What's up everybody? How are we doing today? Hello. Hi. Well, thank you all for tuning in. This is the Rocky Talk podcast. We are a news podcast that is going to be talking about anything and everything that has to do with the Rocky Horror Show or the Rocky Horror Picture Show, whether it's nationally internationally, within the community and everything in between. So this is our first show. So thank you all so much for tuning in. We appreciate that more than words can say. But since you all don't know any of us, we should probably do a bit of an introduction. So with that said, allow myself to introduce myself. My name is John. Uh I started with Rocky in January. The very end of January 2016, I joined the New York City Rocky Horror Picture Show, Shadow Cast. So I initially actually got on to cast because I was in cahoots, we can say with a uh a cast member at the time we had met and she was like, hey, do you wanna come see me perform at the Rocky Horror Picture Show? And I was like, uh yeah, sure. And then she was like, where are this? And she gave me like a bunch of her clothes. I put them on, I made the uh two hour train ride all the way down to the Chelsea Sali Theater and I watched it and I was like, this is really freaking dope. And I stood around for like six or seven months just trying to be as helpful as I could. And eventually, when I had got my new job where I'm working at now, I was like, you know what I think it's time for me to join. So I did and you know, for almost four years later, I'm now the assistant director for N Y C R H P S. So I'm in charge of things like theme nights, pre shows. I do a little bit of outreach here and there. Uh I do a bunch of shit. So as of right now, I'm one of, I think it's three cast members on N Y C who performs as every character. But my favorite character is Riff. You've got such good energy. He is arguably the biggest song in the show with Time Warp. He's the villain. Question mark. Uh Riff is 100% my favorite. Not a lot of costume changes. I get to glue some hair to my head, which is really freaking cool because I'm bald outside of that. I'm a higher education administrator by day. I also stream on Twitch every night at 7 30 PM. You can find me at. Hi, John, I'm dad dot com or Twitch dot TV slash Hijo. I'm dad and I'm also doing this podcast. So, uh you could say that I have literally no time to myself. I also like to go for long walks on the beach. I'm really freaking pretty. I can agree with that. John is a very pretty man. Yeah. So, are you buddy? Well, and, and with that, I guess I'll explain myself. Hey, everybody. My name is Aaron. I, uh, started with Rocky in 2004. Way back, uh, in the Midwest in Lincoln, Nebraska. I was with a small cast there called, uh, The Strokes Of Midnight. They only lasted a little bit. So in 2005, I packed everything up, moved up to New York City and I've been part of the New York City Rocky Horror Picture show ever since then. I've done a lot in the 15 odd years since I've, I've started doing Rocky. I've been Crim and Eddie Scott Rff Brad. My favorites definitely play Eddie. You only have to be on stage for five minutes. You got to be the center of attention and then you get to go sit in a wheelchair for the rest of the show. Absolutely love doing doctor. One of the few people who really enjoys that. I hope there's more of you out there because Doctor Scott's Unite. I'm also in charge of the New York City website, N Y C R H P S dot org. And I run a virtual streaming platform, uh R H P S live dot com in addition to the Rocky or news site or H P S news dot com. Uh So I am thoroughly digital as you might say. And yeah, let's talk about Nicky. Hi, I'm Nicky. I joined the Rocky Horror Community in 2018. I joined the Friday Night specials cast. They were in Aberdeen when I joined, but we're now in Red Bank and we do shows all over New Jersey. I was a senior in high school when I joined and I was just like, oh my God, I was the biggest loser in high school. And I had heard one of my friends talking about how this show in Aberdeen was doing like a Halloween in June type theme show. And I had this Napoleon dynamite costume that I just needed to get out into the world. So I dressed up with a bunch of my friends and we went and the rest was pretty much just history. I felt like that was just one place where I really belonged and I felt like everyone there really understood me and I just waited until I was old enough. I went every single week and then I joined, uh I joined as a Janet. Um But I really don't like playing Janet. My favorite role is definitely Rocky because I'm kind of an attention whore. And I really like the big reveal of unwrapping and showing off like the sparkly costume and all the things. And about three months into joining cast, our graphic designer had left to do whatever it is they do when they leave Rocky. So I stepped up and I started doing graphic design for them. And now I make most of their ads. I do a lot of videos. I do a lot of slide shows. I do a lot. I mean, I'm on tiktok underscore Little Nicky. I do a lot of Rocky content on there. I don't do much else with my days. I'm a waitress at a drive in and uh Rocky Horror is pretty much just like the thing that I love most. So that's about it for me. So we had decided to start this podcast, uh because Rocky is a really big part of all of our lives. It's really impacted who our family and friends are. It impacted who we live with. Like right now I live with my partner Savannah and our roommate, Adam, who were both on N Y C R H P S. Savannah still is. Adam is an alum who comes and performs with us every so often. So, you know, it's really impacted my life in New York City because when I first moved up here, I didn't know a damn person. And after my girlfriend at the time and I, you know, called it quits and I got involved with Rocky. It's kind of really shaped my entire social circle at this point up in New York City, it's who I live with. It's who I hanging out with. It's, you know, not necessarily where I work but a lot of people in N Y C get each other jobs because, you know, the starving artist life is real y'all, everyone gets each other jobs. It's how we spend a lot of our free time. Not just with Rocky, but like making costumes, studying the characters, hanging out with other people that are on Rocky casts, whether it's your own or abroad and it's really impacted like the way that we feel about ourselves. I uh didn't think I was hot shit until I did Trixie for the first time and I was like, yo, I'm hot. Like I feel good. Like I always had a big ego but performing with Rocky has made it skyrocket and I can't tell if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Oh, it's a good thing. It's, it's definitely a good thing. That's been one of the biggest things for me with Rocky is just the amount of confidence in the community and, and all of the things that you grow as and like Nicky said, I don't know what people do after Rocky because I haven't hit that point yet and it's been a long time and I hope it's gonna be a long time. But one of the big reasons that we also wanted to start talking about this is that lots of stuff comes up in the news with Rocky more than you would really think lots of big events that happen. There's lots of