For McCleery, dinner is gorgonzola cheese fritters: crisp little pucks made of sweet corn and gorgonzola that are battered and deep-fried, served with an olive-green puddle of chimichurri. She eats daintily and asks for a box to take half her fritters home for after the show.
I order a goat-cheese chicken sandwich, which sounds wonderful—sherried arugula, roasted tomatoes, and tarragon goat cheese—but is, in fact, bland and bready. There’s not enough creaminess to make up for the thick, crumbly ciabatta, and the chicken tastes old. The side order of sweet potato fries, however, is exquisite: hot, meaty, perfectly spiced, and accompanied by a peanut pesto aioli so good I could eat it over ice cream.
While we eat, McCleery explains what it means to be a Rocky person.
“When you see the film for the first time, if you’re one of us, you recognize yourself,” she says. “You say to yourself, ‘I’m a part of that tribe.’ Rocky people look at that screen and see other people who are pushing the boundaries and pushing their inhibitions and pushing the realm of naughty. They feel a commonality, a bond.”
Apparently, real Rocky people are rare. Transvestite Soup is willing to audition hopefuls whenever they want. But more than half of those who request auditions never show up. And of those who do, few understand what it means to be a part of Rocky.
You have to know what’s happening on screen even when your back is to it, McCleery says. And you have to be versatile: She, for instance, is on her way tonight to play Frank-N-Furter—as she has for the past several months—though she began her Rocky career as Magenta; she also played Janet in bra and panties throughout nine months of pregnancy.
We talk about Richard O’Brien, the English stage actor who wrote the musical stage play The Rocky Horror Show, adapted it for screen as The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and played Riff-Raff, first on stage and then in the film version. She calls him a “brilliant and multi-faceted” author and performer, saying that he’s never been properly recognized by the theater world for his contributions.
McCleery leaves at eleven o’clock in order to change in time for the midnight screening. The outfit she wore to dinner is “street legal,” she tells me, whereas her costume for the show definitely is not.
“It’s hard to be shocking at Rocky these days,” McCleery tells me in parting. “So we have to be a lot edgier than the movie itself.”
We take separate cars to the Riverview. I’m there by 11:15, part of the crowd milling out front. There’s a group of guys playing hackey-sack, several women wearing feather boas, and a young person walking around with a tube of red lipstick, painting V’s on people’s foreheads.
“You aren’t a. . . .virgin, are you?” the lipstick-wielder asks. It’s amazing how a person can be utterly beautiful — dreadlocks, eyeliner, tight jeans over fishnet stockings — without giving off a single, solid clue as to their gender. This, I think happily, is what Rocky Horror is all about.
I’m one of only three people who isn’t smoking, but for once, this doesn’t bother me. The rain has cleared. The night is fresh and cool.
Inside the theater, however, things are a bit stuffy. The cast mills in and out of restrooms (again, with little regard to gender), putting on their costumes. McCleery adds a good half-inch of white makeup and a black, curly wig. A delicate young man slips into a sequined suit and becomes the siren, Columbia. A luscious, zaftig Magenta walks by. There’s a kid with a ducktail haircut and a leather jacket who’s a dead ringer for Meatloaf — 25 years ago.
I enter the auditorium, which was not cleaned after the previous film (or, perhaps, the previous ten films). The floor is sticky, and the air is musty, full of spores. It’s 12:20 before the cast climbs onto the stage. And even then, it’s only for the pre-show.
McCleery, dressed now in a leather thong and vest, takes the microphone and begins. Gone is the articulate woman I dined with. She entreats everyone to move up to the front, and when we don’t, she starts the chorus of screaming: “Fuck you back row!” “Fuck you front row!” “We fucked you first!”
Periodically, she turns, leans over, and shows every inch of her butt cheeks to the crowd.
This goes on until a middle-aged woman with long gray hair boards the stage. McCleery introduces her as “Rocky Mom,” and her role, it seems, is to take the virgins (those who have never been to a live performance before) into her care. Everyone bearing a red V is called to the front and made to repeat the following pledge:
I, virgin scum
Pledge allegiance to the Lips
Of The Rocky Horror Picture Show
And to the decadence
For which it stands.
One Movie
Under Richard O’Brien
With sensual daydreams
And erotic nightmares
for all.
So fuck me!