturday night.

• Cameron Reid, New York City, NYCRHPS Cast

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In our senior year in college, my friend Ian had a new girlfriend, Shannon. He learned she’d never seen *Rocky Horror *and insisted on bringing her, dragging the rest of us along to the theater as well. Ian was a *huge *fan, with a whole set of audience call-backs from where he grew up near Boston. He and Shannon sat side by side, with the rest of us in the row behind them – where we could see Shannon repeatedly turning to Ian with astonished laughter as he shouted out each of his jokes.

We all gathered on the sidewalk outside after the show, asking Shannon what she thought; she’d loved it. But after a second she turned to Ian with mock horror and said – “you’re disgusting.”

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My older sister was a cast member when I was younger. So I knew the score well, from the crackly record I’d listen to on giant clunky headphones tethered to the stereo in the living room on an arc of coiled cable, and I had The Official Rocky Horror Picture Show Movie Novel, a lurid tome published at the five year anniversary of the film in 1980, which told the story in a sort of hardcover comic book comprised of movie stills. As I got older, I found Aaron Fricke’s coming out memoir, Reflections of A Rock Lobster, in which attendance of Picture showings was a key moment of camaraderie. A year later I had a job, a savagely dented Datsun station wagon with one black fender, and was living in a filthy illegal basement apartment, and I set out to finally be it after waiting so long.

It was 1986, the president was the man who’d ruin America, everyone was falling down dead with AIDS, and still, I was set. I had my props, carefully remembered dialogue explained (via impossibly expensive long distance calls to Greenwich Village) by my sister, and I showed up at the theater. The crowd was bustling, all loud and exuberant and stinking of cigarettes and cheap beer, and I took my seat, waited for the theater to go dark, and—

—it was one continuous shouting homophobic larf after another, hurled at the screen with all the spit and force of flatulent frat boy machismo bullshit histrionics. I sheepishly tried to holler out the lines of the script (circa 1981 as taught to me by my sister), but the words “fag” and “faggot” and “fag with AIDS” were everywhere in the air like a whirling cloud of yellowjackets, stinging with each raspy blowhole outcry from some dick in Izod, and I could hardly take in the movie, I was so angry.

This was supposed to be our place.

I drove home in a dull rage that, after all these years, Brad’s letterman compatriots had stormed the theaters and ruined everything. “What’s wrong with you?” asked my roommate when I got home.

“Went to see Rocky Horror,” I said, in a full pout.

“Oh, I don’t do that. All they do is yell ‘faggot’ all the time.”

“Yeah, I didn’t think it was supposed to be like that.”

“It wasn’t. Welcome to the eighties, I guess.”

The next weekend I resolved to claim my space. I waited in line for Rocky again, forcing myself into a neutral face instead of the rictus of dread that would have come more naturally, bought my ticket, and this time, instead of sitting near the back, I took the center seat in the front row.

Those lips were enormous, enough to drown out the whole world, and I sang along, letting the stupidity recede into the dark behind me. I said my piece, threw all the right objects on cue, and let the screen peel away and wrap around me like the protective arms of an angel from sweet Transexual, Transylvania, from the moon-drenched shores of my beloved planet, and all the laughing, cackling, brutish cries of “faggot” were like clouds of gnats—present, unavoidable, but lost in time and lost in space…and meaning.

This is my place. This is my voice.

The weeks rolled on. I learned, I experimented, I added lines and added retorts to the asinine Reaganauts. I never summoned the courage or had the budget to dress up, but I suspect I’d have made a good one of whatever I felt like being, and I suspect no one really ever knew I was there, but I knew. My drives home became euphoric, elevated, even though my Datsun was making a terrible noise that I suspected would soon be expensive. I drowned it out singing “Touch-a Touch-a Touch Me” at the top of my lungs with my mousse-crusted mullet scratching at the headliner.

It was the heart of the eighties, our president was the strutting, wisecracking, lovable asshole who would ruin America, and everyone was falling down dead with AIDS while a country that had lost its soul laughed like filthy, ugly hyenas, but there was a light, over at the Frankenstein place—a light, burning in the fireplace, a light in the darkness of everybody’s life.

Especially mine.

• Joe Wall, Baltimore

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….I have mixed feelings about this film.

• A woman named “Janet”