interesting articles that come out talking about the actors and the community, but most of them don't have the same kind of world view that we have from being inside the bubble, right. We've all been inside of Rocky for a while now and the community doesn't get a lot of the interpretation and analysis for that kind of stuff. It's always very outside. So it'll be fun to uh to, to talk about that stuff with you guys. I agree. I mean, we really enjoy hearing about the news in the community itself. It can be really easy to get super caught up in what's going on with us in our own cast and just forget that there's a whole world of Rocky horror out there. I mean, like, we're in New York and New Jersey. We're not far out there so we can hop on a train and go see R K O but we're not taking a trip out to see the Los Best stars cast perform out in Dallas. It's not the easiest thing in the world to do for one show. Sometimes I go on to like the uh the shadow cast page and like, I'll see like a, like a new virtual show or something. And I'm like, oh damn, that's like, really cool. I wonder how we can kind of conglomerate all of that and then boom, Rocky talkie, you know, stuff gets posted to different social media accounts. So like, whether it's gonna be a Facebook page or an Instagram page or a Rocky horror cast, a lot of it doesn't really make it to like the community overall, whether it's because of lack of interest or maybe the Facebook algorithm is working against a cast. There's a lot of different reasons why a lot of stuff doesn't get out to the community as much as it should. And that's kind of one of our big overarching goals with this. Yeah, I mean, it's 2020 right? Like we shouldn't have to wait for the next big convention just to hear about all the stuff that all the casts out there are doing. I think that this is a great opportunity for anyone in the community who's got events coming up or they're going to a neat venue to perform at or you're, you're doing a day digital project or anything like that. I love hearing about that stuff and, and we love to give that information out to the community. So if you've got one of those kind of things that you're working on a project that you're excited about, let us know about it. We'll plug it on this show. Go to rocky talkie podcast dot com. We've got a contact form up there. You can always, you know, let us know what, what you're working on and additionally, just to hop off of that for those of you who may be listening and who are like, what are they doing? Like they can't form like this is community theater. And you know, if you've looked outside the past eight months, you'll see that the world is ending. But trust me, when I say that there is so much going on in this community right now, like unreal and absolute unreal amount of stuff that's going on, even though we are all confined to our homes, learning about the community and its history is super interesting. There's a lot of stuff that we do as a community that gets taken for granted and we might not stop to wonder why or we might be curious but not really know how to find that answer. So we want to kind of create an area where casts from everywhere can talk about their community, their history, what's going on right now. This is information at its finest when it comes to the rocky community. Yeah. And I hope that this podcast can just be beneficial to people like me on other casts. Like I haven't really been in the community for that long and I have a lot of random asked questions about the community and about the show itself. And a lot of my friends on cast are also really new, like half of the friends that I have on my cast aren't even in any of the shadow cast groups. Like they don't know that these are things that are going on. And so we have a lot of questions and not a lot of places to get answers. And I'm sure a lot of new members to the community feel the same. So we all thought that it would be super cool to do a segment where every week I get to ask a question and these guys will do some research and give me an answer. Yeah, I'm, I'm really excited for this. It's, it's a great excuse for me to bust out all the books and resources that I have sitting around, filter through the indexes, go hunt down the, the little minutia details that nobody else really cares about. But um I think it'll, it'll create some fun stories and hopefully we'll all learn something along the way. It gives me an opportunity to make fun of Aaron for being a huge freaking nerd. And it really gives me an opportunity to make fun of Nicky for being a small sheltered new baby to the community, everybody wins. So yeah, if there's something about the show or the community in general that you want to know about too, you can write to us and I'll ask your question on air. I definitely don't know the answer. Uh But we can all learn about it. Together and make it fun. Yeah. So I guess we'll start talking about global news, what's going on in the world with Rocky, nationally, internationally, et cetera. First thing we're gonna be talking about today is how Rocky won the 2020 presidential election with the D N C table read. Now, we are not a political show by any stretch of the imagination. Politics as out of this as we can. But as all of you probably know at this point, Biden and Kamala Harris have won the election and you know what? It's all because of Rocky Horror. Oh, yeah, 100%. I don't think that anybody else contributed out there. Um It was literally this, this single event when you get such heavy hitters as Tim Curry and, and, and Nell Campbell of all people out there. They just wrecked the political process for the entire machine. They were not prepared for this presentation. Nobody knew that it was coming. Everyone was so taken aback. It was for the Wisconsin Democrats and we all know that the Wisconsin electoral college vote is just you win that and it's straight 2 70 votes right there. Oh, yeah, automatically they just stopped counting everything else and that's how it goes. Yeah. But I mean, this, it was, it was really entertaining to see it came up last minute, right. Like we didn't know about this month out. It kind of felt like they threw it together right at the end, they did. Some people who tuned in might not have been familiar with it. It was a stage show, read, not the film version. So if you aren't familiar with the stage version, I know a lot of people in the US just, they are only familiar with the movie. There might have been some things there that you weren't familiar with. You know, like Brad has a verse and over at the Frankenstein place, Rocky is talking throughout the show. There's lots of this kind of stuff that is just fun to see. It's fun to see that and it's fun to see the people who are the celebrities that are making the appearances and doing what they can to support the cause that they were trying to, to support. I think it was really exciting to be able to see a bunch of the original cast members performing live again. Barry Boswick, now, Campbell, Tim Curry, it was a little hard to see Tim Curry, especially like that one scene right before Sweet Tea. I feel like you guys should know what I'm talking about when that, that hurt me. That definitely I had to pause for a minute and be like this is