Tag: Tim Curry

Keep It Together

Saturday!

His Majesty let me sleep late this morning–I did wake up at six and went back to sleep after a glance at the clock–and I feel rested and good. Yesterday was a surprisingly good day, all things considered. I got my work done, got the chores done, we went to Costco, and last night we watched the newest episodes of The Shards and Reacher. I didn’t get as much done as I would have liked; the dishwasher needs to be unloaded and the counters are a mess, too. I have to order some things for delivery this morning, and then I’ll be all set for the weekend. My current plan is to not leave the apartment except to either take out trash (there is quite a bit of it), or to cook out. Next weekend LSU has its first game and it’s Labor Day weekend and it’s Southern Decadence, but this delicate magnolia flower actually can’t really handle standing around in oppressive heat anymore. I didn’t do any reading or writing yesterday, so hope to get to some of that today while I clean up around here and get the house under control. Ambitiously, I want to finish this chapter and a short story draft I’ve been working on, but we’ll see how everything goes. I also want to get out another newsletter this weekend, so I need to decide which draft I am going to finish.

But I do feel pretty good this morning, which is a very lovely sign that the day might be a good one.

Honestly, I’ve been in a bit of a funk this week. I thought it was because of the one-two punch of Dolly Parton and Tim Curry dying, which definitely played a part in it, but it’s also the weekend of the Katrina anniversary, which has always been an subconscious downer and mood-suppressor for me. It’s why I was so low-energy this week and unfocused. (I did enjoy seeing Carrie Underwood getting dragged for the filth she is on Threads and her post about Dolly. She really thought we’d forget her bending the knee for the tangelo toddler; she thought fucking wrong. I also laughed at loud at some stupid show business “journalism” website posting that Kristen Chenowith play Dolly in a bio-pic–the nicest response I saw was “do you want people to actually watch it?”)

This has been rather an interesting week, has it not, for stupidity and bigotries? Good Good now is claiming Callaway set them up to take a hit while buying their stock back at a much lower price because it dropped dramatically in trading price because of the abuser ad, and threatening to sue the. Oh, cute little stupid white boys–welcome to unregulated capitalism, and for being so fucking stupid you trusted a bigger company as a “partner.” You were of use to them until you weren’t. (I suspected this whole thing was manufactured to drop the stock price; you were the idiotic sexist jerks who gift-wrapped it for them.) But I also think it can easily be proven that people were demanding that Callaway abandon the partnership, too. I also love how the “boys” at Good Good (they aren’t men) feel betrayed and cheated and made the patsy–well, the number one rule of the business world is never trust anyone completely; always keep an eye open because they will screw you at the first possible moment, but it all sounds like Good Good trying to cope and shift blame….typical for white people, especially white men who are used to being catered to on everything. Maybe this lesson can make up for that high school diploma and college education you passed up, Garrett Clark, because you are now toxic and so is your brand…and it was all very public.

Good luck to you getting that stain out. But I’m sure you were smart with your big income and didn’t blow it and safely saved some and made some conservative investments with a low but solid and steady return.

Yeah, right!

Milo Yiannopoulos was arrested by ICE yesterday when he flew into New Orleans for his employer’s concert here last night. Mr. “we need millions and millions deported” is now going to be deported because he turned on his original foul lord and master. This is an excellent example of leopards feasting on his face or FAFO. I hope he enjoyed his stay in whatever detention center ICE has set up here, and Louisiana doesn’t concern itself too much for the health and safety of anyone incarcerated…so either they’re using one of the local places (I’ve crossed my finger for Orleans Parish Prison myself, but I’d prefer to see him picking cotton at Angola.) No, I am not celebrating ICE; I still consider them no better than the Gestapo or the STASI. I am, however, enjoying another far-right piece of shit getting exactly what he wanted for other people. I hope he’s banned from the country. Fuck that ex-gay pedo enabler/excuser, now and forever. His mugshot was terrible, and I love the petty bitchery of Homeland Security releasing it. They’re finally detaining the worst of the worst, and the schadenfreude is as delicious as a face is to a leopard.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a marvelous Saturday, Constant Reader, and I will see you again tomorrow morning.

