The Horror

(continued)

by Camille Dodero

MAID TO ORDER: Linda Brennan plays Magenta, Rocky Horror's off-the-wall housekeeper.

The Saturday after Thanksgiving, the film narration begins in a crass fusillade with the film's opening credits. Craggy voices intone a Star Wars-meets-Genesis intro over a pitch-black screen: "A long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, God said `Let there be lips.' " And then The Rocky Horror Picture Show's signature lips zoom in -- a moist crimson pair that floats and sings from an aperture of dark oblivion.

The show is not an event suited for those who like to watch movies in silence. Audience dialogue persists throughout the film. Most of the catcalling is familiar to anyone who's ever read about Rocky: Brad the hero triggers shouts of "Asshole!" and Janet, Susan Sarandon's coy maiden, gets called "Slut!" Some of the revilement is fresh and steeped in contemporary pop culture: "You're all voted off this island!" "Big Brother is a really fucked-up show, isn't it?" When Dr. Frank N. Furter murders Meatloaf, the theater reverberates with South Park-type cries of "Oh my God! You killed Meatloaf, you bastard!"

But most of the cracks reflect a more Beavis and Butt-head sense of humor:

"Hey folks, check out this angel: it's got a hard-on for Jesus."

"Mary Poppins is taking a shit on the front lawn."

"It's better than eating gonads."

"Waiter, there's a tampon in my soup."

"There's a smurf on Janet's ass. Get him, get him!"

And at the conclusion of the Time Warp, the film's famous jig, dancers collapse onto the floor, leaving a hallful of limp bodies. Someone yells, "The Columbine library!"

Columbine, tampons, sex -- no subject is taboo with Full Body Cast. God is fair game: in honor of Mass Cann's annual Freedom Rally in September, a pre-show skit turned Joan Osborne's chorus of "What if God was one of us?" into "What if God smoked cannabis?""Special needs" aren't off limits, either: the pre-show I saw featured an opening skit called "Devils and Retards," which posited a helmeted "special person" volleying himself into walls and spasmodically skittering around during a casual ball toss. (Audience commentary included "Take it, Corky!" and sing-songy chants of "We're going to hell!")

GIRLS' NIGHT OUT: even by movie-theater standards, there are copious amounts of coupling in the Rocky Horror audience.

"The first week we were going to perform that, we couldn't," admits Alex Savitsky, the FBC director. "We had one, you know . . . a special person show up that night, so I made an executive decision not to do it."

This touching display of consideration is unusual for the members of Full Body Cast. Generally, they don't worry about offending people. "Every Halloween we introduce at least one pre-show skit that pushes the envelope and pisses people off," Savitsky says. "Halloween before last, the pre-show that had five audience members storming out was called `Driving Retards to the Zoo.' "

"Devils and Retards" debuted this past Halloween, but surprisingly, the special-needs jokes weren't what made people the most irate. "What really pissed people off was our take on Beauty and the Beast," Savitsky says. "We played the Nine Inch Nails song `Closer' [its lyrics include `I want to fuck you like an animal']. We had the Beast raping Beauty, but after a bit, she started getting into it." He pauses and then tries to explain that FBC wasn't condoning rape. "We did have the Beast get beat down by a crowd. But people still didn't like it too much."

And when people don't like Full Body Cast's jokes too much, they broadcast their disapproval. "We have people storming out, we have people complaining to anyone who will listen, we have people starting fights with our security crew, people complaining to management, people e-mailing us through the Web site," Savitsky says. "It's funny, people actually get upset enough to go to our Web site and complain."

Savitsky laughs and recalls, "We also got in trouble for a lingerie night we had. We'd been promoting it for about a month and only one person showed up in lingerie. To make it relevant, we passed out squares of duct tape for women to put over their nipples. And later we got a call from management. A woman had called to complain because she felt the nudity was inappropriate for her 14-year-old children to see. To which our response was, `Well, it's an R-rated movie.' "

HEAD OF THE CLASS: Dr. Frank N. Furter, played by Mark Cotton, uses his teeth to pop the cherry-red balloon between the knees of a Horror "virgin."

