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ROCKY HORROR
My oldest daughter is almost thirty years old, well, o.k..... so she's almost twenty nine, but that's close enough and it is almost thirty. Her mother, my first wife, and I had split up when this child was only about three and it was almost twelve years before I got to spend much more time around her. By then she had grown into a small but gangly woman with large glasses and small self confidence. She was a goody-two-shoes at school and even had a football player who would platonicly escort her from class to class ready to pound into the ground like a tent stake anyone foolish enough to use foul language in her presence.
I attended her sweet sixteen birthday party and even got to dance with her to her very own brand new stereo. My second wife came with me to the party to meet my daughter for the first time sober. She and my mother had felt the need to sample and taste their way through two complete bottles of champagne before the wedding so her actual memories of my daughter attending the ceremony were hazy, at best. In an attempt, at the party, to bond with her new stepdaughter who was only a few years her junior, she told her that we would take her to the midnight movies to see "The Rocky Horror Picture Show", at that time one of the cool and "in" things to do at any age.
None of us had actually seen the movie, but we had all heard much about the spectacle. The audience mimicked the movie, throwing rice and water, wearing newspapers on their heads.. Some even got up on the stage, in full costume, and acted out the movie complete with props and the correct choreography. It sounded like a lark or, as we older fools might have termed it, like a happening or even a be in. We took her and then we lost her.
She was entranced enthralled, engulfed and enabled. Within ten minutes she was reborn as an actress. Gone was the shy, mousy sixteen year old girl. Here, suddenly, was a smooth, self assured woman. The film, and the action that it prompted from the audience didn't, as it did for my wife and I, simply raise her consciousness; it launched it into the stratosphere.... exploded it. Just to watch her change was cathartic. When it was over, she glowed.. I could have driven home by the light of her shining from head to toes.
She had a new born swagger, a genuine sense of self that was electrifying. Within a week she was reading; Sartre, Genet, Hunter Thompson, Ginsberg and even Yevtushenko. She discovered, devoured and discarded Zen and Est. She had new and different friends, clothes, hair and habits. It was pleasing, and yet terrifying in it's suddenness and completeness.
My ex wife, who had been hoping that something would come along to draw her child out from her shell was mortified when, within a month, her sweet daughter dropped out of high school and moved out of the house. She was now sharing an apartment with six or seven of the "cast" of Rocky, those brave abandoned souls who stood on the lip of the stage and basked in the reflected movie light. With no acting experience at all she became "Columbia" a small but significant part which allowed her to wear a gold lame top hat. It didn't last long, her "Rocky Horror" phase, maybe a year or two at most. She worked hard at it and never collapsed into drugs or got pregnant or any of the other things that her parents had envisioned. When it was all over, and the attraction faded for her, she even moved back home for a month or two, firstly with me and then with her mom. But she didn't stay. She had grown up, on that night in the darkened riotous movie theater. She had found, not who she was perhaps, but who she wanted to be at least and definitely who she didn't want to be. She s been married since, for three or four years and now divorced. She never had kids yet and she's always fallen upwards from one good job to the next. She's an executive now.. Woefully unqualified on paper but she's the best one they have. She's got beauty, brains and the world by the cajones.
Thanks, Rocky Horror; ya done good.
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