Next morning after my random encounter with that midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, I awoke not completely sure of what had happened. I thought that it may have been a dream, or weed-induced hallucination of some kind. Perhaps, after so much walking in my previously dark state, my imagination insisted that I get some fun (an interesting twist on my survival mode?) and conjured up the whole thing.

After all, my brain was telling me that the theater marquee said the movie was a Horror Show so perhaps my imagination just went wild in there and made up all the other goings-on-n-stuff that my brain was still telling me also actually did happen.

Actually.

Actually, for the better part of the rest of the day, my brain continued to tell me such details from that previous evening’s spectacle, that my conscious mind was having a very hard time believing I had not completely succumbed to the darkness. But why would it get so very weird? These “memories”… these details, slowly filtered into my questionably conscious mind and shook my very being.

My being sane?

Yes, of course I was sane. I knew what insanity looked like from my sojourn at 6-D East, a million miles away in Rochester, Minnesota (now nearly two million years ago) and this was nothing like that. There was an easy fix to this confusion of course. An easy way to confirm the reality or non-reality of my ever more vividly remembered spectacular encounter the night before.

An encounter that my adult self easily can understand might have an effect like this on any naive, midwestern, nineteen-year-old youth such as me. Besides, this wasn’t California or New York… ya know? It was Omaha, Nebraska in early 1979. The now, hugely well known and popular 1975 cult classic was brad new in the midwest at the time. My adult self is even now quite surprised that Omaha would have been so cool.

Yes… cool.

As my conscious mind became more and more aware of the details of the experience, the coolness of it all became my over-all takeaway feeling. I had stumbled into something very cool. Something so very fun that it was really a shame I had forgotten so much of it.

I had to go back.

I would have to go back and I would have to do so right away. I was going to have to retrace my steps from the night before to even find the theater, so I needed to get going as soon as possible.

I found myself walking again. Walking again but no longer without purpose or direction. I was on a quest.

A quest to find those lips.

I knew the lips would be on the theater marquee and so I went looking for them. Looking for the lips. I walked and walked. I might have even begun chanting to myself as I walked.

Lips, lips lips liiiips…

When I found the lips I was happy. I was so very happy. But the movie wouldn’t start for several hours. It would be another midnight showing so I had to wait and now this story will have to wait. Will have to be…

To be continued…