That second night I saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show, was the most fun I’d had in months. I shouldn’t have to tell you (my dear reader) how entertaining it can be when the whole audience joins in the fun. The fabulous fun facilitated by this film. They really become part of the show, don’t they?
Now that I was clear headed enough to follow what was going on and catch all the details, I also found myself enjoying all the subtle aspects of this movie that truly make it work. The artist in me was stirring and perhaps even looking for some expression.
My adult self can easily imagine how I might have taken a completely different path at this point. How I might have become part of some creative community of Omaha artists who also happened to regularly attend this movie. Surely if I’d tried at all, I could have found such people there. I may have even been able to find some kind of art-related work through the type of people I might meet in this theater. The possibilities were there, I’m sure of it.
My adult self can imagine all I want.
I went to the movie a few more times but I was still in my big, hairy, dark specter costume. A few people passed me beers and joints but no one tried talking to me and I did not initiate any conversations. I don’t know why. My adult self can speculate that it was all just too weird for a naive, midwestern nineteen-year-old farm boy like me.
So instead of taking this perfect opportunity to make some creative and interesting new friends, I went back to a friend I already had. Even though it was not anywhere near a fulfilling, healthy or even all that interesting of a friendship… it was what I had. It had already become familiar. Crazy as my adult self may see it now, I went back to my friend…
“Crazy” Allen.
After experiencing his violent and racist outburst during our walk, after that painfully anticlimactic trip he took me on to show me to his childhood home, Allen and I had hardly seen each other. I’d been spending almost all my time walking in my big, dark, hairy specter costume by night and sleeping by day. I wasn’t even aware of what Allen and the gang were up to most of the time any more.
I can’t remember how it happened, but at some point I told Allen about the movie and in no time at all, the whole group became completely hooked. They all went to every single showing. It became like a ritual, and most of them dressed up, brought all the props and everything. Allen himself treated the event like just another party but for his girlfriend and the rest of his gang, The Rocky Horror Picture Show became THE most important part of their social life for as long as I knew them after that.
I stopped going to the movie after I went with them two or three times more.
My adult self can see how it may have been a lucky thing that Allen and the gang had got so hooked on this movie. I guess that helped facilitate my separation from them. Our relationship had always been pretty one sided anyway, so by the time I left for good (sometime around the end of March or early April of 1979) I was not at all sad to have seen the last of Omaha, Nebraska.
There are however, a few more stories about that time that I will have to share when this will again have to be…
To be continued…