a lot, but it was really sweet to see Nell out there helping him as his evil sidekick and she was very on ball jumping in to do his lines during the whole performance. I don't know, I think it was, it was hard. It was bittersweet. That's the word, it was very bittersweet, I think, saying that it's bittersweet is probably the best way of saying it because of course, you know, we watch this movie, we sit here and we idolize him like he paved the way for a lot of individuals to feel comfortable about themselves, to own who they are because of his portrayal as Frank. It is sad to see him like that because you know, we don't really see much of Tim nowadays. I do want to kind of say though that it was really, really cool as sad as it was to be able to see him in the state that he is in. It was still really cool because I think that giving him that opportunity to reprise his role as Frank was cool for individuals like let's be real. How often do you see a stroke victim perform? Right? Like you don't see that ever. And I think that that was really, really cool and you could see that even though his auditory cues were really hard for him, you could still see that he had that Frank energy in him. He lit up during those performances and this has been his really like his first public performance since 20 12. Oh, yeah, I mean, like historically, right, Tim curry over the years has kind of oscillated back and forth between how much he's into the Rocky community and supporting the Rocky community. Since his stroke. Right. He's been doing a lot of online events. Right. He'll do online fan appearances where he'll, he'll do meet and greets and, and that kind of stuff. Um, but this is the first time, right, that I've seen him actively want to perform in any kind of rocky thing. I know that they tried to get him to do something with the remake. Right. And he was, he, he did the remake four years ago, but you haven't really seen much about him since. And, you know, it was, it was fun to see. I agree. Hard to watch. You know, I had to put it on mute sometimes, you know, just because I, it was a little bit too much to get through. But you know what if, if anybody's out there decrying him, just, just leave the old man alone. You know, he's 74. He can do whatever he wants. He wants to light up on stage both, uh, his cigarette and his performance. That's fine. You know, he can do what he wants to do. Uh, yeah, we had a bunch of other people who were also celebrities in their own. Right. Wilmer Valderrama from that seventies show, Fez, if you remember he did a, uh, Frank and Fter costume in one of the episodes late in that series. I did not make that connection until right now. It's, it's a really, it's like a cold open bit, right? That they do on that 70 show. But it was really funny when they did that one, lots of other people who else was in this. I mean, I'll just say right now I had about a panic attack and a half when Rachel Bloom showed up on screen because Jesus Christ, like Rebecca Bunch and Rocky Horror are basically my only two personality traits. So seeing her do damage Janet with Barry Bostwick was just like euphoria moment to the max for me. Uh Yes, Barry Bostwick from Teen Beach movie fame, not Spin City or Rocky in a Teen Beach movie. Uh There was a lot of really cool, surprising guests in there like Lance Bass, I haven't seen anything about Lance Bass since he was Seo in the Kingdom Hearts franchise. Seth Green as Riff is like head cannon. Now, like I want to see that I want Seth Green to be able to sing like really, really, really well so he can portray Riff in the stage show because it was just hysterical him in that bald cap. Oh yeah, so funny. So we were actually kind of involved with some of the costuming for the D N C show myself and Meg who is one of the directors of N Y C R H P S. She's also our producer for this podcast. Just an all around bad bitch. N Y C was actually approached to help costume Rosario Dawson for the show, which was really such a cool experience. So Meg is out in Jersey. So she wasn't able to get to Rosario at that point. So she had reached out to me and was like, hey, can you deliver these costumes to Rosario Dawson? And I was like, yes, of course. So I was going back and forth with somebody who I thought was like a production assistant who gave me a location on Halloween to go drop off spacesuits that morning. I got a message. It was like, hey, do you happen to have a space wig too? And thankfully because my partner Savannah is a wig hoarder. We have four drawers full of wigs and I started digging through and it turns out we did have one. So I spruced it up and I went down to the location and when I got there, they were like, oh, just buzz this apartment. We're gonna get you into the elevator. You can't press the button. It was like one of those elevators, you know, like one of the real bougie ones where you can't like, get there yourself. They have to call it for you. So I get there and I thought I was just gonna like pass it off to the P A who was living in the city at that point. But that was not what happened. I found out that it was not a P A, it was actually her friend and I walk in. They were like, come in, please come in and I was like, whoa, what? And I walk in and Rosario Dawson is sitting on the couch in the middle of the room on her phone. Holy shit. That's Rosario Dawson. And they were like, yeah, come in, sit down, how was your day? And she goes, oh, this is John and she was like, texting on her phone or something and she's like, oh, hi. And I was like, uh-oh, she about to like not engage with me at all. Like she's in the middle of doing a show. I don't even expect her to engage. But the second she finished her text, she was like, oh my gosh, thank you so much for all of this stuff. She was like, oh man, what did you bring me? You brought me all the she was like, I only asked for a space. You what? Because I brought her a bunch of other things because my partner and I, we both play Magenta. So I brought her a few of our costume pieces that we had because I was just like, I don't know what you have. So like, let's do this. So I passed her space suits, the space wig which she was in love with. I gave her my time warp dress some of the stuff for lab scene from Magenta. And then she sat me down and was like, do you want to see the time Warp video that we're showing tonight? And I was like, I don't know if you're supposed to be showing me this but OK, so she showed me the time work video and I hung out with Rosario Dawson in what I'm assuming is her apartment for like an hour. We just shot the shit. Like we talked about Rocky, we talked about the community. We talked about just our favorite Broadway shows. She had the Life Cafe banner hanging up in the apartment. Oh, wow. We talked about like how Rocky is really becoming an area for people of all genders, of all walks of life, of all sexualities, of all ableist or lack thereof. It was just a really cool conversation that I, to be honest did not expect to have with Rosario Dawson that day. You go in trying to help out doing the community a favor and getting all of this stuff done, you think? OK, you'll go drop it off or whatever, but no, you end up shooting the shit with a celebrity for an hour talking about Rocky. That's