How to Host a Virtual Rocky Horror Event

[genderjumper]

If you want to host a virtual viewing of RHPS, it's important to keep things simple and match people's enthusiasm levels. A few people with high enthusiasm are happy to settle for a couple of gags and a straightforward viewing, while a lot of people with low commitment just invites frustration and noise. If you're somehow enthusiastic about this experience without having ever been to a shadowcast yourself, there are recorded audio (cassette) and video (DVD) versions out there where you can learn about popular audience callbacks, some of which date back to those early Village viewings in 1976! Once you know the lines, though, it's important to scale back expectations and adapt to your circumstances.

Read my full essay at Letterboxd, no login required.

Comments

[otter]

How odd is it that so many of my friends in the early 80s would go to RHPS Friday nights at the Lagoon theater and I've never seen it? I attribute it to the fact that I nearly always had to work on Friday evenings at the grocery store, and that my mom wouldn't have let me take the bus to that area at night.

[genderjumper]

What a time to be alive, though! I'm still morbidly curious when and how my mom saw it in the brief interlude between its and my emergence into the world.

[numb3r_5ev3n]

This is great. I was a cast member understudy at Casa Linda before I was even 18 years old (and I was insufferable, LOL.) At one point I could nearly do our entire second script from memory, and did once at TWU when they asked me to do it for a Halloween showing.

[genderjumper]

The Venn Diagram between RHPS and queer autists is a damn circle?! I applaud your memorization skills; I'm much better at cataloguing the quoting things verbatim (...not that I haven't tried...).

I probably went to Los Bastardos a half-dozen or so times in my late 20s, after only seeing it with friends in high school only once (on VHS!). I also briefly entertained joining the shadowcast -- until I learned that I'd have to give up my Friday nights for rehearsals.

The very earliest touch point was probably that the show got a major-plot-element shoutout in an episode of Charles in Charge that I somehow retained even though I almost certainly saw the episode years before the movie.

(The episode is La Cage aux Fools, if anyone wants to track it down.)

I probably have a thousand touch points since then, and by now my queerness is way more expansive than this film could include, but it was a nice night of nostalgia, and I'm glad you liked my writing about it!