For July’s four Saturdays, a downtown Portland movie theater was playing Rocky Horror Picture Show at midnight. I really wanted to go.
But midnight. Geez. I could barely make the midnight showings when I was young.
Still, we figured this past Saturday, we’d try.
That afternoon, we ran into Heidi’s main squeeze, Colin, at Maine Squeeze, the yummy new smoothie place downtown. Heidi had told Tim that she’d never seen Rocky Horror in her youth. When she’d tried to go, her mother hadn’t believed her, saying something to the effect, A movie at midnight? How stupid do you think I am? We’d been thinking about calling Heidi to remind her that it was the last night, so it was fortuitous running into Colin. He said yeah, they’d thought about going, but it was at midnight, and they were usually in bed by, like, 9:30.
Thank god. These people may be a decade younger than we are. I thought we were the only ones.
Apparently we’d all previously joked about how they needed a senior citizens’ showing, like maybe at 7 p.m.
Then Tim and I tried to stay up. We hung out in the room and watched some DVDs. I played a Youtube of “The Time Warp” to get psyched.
At 8, I was feeling pretty good.
Then George called. He was going to do another rocket launch avec attached camera on Sunday morning, early. Tim (over)confidently said we’d likely to go Rocky Horror, but he still wanted in. There was some discussion about who would call whom the next morning, which got muddled later, of course.
At 10:30, Tim was “napping,” and I was having serious doubts.
At 11:15, I turned off the light.
I love Rocky Horror. I do. I wanted so much to be the kind of person who could stay up til midnight and see it.
But I also know that it’s the first hour that’s really good, and the last half hour falls apart a little. Or at least it always seemed to. And I’m not sure if that’s because it actually does, or if it’s because by 1 a.m., something would have to be magnificent for me to not think, When will this be over? The last half hour of RH is not that, in my memory.
The thing is, the theater was practically just a jump to my left . . .
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3 comments:
Maybe Maureen will magically reappear and comment (she likes this song).
I have the same experience with Monty Python and the Holy Grail. I've seen it at three different midnight showings, and at each I lost interest somewhere in the second hour, and by the end it was nearly incomprehensible because I was so tired.
I needed a geriatric showing even when I was 20.
Do you think this is why "midnight" mass now always seems to take place at 9 or 10 pm?
I recently had to stay up until midnight to take my nephews to get their Harry Potter books (OK, one of the copies was mine). We rented Dr. Strangelove and Soylent Green to help keep us awake. They were sufficiently bizarre that it seemed to work. That and lots of coffee and chocolate.
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