absolutely totally crazy. She asked me to like email her like pictures of me as Dr Franken Furter because I did Frank for a virtual show at midnight. She was like, oh my gosh, make sure you send the virtual performance that you did. I would love to see it. And I'm like, oh my God, Rizor Dawson wants to watch me perform. God, I wish that were me. Right. Honestly, it was really cool. She was great on the show too. Her and Seth Green were the standouts for me. Like, I absolutely love their performances. I thought it was great. I also really like David Arquette. I mean, his Eddie while, like, Goofy was really fun to see. Right. He put some effort in and like, that's, that's what you want to see on a virtual show is like, oh, he spent a whole afternoon filming stuff. He put out so much work on it. I really liked when just going back to the Rosario 0.1 of my favorite parts of the entire show was when she was on the banister, right? When she showed up as Magenta, I audibly screamed because she was wearing my magenta time warp outfit. I was like, Rosario Dawson is wearing my clothes right now. Well, I, I hope you at least washed it before you gave it to her. Of course, a big stand up performance for me. I don't know what their name is, but the person that played Frank for sweet Tea absolutely changed the show for me because like I was feeling it but not that into it. And then once sweet Tea hit, I was like, oh, it's over. This is it. Nothing can top this lady peppermint. She was on Rupaul's drag race. She fucking killed it. I mean, not to make, right? Like all of the great musical performances that happened, right? We had fallout boy and the Dresden dolls on there. Those were both super insane. I was sitting here watching it with a bunch of Rocky people. They just freaked out when Patrick Stump came on and started doing his number. That was fantastic. That was the last song that I expected Patrick Stump to sing. It's not like a big song in Rocky. You know, it was just, it was Make you a man. Right. And I was like, ok, but he nailed it. Yeah, it's, it's not the one that you think of, right? It's, it's not the big show piece. It's not the like, you know, it's not sweet tea. It's not time warp, you know, but he, he killed it. He absolutely killed it. The run up to the show, right? Was also full of celebrities. Tenacious. D did a big promo for it. Oh, yeah, they had, uh was it Elizabeth Warren? Uh Eric Andre who I love? Eric Andre so much George Pete. But was there, I don't know, guys, politicians are gonna stop at nothing to fucking pander. Yeah, absolutely. Mayor Pete. Mayor Pete out there showing off getting people to jump to the left. That was, I'll tell you right now. That was not on my 2020 bingo card for Mayor Pete to tell me to jump to the left. But somewhere out there, somebody got bingo from that. I mean, that's, that's what it was. It was that alone that made me decide to vote for Biden. I was on the fence beforehand but, you know, that really, that really flipped me and as a result, going back to what we said before it is because of Rocky horror that we won the election. It is certainly, I don't know about that, but, uh, I would certainly bone Jack Black in his riff raff costume. So, just putting that out there not gonna lie. Same. Yeah. No, uh, sign me up for that too. I'll, I'll even go through if we're on the topic of talking about the tenacious D I a genuine question that I want to pose to the two of you as well as everybody who is listening. Who in the hell was Kyle Gass supposed to be when he was dressed as like a blonde Karen? Like somebody like, please if you know, tell me, I think that they might have told him Rocky and he wasn't really sure which Rocky. No, I mean, there's not even a blond character, right? Like maybe he's Janet but he was wearing like a boo. I don't even know, man. He was just the property manager because the Rocky Horror Castle is a hotel now. He was just covering all the bases. You know what I think you're right for everyone who's listening. I don't know if you knew this, but the Rocky Horror Castle in England, it's a hotel you're playing with me. I, I wish I was. Did you know that Jack Black? Did a time warp video. Uh, no, this is news to me. Hey, well, we're talking about news. Let's move it over. Did you guys see this? Richard o'brien did an interview for an article that dropped to just the other day. Lots of stuff in it. Like absolutely crazy. Tons of stuff being listed out here. I think that the major takeaway is Richard o'brien is weird and, and let's, let's go through why? The biggest news here he had a stroke a few months ago. Who knew? Not me? I mean, yeah, he said he walked around his house in a bit of a daze and then he fell and he couldn't figure out why he couldn't get up until eventually his wife called an ambulance. Yes, something like that. He said it was just a little stroke, you know, just a little stroke as a treat. But he did bounce back. He was quoted as saying, uh, I used to love sitting on the back porch all day with a bottle of very full bodied red in my elbow and a couple of jazz cigarettes. Uh, I don't know if I'm just a moron but again, just like me asking who was Kyle Gass in their video. Uh, what in the Sam Hill is a jazz cigarette? Oh. Oh, John, a jazz cigarette is one of the marijuana. Yeah, that's, uh, Richard was saying he likes to sit out back on his porch, drink wine and smoke weed. All day. But now I feel stupid. But yeah, he said that he couldn't think of anything nicer. Uh, he said that it cheeses him off that those days are over. Like, what can you have as a substitute? You can't drink tea all day. That was the, uh, the comparison that he drew. Well, you gotta know most tea doesn't go well with a full bodied marijuana. But no, I mean, he, he's ok. Right. That was, that was the takeaway for it. It was a small stroke. He's fine. He just, you know, has to start acting his age, maybe, you know, switch to light wine, uh something like that. But yeah, I mean, he was doing all of it to promote his new audio play. Right. The Baron author looks like that's a six part audio comedy drama inspired by Baron Munchausen. Are you guys aware Baron Munchausen? No, I'm uncultured. I'm sorry, I wasn't either until I looked it up on Wikipedia for this. Um It's a 17 85 book about a nobleman who tells like crazy war stories, but they're not true, insane things like he fought a 40 ft crocodile or traveled to the moon. It's just a rich white guy being absolutely crazy in an unreliable way. So as you can tell, absolutely not similar at all to Richard o'brien himself. Certainly not a type cast. So you said it was like a comedy drama because it sounds hysterical. I'm curious to know what the drama part of that comedy drama entails. Yes. So it's a comedy in that the stuff is satirical and that it's the stories he's telling are absolutely crazy but he's telling them in a serious way. Um, he's interacting with a couple of other characters. It's unclear who these characters are. Yeah. It looks like it's gonna be really cool. It's available now on, uh, spiteful puppet dot com. That's, that's where they're doing releases for it. He had a couple of other things to say in the interview though. They got sidetracked part way through talking about how he