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For all its antics, Full Body Cast isn't a ragtag organization. It boasts an active roster of 30 to 40 participants ranging in age from 16 to 36. It holds Wednesday meetings, alternates casts every week, and auditions every single role twice a year to make certain that, as Savitsky puts it, "people aren't slacking off."

With such a large commitment, do FBC members tire of devoting so much time to Rocky? "People ask me how I can do the same thing week after week," says Mark Cotton, an FBC member for almost a year. "I often tell them that each week is different." Christina Rice, a freshman at Emerson who performed a kinky striptease the night I saw Rocky Horror, explains that the other cast members keep it interesting. "For me, it's not so much about the movie as it is about the people involved in the show," the Idaho native says. "It takes a special kind of group that would actually spend every Saturday night volunteering their time in order to get half naked and put on this crazy show."

Ask how or why FBC members became intertwined with "this crazy show" and it becomes obvious that this is, as Rice suggests, a special kind of group. David Wilson, an 11-year veteran of Rocky, confesses: "I joined the show to get laid. Nothing more complicated than that." (Why, after 11 years, does he still do it? "Not to get laid," he says. "Well, not entirely." After a moment he adds that it does still "get me laid regularly when I want to.") Alex Savitsky says he was a "sheltered little kid" when his Jewish youth group brought him to his first screening. (According to Alex, the show is a popular destination for both Jewish and Christian youth groups. "A long-standing joke is that when we show up at 11 o'clock at the theater and we see a bus full of people, we always say, `Oh good. They bused in the Jews,' " he says.)

Rice thinks back to her own deflowering and still can't quite recall why she stuck around. "One of the other virgins and I had to partake in a little contest involving a banana stuck between the legs of the actor playing Frank," she says. "To this day I'm still not entirely sure why I went back the next week, and the one after that, and the one after that."

But chagrined newbies do come back: the Harvard Square screening sells out almost every week, and most FBC members have their own initiation memories. Bianca, the Frank N. Furter who led my virgin ceremony, suggests that people like to be forced out of their shells. "Everyone has fun, no matter how embarrassed they seem to be. The worse things you do to them and they'll come up afterwards and be like, `Thank you. I was mortified, but thank you.' "

Some aren't so thankful -- even if they weren't the one being embarrassed. "We had a family bring their kids to the show," Savitsky says. "One of the kids was a young girl and she was about 10 or 12, but she looked about eight. The Frank of that night proceeded to take it over the edge. He pulled out a banana and had them see who could deep throat it further."

Savitsky says Frank told the parents what he was planning before he did it -- "They were like, `Sure, it'll build character.' " But despite the parents' permission, other folks later questioned the incident. "You know what the funny thing was, no one in the audience complained until the next week," Savitsky says. "No one was complaining at the time. There were the usual chants of `We're going to jail,' or `We're going to hell,' but no one actually stormed out or complained."

Savitsky says the cast was divided about Frank's actions with the prepubescent girl: "We had a very interesting moral debate about that one. We talked about how we could've stopped it and some of us wondered whether we should have killed the lights."

In all fairness, Full Body Cast doesn't try to conceal its lasciviousness. As Savitsky says, Rocky Horror is R-rated, and FBC's Web site (www.fullbodycast.org) is extremely forthcoming about the show's explicit content. And in theory, the flouting of social norms upholds a 25-year-old tradition that began with Horror star Tim Curry's cross-dressing. But is having a pre-teen blowing a banana or using rape as a gag justifiable just because a movie transgresses boundaries?

Sometimes, audience members confront the cast with questions like these. Bianca, a Weston native whose own father doesn't know she cavorts around on stage twice a month in garter belts and a jacket with a 69 patch, has had parents approach her after the show. "They come up to me," she says, "and they ask, `How can you sleep at night?' "

Camille Dodero hasn't slept at night since she thrust her pelvis on command. She can be reached at cdodero[a]phx.com.

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