I love this view of the quarter and the river from the window of the Tennessee Williams Suite at the Monteleone Hotel

Act of Contrition

Thursday and it’s my last day in the office for the week, and I’m kind of glad to not have to get up tomorrow morning. This week hasn’t been terrible as far as being tired or sleepy or feeling worn out as I was–or has this been the case now for a while and I wasn’t paying attention? (That does tend to happen quite a bit.) It’s not sleepiness that causes me to hit the snooze button; it’s how comfortable and relaxed I am in the bed and under the pile of blankets that makes me not want to get up…and that’s every morning, not just the ones when I have to get up early.

Everyone is still reeling from the loss of Dolly Parton–who kept her cancer diagnosis private so “people wouldn’t worry” (so typical)–and it is very sad. I’ve been meaning to rewatch The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas for any number of reasons; maybe this weekend would be a good time? Maybe so; I saw it in the theater back when it was released and greatly enjoyed it, despite its many flaws. Naturally, there was some trash on-line who decided to be nasty about Dolly; there was one bitch in particular whose account eventually disappeared–her biggest reason for calling out Dolly’s mourners is because Dolly recorded a duet with Kid Rock and defended it. Oh my God, why wasn’t she burned at the stake? I believe that particular piece of shit may have either blocked me (I didn’t engage so not likely) or deleted her account. There was another one to that also trended for a while–a redheaded pile of dog shit I had already blocked. Anyone who is being shitty about Dolly Parton is a fucking piece of shit themselves. Dolly was the purest example of living Christianity we maybe ever had–so it wasn’t surprising that both the far right and the far left came for her. They really are the same people.

And now, Tim Curry, too? I’ve loved him since the first time I saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and the performance was so fucking iconic that everyone who’s played the role since (sorry, Luke Evans) has just mimicked Curry’s performance and never quite equaled the master. He was usually the best part (or one of the best, at least; he did make a movie with Madeline Kahn, after all) of everything and anything he was in; his Cardinal Richelieu made the execrable remake of The Three Musketeers in the 1990s–and that’s a story I love, so for me to hate the film it had to be bad, right?–bearable. In fact, that was my entire opinion on the movie: Well, at least Tim Curry was in it. And yes, as I wrote about for my newsletter, seeing Rocky Horror when I was nineteen or twenty was eye-opening and mind-altering. He was just so out there and erotic and sensual and so not like anything I’d ever seen or imagined before (well, besides Liza in Cabaret)…Curry was a cultural touchstone for me, much as Dolly was.

What a shitty fucking week this has been, am I right?

Celebrity deaths generally don’t hit me very hard, with a few exceptions (Whitney Houston is one), but Dolly kind of left me off-balance, and the follow-up punch with Tim Curry while already reeling was very disconcerting. I ran an errand on the way home from work last night, and once I was home I just settled in for the night, mindlessly watching short documentaries about the Pacific War and thinking about the book. OH! A marvelous thunderstorm has just rolled in! It’s pouring rain outside! That will make driving to work fun this morning! (I actually don’t mind driving in the rain–safe and snug and dry inside the car while all hell breaks loose outside of it–but I do mind other drivers in the rain, who are absolutely terrifying here. You’d think it never rained here the way drivers here lose their minds driving in it.)

So, Janky Jeff is letting the Space Nazi build a “space port” here in Louisiana; on the Gulf Coast in Vermilion Parish…you know, on the wetlands1 that are at or below sea level–what we call a . What could possibly go wrong? A Category 3 storm surge will wipe it clean, if it doesn’t sink in the marsh first (concrete is heavy; which is why we can’t keep the roads up in New Orleans). But I am sure Janky Jeff and the Space Nazi did environmental impact studies in an endangered wetlands and…ha ha ha ha! NO they didn’t. I’d be surprised if they even did a feasibility study. This is going to help Louisiana continue to erode into the ocean and is going to destroy or wreak havoc on the ecosystem. I wonder how much Janky Jeff pocketed for this deal? Senate candidate Julia Letlow certainly has pocketed some.

Pecan Island Spaceport. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.

And on that note I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Thursday, Constant Reader, and I’ll be back in the morning. See you then!