doesn't really see himself as this character though. There's quite a few similarities that are too on the nose. So take that what you will. So Richard o'brien's playing the Brigadier and one of the things that he talks about is quote, hair was unwilling to make itself at home on my adolescent body. I mean, Richard o'brien bald, he's admitted that he started shaving his head after a series of dye jobs in the mid seventies. It's, it's just too on the nose. Honestly. I kind of wish that that was my reasoning for shaving my head, but it's just because I have a really, really, really bad hair line. But for some reason, I don't know why the reporter asked if Richard o'brien shaves his body hair too. And Richard o'brien said, oh, we're getting a little bit personal here, are we? Which honestly a valid, valid thing to say. Yes, you are. But he did say as it happens, yes, it feminizes the body. All shaving is feminizing. I wonder when men first started shaving their faces. That must have been an interesting point in time and quote, what the fuck like fuck is, right? He, he might need to lay off on those jazz cigarettes a little bit. But there, he also started talking about like the longevity of Rocky saying that about the show's first transfer that the penny dropped, that there was a life to this piece that we hadn't anticipated. I was dispassionate about it. I was one of those people who held off getting too excited about things in case they got taken away. It'll be 50 years old in three years. It was only meant to run three weeks, take away from all of this Richard o'brien's weird as fuck, which we all know. I mean, I'm not gonna sugarcoat it. That's where we're at. He had a stroke which definitely sucks, but it still sounds like he's alive and kicking enough to be cheesed off about not getting his wine and jazz cigarettes anymore, so he'll recover. So, let's talk about the new Rocky Horror UK tour that was announced recently for 2021 which sounds like a date that I just made up. But 2021 is in a couple of months and that blows my mind. The stage musical has been continually performed for over 45 years. It's been translated into 20 something languages. It's been performed in over 30 countries, which is super cute considering Richard's comment about it being meant to run for only three weeks. I legitimately cannot imagine creating something that was just supposed to be a one time thing. And all of a sudden it took off to be a global phenomenon in regards to the current tour o'brien said, and I quote, I am as thrilled as the parent of an irrepressible child must be when they see their offspring skipping and dancing with abandon, regardless of the, when, where or why of the reason for doing so. To tell you that the Rocky Horror show will be allowed out to play again in 2021. We all need a bit of cheering up lately. So please break out the fish nets and join us for the fun. Sure, Richard, that's a mouthful. Wow. I mean, I want one of whatever he's smart. I'll take a jazz cigarette serious. So the show itself will actually continue to be directed by uh Christopher Luscombe as it has been for the past 13 years. I actually didn't know anything about this guy before we looked into his background for the show. He's almost 50. And before Rocky, he worked almost exclusively on super classical productions. Like when I say classical, I, I mean, the Royal Shakespeare Company because that's exactly what you do after you're done directing I don't know, King Lear for seven years, you just go to Rocky because, you know, baseless claim. But Dr Franken Furter was clearly based off of King Lear, you know. Oh, that's a whole other topic. I think he's more of a Macbeth John. We really need to go through this. But after his time with the Royal Shakespeare company, almost everything that he worked on was like super serious. With the one major exception being a production of little shop in 2002. All of a sudden he picked up Rocky in 2006 and he's been doing that ever since. One of us. One of us just you, I'm sorry. I mean, that's great. It's, it's fun to see some semblance of normal coming back to, to the world of theater. Right? See Rocky starting to thrive abroad again. It might be a little ambitious though, right? I mean, COVID is still a very real thing. The UK has just had a huge uptick. They're, they're going back into a month long lockdown. We'll see what it means for the tour. Hopefully they'll be able to put precautions in place and be able to have a good run. So, speaking of the UK tour, there's some news with an Ex Frank that was on the Australian tour. He's on trial now. So this is upsetting. I'm just saying. So, Craig mclaughlin, he's 55 played Frank in the Australia tour from 2013 to 2014 and is being charged with indecently assaulting and assaulting four of his co stars during the Melbourne leg of the tour in Australia. Assault occurs when somebody uses unwanted physical force against a victim. Whereas indecent assault is an assault is sexual in nature and the allegations came out as mclaughlin in June 2018, he left the production of the Rocky Horror show. He was performing in shortly after the allegations came out and in response, he has filed two defamation suits, one against one of his accusers and the other against a media outlet. It's very hot in the news right now because mclaughlin then apparently started singing in court the other day while on the stand in an attempt to recreate a scene and prove it would be impossible for him to have inappropriately kissed one of his co stars during a particular scene stating and I quote, if I am late in that scene because I fancy a snog. I miss the next lighting cue. I mean, are you fucking kidding me? I mean, yeah. Right. There's no such thing as improv in theater. Right. Not once it's the most bullshit excuse I've heard. Uh well, since the election. So yeah, we're not gonna be diving too deeply into this stuff that he's being accused of, but it's all super gross and it's not stuff that should be happening on stage during a live theatrical performance no less ever. Yeah, I mean, if you want to know the details. Go Google it. There's tons of articles that go into the accusations but like, just know there's a lot of evidence against this guy. There's crude text messages that he sent to fellow cast members and just his own writings from when he's been in other productions where he talks about doing things like rigging his costume to expose himself on stage to his cast mates. He openly defends all of his actions saying that like kissing between performers is commonplace in the show biz industry. It's what we do. It's what we've always done. And he quote, this is his quote. I like being the fun funny. Craig at work. I won't apologize for who I am because it's hilarious. When somebody shows me their dick at work, it's super fucking gross. And if anyone ever did that to me, they would lose a dick. But I think we should mention that a lot of this stuff is circumstantial on its face considering like I can't speak for everybody. But I feel like we've all sent texts to other cast members that could be viewed as extremely inappropriate without the right context. We've all walked around naked around our castmates. And we should also note that mclaughlin hasn't been convicted of