Last night, or, more specifically, this morning, I went to a
midnight showing of the Rocky Horror Picture Show with my dear friends of
several years, whose names I will spare in this instance. This was a tradition
that the older of the two friends was quite fond of for the sheer hilarity of
it: A large group of enthusiasts of this old cult film, almost unanimously
theatre students, crowding about to watch the film for maybe the fiftieth time
and to watch some of their best prance about the stage of the playhouse in
lingerie, mimicking the film as it played on the screen behind them.
The theatre was in Encinitas, which is right beside the
Pacific Ocean. The city was Alive, markedly more so than the pacified, hungover
suburbs of Rancho Bernardo. Stepping onto the street felt like experiencing
something for the first time for the first time in ten years, as though just
waking up after ten years of being asleep. The ocean seemed to wash onto the
streets and into the minds of all the young patrons pacing it unapologetically.
A light that seemed to have no past lent a flicker with no foreseeable future
to every lamp and every set of tables behind every window, and each shop was
like a child in its own right, a sibling of its neighbors but its own tenant,
and an orphan with no regrets.
Yet there was a strange hangover from Rancho Bernardo, that
old retirement community that cropped up like a fungus in the midst of the
sixties counterculture, in all the young actors, boyfriends and girlfriends,
and degenerate twenty-year-old children that stood like a scattered guard
outside the playhouse. I got the impression that each costume that I saw, the
group of them together an ornate cornucopia, paled in the eyes of those who
wore them. Something in the face of every patron seemed to glaze over the very
Fact of each face present with a kind of almost hostile self-righteousness, as
though to admit the fact that they were Alive, be they happy or sad, more so
than anyone I had seen in Rancho Bernardo, was embarrassing.
I looked upon each face, head, and body with reverence. At
moments, I attempted to catch a glimpse of recognition from these novel
strangers, or even familiar ones I had met during my brief and interrupted
stint at Palomar College, but to no avail.
I looked over to the older of my friends, and he told me,
grinning with grim resolution, that a letter “V” would be inscribed on my face
with a washable marker. The “V”, I presumed correctly, stood for Virgin. It was
a joke. I was among a crowd of people who would be thus marked for never having
gone to see this production at this playhouse before. A young man with the
sarcastic demeanour of a slighted joker came about and leant the best friend of
every Virgin his red marker. My friend wrote two “V’s”, one on each cheek, and
the words “Cum Dumpster” on my forehead, for good measure.
There would be a brief ceremony to honor the Virgins. Once
in the safety of the theatre, the crowd of us were prompted to stand in a line
that almost encircled the rows of chairs in the middle of the theatre. A
faction of the troupe would then run about in a line, as we stood facing away
from them, and slap us from behind to riotous applause and, with luck, chuckles
of good sport from the slapped.
My sister will be going to high school next year. At the
dawn of the summer, after watching cartoons, we strode to the pharmacy to buy
some of the pizza that we could prepare in a microwave. The moment that we set
foot outside and a car whizzed by us, I was possessed of an inexplicable
anxiety. I asked her, fumbling not to say anything about the World, if she was
afraid of being innocent. She told me that she was not. She then said, with
only a moment’s hesitation to think, that she was afraid of being naive.
As we ambled back up the hill, having bought what we wanted,
she pointed something out to me. She told me about a girl at her school who
would pretend to watch the show “Adventure Time”, an animated program reputed
for its oddity, which I loved for its fable-like quality. This was done with the
girl’s intent to appear “weird”. Maria said that she herself and her friends
were weird, but that people who were not Actually weird pretended to be because
strangeness had become popular.
About a month prior, I had gone to an audition, with a group
of friends, for a television program. I had never hung out with these friends
before. I only met two of them the night before. They were my friend’s
boyfriend and brother. The next morning, we set out for Los Angeles. She
admitted, as we sat in a Denny’s diner, killing time before our audition, that
she felt the strange, paranoid and overbearing aggression, like an epidemic in
the city, that I did.
The audition was for a show called “The Quest”. It was
produced by the young college graduates who had created “The Amazing Race”. One
was a short girl with a clipboard and an angry glare who looked pregnant. The
other was a young man who looked like he was still calling the shots in a
community college film crew.
The premise of the game show was that it was a competition
for “nerds” (i.e. intellectual, socially awkward enthusiasts) that pitted them
against one another, or in teams, in a simulation of a Tolkienesque Hero’s
Journey.
My group of friends, comprised of a Wiccan, a Christian, an
Atheist, and an amateur Zen man, were the biggest nerds in the crowd.
Predominantly, our adversaries were Los Angeles locals hoping to begin their
acting career. Everyone in the room was instructed, by the short girl with the
clipboard, to present a brief life story to the other contestants. People went
up in groups, although a few went up alone. At one point, their bios seemed to
settle into a kind of stew. One girl presumed that almost everyone else there
was from Los Angeles. She was wrong, but she spoke with conviction nonetheless.
Another man, who seemed to have known better, said that he was a local and that
he worked two jobs, but qualified that everyone in Los Angeles worked at least
three jobs.
We did not make the audition. We were the most socially
awkward people there. My friend had been caught off guard, and the rest of us
had to console her a bit afterwards. She had not been prepared to present in
front of a large group of people pretending to be nerds.
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