This picture captures the essence of how I viewed New Orleans when we first moved here–a decaying yet still beautiful place with wild overgrowth. I think this may be the house they used for the exteriors for Mayfair Witches, as opposed to the actual house at First and Chestnut which is the actual house from the books.
  1. Pecan Island, the site, is what we call a chênière, a sandy ridge with live oaks. ↩︎

Science Fiction Double Feature

Lips! Lips! We want lips!

The first time I went to a midnight movie1 was when I was either eighteen or nineteen. I still lived in Kansas then, and the midnight movie was playing at the old movie theater on Sixth Street that was rarely open other than for some special occasion. They’d been doing midnight movies for a while before I went that first time, and I was going with a co-worker who promised me I was going to have an amazing time. I wasn’t so sure. The line outside the Granada Theater was a bizarre sight–many of them dressed up freakishly, and a lot of them were carrying paper bags full of stuff, which I also thought was odd.

I was about to watch, and experience, The Rocky Horror Picture Show for the first time.

I had no idea what was to come.

At the late night, double feature, picture show…

The crowd started chanting for “lips” as the lights in the theater went down, and then I saw what they were chanting for, as two bright red lips appeared on the black screen and started singing as everyone cheered….and started shouting responses to the opening credits.

And I liked the song.

What followed was ninety-eight minutes of insanity. I had never heard of an “interactive” movie before, and it really caught me off guard. How did people know what to yell, and when to yell it? They sang along with the movies, and I soon was caught up in it; getting sprayed with water, ducking out of the way of flying pieces of toast and toilet paper and tampons, and it was all so delightfully subversive in terms of questioning gender and sexuality. You still couldn’t swear on prime time television shows, and you definitely couldn’t say “sex” (I always hated the coy and cheesy ways television writers came up with as a workaround).

And then of course, there was Tim Curry’s Dr. Frank-n-furter.

I’d never seen anything like that before in my life…and I howled with laughter as he removed his robe to reveal what he was wearing beneath, and several people shouted in unison, “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Liza Minnelli!”

And after ninety-eight minutes of madness and mayhem, I was a convert. I walked out of the theater with my head still reeling from all the subversion a still moralistic 1970’s American culture had taught me was wrong on every level, disgusting sin and decadent morality, and I wanted more.

I bought the soundtrack shortly thereafter, both vinyl and eight-track, and it didn’t take long for me to have the entire thing memorized. I don’t remember seeing it again while I lived in Kansas–we moved to California shortly thereafter–but I did discover the theater in Fresno that showed it, and I started going weekly. It was more of a production in Fresno–people dressed up and acted out the parts in front of the screen (they tried to recruit me once to play Brad, but I said no; it would be over another decade before I was comfortable enough to wear only underwear in public; I was really uptight). Eventually, after memorizing the film and soundtrack, learning everything there was to know about the movie and play, I finally stopped going to the midnight movies. HIV/AIDS ripped a lot of the joy out of life in the 1980s for me, and once I was out of the habit of the movie, I was out of the habit and looked back on it as a past experience with nostalgia and joy.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show was the perfect amount of subversion at precisely the right time for me. It opened a world of possibilities to me, but at the same time, it made me very aware that I needed, more than anything else, to get out of Kansas. Much as I loved the movie, those memories of seeing it that first time–and the self-actualization and realization that came in its wake–are also tied up with my growing misery and dissatisfaction with living in Kansas. It’s also tied to discovering actual queer people in Fresno, and recognizing that even this little bit of subversion, something I could go see with the straight friends without any questions or fears, kept me going through the early 1980s as everything started turning even darker than they had ever been in Kansas.

Watching it on television just isn’t the same, either.

But the movie always holds a special place in my heart–and I imagine it does with many other queers for whom it proved an awakening of their true freak selves–and I became a lifelong fan of all the stars, whose careers and successes I followed…but one is now dead to me forever, and Her Name Must Not Be Uttered….and her being in the film has also kind of tainted its legacy with me.

But seriously, what a great movie. I may write an essay about the movie someday, you never know!

  1. I’m not counting the night of the senior prom, when the school districts got together and got the Twin Theaters (I think that was the name) to show a midnight movie to keep us all out of trouble. It was Smokey and the Bandit, by the way. ↩︎