anything at this time, right? There's at least four accusers right now and there are currently 12 whole ass charges pending against this dude. He's made a significant number of statements in his own events that are also just like not helping Craig mclaughlin as of right now has a serious, serious, serious condition called foot and mouth syndrome. He's not helping his case at all. The trial is still ongoing and we will keep you all posted as it unfolds on the lighter side of things. Let's talk about some community news. There was the Halloween Zoom show that just happened, John, you were a part of this, right? I was, I was Dr Franken Furter for three scenes. It was a good time. It was put on mainly by the test players of Boston, which is one of the Boston casts. They have been organizing and putting on great shows since the spring virtually. It was such a cool idea and we had this planned for so long, we had a time it was on Halloween and then two or three weeks out of the show, the D N C table read was announced and we were like, well, shit, we can't compare with that. We ended up having to push it back to 11 30 Eastern with pre shows starting at 11 30 then the actual performance beginning around midnight. Looking back, of course, everyone is gonna pick Halloween for Rocky Horror. A lot of the community did turn out to watch and have fun. It was a really great time. It streamed on Twitch. So you have the area where you can and like type and stuff and it was really cool because a lot of the performers would like do their scene or their scenes and then come into the chat to like, engage with the audience. It was really cool. Most of us are really familiar with back to back Rocky shows on Halloween. Anyway, so the fact that the D N C table read finished like right around 11 50 ish people came from that and then went right to our show. We had a good spike in viewers around like 11 50 11 55. It was a really cool way that we got to experience the situation virtually. I know that the minute that uh Frank was dead in the D N C show, I was already flipping over to Twitch to start tuning in. So it was a real fun show. It was great. I was glad I got to see both. It's really cool to see how performances are gonna continue to morph and evolve in the time of COVID because I mean, we've never really experienced anything like this before. You know, now we're doing Rocky Horror outside and at Drive ins and they've been getting really popular around the Halloween season. I know my cast did a whole bunch. We did like eight shows for Halloween, which is kind of normal but doing them outside and packing up the show, like it was just really cool to see, like everybody come together and try to like rebuild the show and see, like, is this gonna be the new normal for Rocky horror from now on? And drive ins are really cool, a cool alternative, but they definitely don't come without obstacles. For example. It's Halloween, it's October. It's cold in New Jersey. I mean, we were doing live shows outside half naked in 30 degree weather. It's a lot, it's a lot to do, didn't you? Because part of Friday night, didn't you have to perform in the pouring rain for one of them too? Oh, yeah, we did a Friday show, a drive in, in the pouring rain. But, you know, we got creative, we got some characters changed their costumes. Columbia stayed under a tent. Crim had a umbrella. You know, you adapt to your situation. That's, that's what it's all about. Right. That's super cool because, you know, I'm part of the New York City show and Drive Ins are very, very, very scarce in New York. The majority of performance in New York City has kind of ceased ever since COVID, especially because we don't have big outdoor areas that people can put on shows like this. I had the privilege of performing at a drive in show up where R K O Army is located. It was at the men drive in the very last minute, had their Brad and Janet drop and they were able to find a brad, but they couldn't find a Janet. So I got reached out to like two nights before the show. And they were like, would you be comfortable coming up and performing with us? And I was like, I can try to see if I can get a, a bus up there and it turns out that there was like one bus that I was able to actually get. It was expensive as hell because nobody has taken a bus during the times of COVID. And they asked me specifically because, like, I work from home, I stream from Twitch from home. I don't go outside. You know, I haven't been outside in like eight months. The only thing I do is take my dog for a walk. That is like the extent of me being outside. So they were like, we trust you that you're not gonna come and bring New York's Covid up to Rhode Island. So I went up there. I stayed with a few friends. I quarantined for 14 days when I got back and it was this gigantic. I think the drive-in was like 40 acres. It had like a 1200 car capacity. It was gigantic. I think I might just be making up numbers at this point, but it was huge and all we had to perform on was like this little stage that I definitely ate shit on as Janet like at least six times, but it was like, maybe, maybe a foot and a half off the ground for all of these cars to come see it. And the show was sold out too. So it was really interesting because typically when you're performing with Rocky, there's a lot of audience interaction. But when you're doing a drive-in show like that, especially during COVID, there's like, next to none, we could hear like the faint callbacks from like far away because they were way more than six ft away from us. But it was still a really cool show. Everyone was like cheering and stuff and as they saw like the cast members driving off, they were honking their horns, they were cheering and stuff. It was, it was really cool. Just really different. I think the differences are really exciting though. The first show back we did, we didn't really know how to manage like a post COVID rocky horror show because we all wanted to social distance, we wanted to be safe, but we didn't really know how to go about doing it. And I remember I turned to my director at the time because I was a Transylvanian. And I said to her, like, how do we accurately gauge how much six ft is in between us? And she just looked at me and she said, make time warp as big as possible. And we all just separated like as far as we could and we just used so much of the space and it was just so immersive. I thought it was the coolest thing in the world. I'd never seen anything like it and I just, I thought it was great. I've been excited just getting to see Rocky and new venues. Right. Like, I haven't been able to perform in any of the driving kind of shows, but I've gone and seen one of the shows that Friday night specials put on in New Jersey and, like, it absolutely floored. Just the amount of changes and adaptation that has to go into doing a show. You're used to blocking a show inside of a 20 ft performance space that seats, you know, 100 and 20. Whereas now you're in a giant open field or, or a parking lot, you've got hundreds of cars. So you're, you're suddenly like nothing reads it. It can be difficult, right? Even from an audience perspective, instead of having a couple of seats in front of you blocking your view, you might be 400 ft back in the