2002-01-20 - 22:58
all the strange rock n' rollers

"Fuck you, I'm going to Guam."
--Yitzhak (Miriam Shor)

"Your boob is in the way of my lips."
--John Cameron Mitchell (see below [next entry])

No, I'm not dead, just pining for the fjords. As longtime readers may have guessed, I was lying about getting caught up on my winter adventures before the semester started, seeing as that's in about nine hours. I can tell you about my weekend, though.

This past Friday, an assortment of L.A. area Rocky Horror people, organized by a couple highly dedicated and energetic non-Rocky people, put on a RHPS-style showing of Hedwig and the Angry Inch with movie and live cast.[1] Several notables from the film were there, most notably the writer/director/star, John Cameron Mitchell.

More on him later.

I found out about this show just eight days ago. I deliberated for a few days about whether I was really going to fly down from Portland (having just driven back up) the weekend right before classes started for this show. But considering that I had a) enough frequent flyer miles to fly there and back free, b) a place to crash (even if I didn't quite know where that would be when I made my plane reservations on Wednesday--I have always relied on the kindness of Rockyfolk) and c) a free ticket guaranteed into the show because the casting director (the marvelous Liz from Sins O' the Flesh) took me up on my offer to help out with tech and gave me a couple 45-second roles into the deal, since they were still a little short on actors... well. Clearly this was meant to happen. Plus, my good friends on Midnight Insanity were having their birthday show the next night.

I will interrupt myself only briefly here to note that I really wish I'd known about this show earlier (but the people putting it together didn't know about it much before I did, and I give them huge props for making it happen so fast) and/or that it had been another weekend. I had a blast there, but it really felt like it should have been, like, a road trip with Joey, not just me flying down alone because I chanced to be able to make that kind of trip on no notice. They're talking about going monthly with it, and I'm told second- or third-hand that John had fun and wants to come back the next time they do it. So hopefully there will be other opportunities to go with more planning. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I flew into LAX and set about trying to find the bus stop that would allegedly get me started on my journey to the theatre. After much annoyed scampering back and forth in front of the terminal, I put together a piece of information which was not available either inside the airport or on the website that gave me the bus instructions, which is that to get to the city buses, you have to take a shuttle bus (the C, if you're ever in this situation) to where the actual city buses stop outside the parking lot. It only took me about fifteen minutes to figure this out, and once I got to the bus stop, I got myself to the theatre with no hitches, which I felt pretty good about, considering I was using the suck-ass public transit system in an unfamiliar city without encountering a whole lot of people whose first language was English. (That sentence does, in fact, parse.)

The only random weirdo who talked to me was an older lady in a skirt and kind of gross-pink-colored tights at one of the bus stops who started telling me her life story. She was freezing her ass off. I was tempted to tell her to put some pants on, but then, I was wearing pants and a heavier jacket than hers and I was still cold. I wrote down the one interesting thing she said: "The world is changin' on its axles or somethin'."

So anyway. I got to the theatre around eight, since Liz had said they'd be rehearsing before the show. Of course, anyone who's ever done Rocky knows that you can't *really* ever rehearse in your space, so when I got there, I was told the cast was rehearsing at Liz's house. I was cool with that. I walked around for a while and got some dinner, and on my way back I ran into my friend Tracy as he was unloading his Tommy Gnosis costuming from his car. We hung around in line and talked to various people, some known to me and some not. I saw a really, really familiar-looking guy setting stuff up outside, but I couldn't place him for the life of me. I can usually say, "Oh, convention person" or "Cast member that I've only met when they were drunk" or whatever, but I couldn't figure this one out. It was that kind of recognition that you get from a famous person, not from someone you know. I finally asked Tracy, who explained that that was Mark, the theatre manager and the Movie Geek from Comedy Central's Beat the Geeks. Which explains why I couldn't place him...

We got in and I found out one of my walk-ons had been cut. Aww. But I still got to do the part of the bitchy PR girl in the mall scene, so that was good. Liz was playing Yitzhak, and she looked fantastic. Lots of the audience was in costume. As people were going in, I couldn't tell some of the audience Hedwigs from the ones on cast.

I went to the little girls' room and got my makeup on. On my way back into the theatre, I was surprised to find a friend of mine from the Bay Area in the lobby, negotiating rather desperately with the manager about something regarding her and her friends' tickets, and appearing near tears.

Boy, all this and the show hasn't started yet. I should probably put in a little intermission here. Continued next entry...

[1] The usual caveat applies: If you're not reasonably familiar with RHPS, and in this case with Hedwig as well, forget about understanding most of this entry. I'm an impatient writer and I hate doing exposition.

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boing - 2003-06-07
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ob-la-di - 2003-05-18
not dead. - 2002-12-08