True Tales of Shocking Horror: I Dated a Rocky Horror Cast Member

In the spring of 2003 I was a “super senior”, which is the name they give you if you were too lazy or drunk to get through college in 4 years. I was graduating in May and had a measly 6 credits left to plow through before I’d be out of college for good, which meant I only had to be in class for a few hours a week. The rest of the time I could spend doing absolutely jack shit, mortgaging my future.

The peace and quiet was not to last. One of my two remaining classes was a 400-level film theory course chock full of pretentious film majors like myself. A few weeks had passed and I hadn’t even really noticed Stacy, who usually sat in the back of the class, one row ahead of me. Stacy typically wore a lot of black and came to class late, but she was a redhead and had the proper curves to catch my eye. At least, I caught them when she gave her first presentation of the year.

Stacy was attempting to apply semiotics (which is an unnecessarily complicated film theory for those of you who were wise enough to skip upper-level film classes) to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. She had it all outlined and everything. In fact she seemed to have an almost encyclopedic knowledge of Rocky Horror, a film I’d seen only once previous on VH-1’s increasingly inaccurately named “Movies That Rock” and wrote it off as a confection for people who can tolerate levels of camp heretofore unseen by man. Nevertheless I found her “presentation” intriguing and the next session I sat next to her in class.

“Hey, your presentation last week was awesome.” She lit up like a firecracker.

“Really? You think so?”

“Yeah, totally. I dug it. I mean I’m not like a huge Rocky fan but you made a lot of sense.” In truth I hadn’t really listened much to her paper, I was too busy fantasizing about having sex with her in the projection booth.

“That’s so nice of you to say!”

“Hey, do you want to get some lunch after class?”

You can see where this is going. Over lunch we talked about the usual things classmates talk about when they’re not in class, which is to say, we talked about class a lot. Eventually I managed to change the subject to other things… an hour lunch stretched into two hours or so. At the end, she asked me what I was doing Saturday night.

“Probably drinking myself into an early grave.” She laughed. I wasn’t really joking.

“You know there’s like, people who do the live-action Rocky Horror thing right?” I laughed.

“Yeah, I’ve heard of that! Do they do that here?”

“Yeah, it’s kind of embarrassing but I’m in the cast. I play Janet! It’s like, kinda dorky, but I have a lot of fun. Would you wanna come see me this weekend?”

“Sure!” I said. I’d seen a documentary on this before. Seemed like harmless fun. Hell, maybe I’d get a little after the show was over.

I didn’t get a little. I got a lot. Of pain.