fifth row of cars. It's something that we certainly haven't seen in the rocky community at any point. You know, drive in shows were never a big thing historically in the past, there's just aren't that many drive-ins in the US and it's a unique kind of situation. And in addition to that casts like New York that haven't been able to do drive in shows. There's been so many virtual shows going on, it feels like there's a new one every week, there almost is a new one every single week and those have been really great too. Yeah. Agreed. They give people a really fun way to interact with their friends and with the other performers and they can do what they love from afar. So a lot of the New York City casts, we've been putting ourselves in virtual shows a lot. There's been a lot of like guest performers from N Y C with the other people who have been doing shows. Aaron runs R H P S live dot com. We were able to do a virtual show with that. I think it can get kind of repetitive because unfortunately, we are really limited with what we're able to do virtually. The only thing that we have is that little rectangular screen that we are able to perform in a lot of show bits hold up really well, thankfully, and it is really cool to be able to see so many different casts performances. It's great to be able to see casts on the west coast that I never would be able to see outside of a Rocky convention perform because they're doing a virtual show. Oh, yeah, I mean, I was just saying it the other day this year, I have probably seen more different cast performances of Rocky even than I would in a convention year or in a year when I decide to travel, you know, in order to see shows, there's just so many different people and they all build on each other as you know, everybody figures out what's the best way to do these things. The technical challenges associated with it are absolutely monumental. Streaming online is difficult streaming. A Zoom call is ridiculous. That's layered on top of all the organizational challenges, right, that you will have just in producing a normal rocky show. It's hard enough to wrangle all those cats during the year. But over zoom, that's a huge pain in the butt. Yeah, I mean, they're also so difficult to wrangle. It's so commendable to see how these things come together. I took part in two virtual shows and just like the work that goes into it, having to fill out forms to show your availability, having to be flexible to match other people's availability because it's not like we're just doing one show a week that's set and normal and we're used to, we have to get creative with these things. I took part in a show that halfway into the production of it, they were just like, sorry guys, we can't wrangle this. We're canceling it. And then everyone else in the group chat was just like, no, no, like let's figure this out, let's fix this and let's make it happen. And everyone was just so willing to put in a hand and be flexible and make it work and they made it work. I mean, they did a really fantastic show. It was the Halloween theme show that they put together virtually that just aired recently. Oh, yeah. I watched that. It was really good. Like, the creativity that everybody had in their costumes and stuff, the makeup work in the Rocky community just always blows my mind. Like everybody is always so incredible. But yeah, I mean, I, I didn't know about it until literally the day that it aired. Right. That's always a huge challenge is with any of these kind of things. Drive ins or virtual shows is just getting the word out. It's not like it was before where, you know, no matter what town you're in, if there's a rocky cast, safe bet that they're gonna be on Friday or Saturday night and they're gonna be at the one theater you always know where they are. Now, it's what website you have to go to all of these different things while we're on the topic of issues and difficulties. Let me tell y'all doing a virtual show by yourself is hard. Like I was saying I was part of the Halloween show that aired after the D N C table read. And unfortunately, I was the only person home, my partner and my roommate were out of the apartment, so it was just me, the two cats and the dog and unfortunately, they don't have thumbs so they couldn't help me. And I was frank for sweet tea and for all of y'all know and sweet tea, sweet tea is a defining moment of the show and being confined to a static camera kind of ruins that scene. So, what I had to do was I had to set up certain areas in my apartment to be able to put the laptop down that I was filming on because I didn't have anyone else to carry a camera. So I had to do that. There are some casts that have costumes that are not at their houses or their apartments and they can't access them like N Y C. Up until recently, we had a lot of cast costumes in our closet at the theater which is boarded up. There was a lot of issues and I feel like a lot of times people are like, oh, it's a virtual show. Like that's easy to put together. It is not. No. And even if you remove all the complexity of like doing it live and zoom calls and things, the post production on some of these shows, if you're doing prerecorded, New York did a pre-recorded virtual show that I edited. It took 200 hours to edit that thing. It's a lot of work from all angles and like it's cool to see everybody so engaged right in Rocky at this point. But it's a very different kind of engagement that we're seeing this year, different skills all across the board. It's also really difficult to promote shows to people that aren't in the greater Rocky horror community. So this goes back to when N Y C did their virtual show. We were trying to promote it to the community at large rather than just people who know of our social media because this was like a public thing that we wanted to make sure, got out there. So we actually tried to promote the virtual shows that we were doing on Instagram and Facebook. We actually weren't able to from promoted on Facebook by paying Facebook to create us as a targeted ad because they kept flagging our promotion as either political because the show was called, I'm staying home and apparently staying home during a global pandemic is political. Oh, you so horrible, horrible liberal. Right. Exactly. So then we were like, ok, let's see if we can kind of keep that one because there was a lot of people that already R V P to that one and let's create another one that was just called like the Rocky Horror Virtual show. And then Facebook flagged that one because we used the lips in our promotion and they said it was too sexual. Oh, so you're, you're a deviant liberal according to Facebook. So, no, I can't promote that. No, absolutely not. N Y C is a bunch of sexually liberated liberals and we are trying to push our agenda. When in reality, we just wanted to perform like we just wanted people to see Rocky in a way that virtual shows at that point had not been done to that caliber and hats off to Erin for coordinating all of that and producing it and creating a streaming site for it. We were able to get a lot of people to come to it. It's just so annoying that Facebook was like, it's too political now you got lips that's too sexy. So then we ended up having to do it on Instagram, which we did get a good chunk of people liking and commenting. We actually got a bunch of followers because of that. So if anyone out there is part of a rocky cast and you're trying to promote a show, don't do it on Facebook, do it on Instagram, which is weird because they're owned by the same company. But that's neither here nor there. I guess it's not even the kind of stuff that you've run up against in the past when you're promoting, right? You talked about being flagged for political, being flagged for, you know, sexual references in years past. What we'd be worried about promoting shows is like the backlash from Fox or in this now, Disney, there's always the vague question with online stuff is like, is what we're doing transformative works. Uh When we're doing a virtual show, are we gonna get flagged for copyright concerns? No matter whether you're doing a Zoom show or you're doing a pre-recorded show, you're probably using the music from the movie. And that means that there's a questioned element there of what gray area are we in? Fox and Disney have been completely silent on the map. So nobody that I am aware of. No one who has put on a virtual show has run afoul of that. Everything that I've seen has always been like automatic copyright flags on music, right? If you try and play a Justin Bieber song or something as part of your soundtrack, youtube is gonna go what? No, we're gonna copyright claim you and fortunately nobody's run into that, but it's a delicate balancing act, right? You want to promote and get it out to everybody as much as you can. But you also don't want to draw the attention of everyone who might sit there and go, wait, do I own that? With that being said, there's also a lot of new spins on virtual shows other than just like their traditional prerecorded one or Zoom. There was a deaf Broadway performance of Rocky Horror that was Virtual Tools of Madness did Rocky Horror, but they were all puppets. It was like a puppet show that was adorable, right? Adorable F F O did taped versions of like pre-recorded performance, which is super cool. We mentioned them before but Tessa did a bunch of non Rocky shows like Doctor Horrible and once more feeling the Junior Chamber of Commerce players out in Pittsburgh did Reefer Madness like there's a lot of them still popping up. There was a recent post in one of the shadow casting groups about other movies that get shadow casted regularly. And there was this really big thread about all the different shows that other casts put on. And I'm really hoping that we see a lot more of those in the future because for those of you who don't know, shadow casting is a much bigger pool of performance of community theater than just Rocky Horror. There are so many TV episodes, other movies that get shadow casted and I really hope that we get to see more of that. I love Rocky, don't get me wrong, but I love being able to see what the community creates as a result. Yeah. And now that drive in shows are about to become less of a thing. I'm definitely excited to see what other spins on the show casts are gonna come up with one cast that's doing something a little different is the ordinary kids from New Jersey. They're a shadow cast and they're working on putting together a virtual show and they're seeking some help from the community members. They say that the goal of the show is to replicate the look of going to see a shadow cast. They want it to feel and more importantly, sound like you're at the show, which I feel like is really exciting. Like, I don't know, I just think even with like the drive in shows and the virtual shows, there's definitely a key factor of like that personal interaction missing. And it would be really exciting to bring that back somehow on a virtual platform. They're currently in the end stages of editing their first performance and they're actually taking video submissions of community members doing the time warp. These submissions are going to be included in the performance and they're looking for people from the community opportunity if you haven't got in on the virtual show stuff before. So in addition to Rocky being presented in a new digital format, there's going to be a half hour preshow of various musical and burlesque performances before each performance. That's actually super cool N Y C just put together a preshow for the Halloween show and it's definitely something that we can just reuse. So I'll probably send it over to them and be like, hey, do you want this showings are gonna be November 27th at 10 PM, Eastern Standard Time, November 28th at eight PM and 11 PM, Eastern Standard Time and November 29th at two PM. You guessed it Eastern Standard Time. If you're interested in sending in a video of yourself doing the time work to be included, make sure to record your video twice, once horizontally and once vertically, you don't have to be in a Rocky costume, just show up in whatever you want. Jammies, some other costume. Who cares. And let me tell you as someone who has edited a virtual show before, they're not kidding about the horizontal and vertically thing. If you send them both, they will love you it's so much easier when you have both options as an editor. So for their sanity, do it that way. Is there a deadline for video submissions? Yeah, the deadline for video submissions is November 14th. So two days from the day this podcast drops to submit, send your videos via email at ordinary kids 2020 at gmail dot com which stands for uh what does it stand for? I don't know communism. What the fuck? No, honestly though, this sounds really cool like we were just talking about virtual shows are evolving. People in the community are really, really, really creative. The ordinary kids are no exception to that. I'm super excited to see all the ways that these virtual performances are going to be getting more and more interesting. The longer that we're unable to perform in a theater, if you want to check them out on social media, you can check them out at ordinary kids NJ and their website is ordinary kids NJ dot com. Four, four. Yeah. Uh For those of you who don't get the joke at the last R K O convention, which is the cast that is up in the New England area, they are a Comcast. So they, they put on conventions every couple of years and at the very end of the most recent convention, their owner slash manager slash all around bad ass Roy went on stage in front of hundreds of people and all he did was just the number four on his hands and everyone lost their goddamn minds. Like we already knew that R K 04 was gonna happen in 2022. But last night, the R K 03 convention group on Facebook was updated to be the 2022 R K 04 K group, which is super cool because it's the 47th anniversary of the show because of the 40 7-Eleven that is on Frank's thigh. You see the I get it. Yeah, that's exciting. I'm absolutely pumped for this. I've been to every R K Ocon. They are by far some of the best events that I've ever attended. Roy and all of his team know how to put on an absolutely fantastic convention. And while the updating of a Facebook group name might not be the biggest news. It sure feels like a light at the end of the fucking tunnel. That is 2020. Yeah. Shout out to everyone at R C O for helping to plant stuff like this, but it is over a year away and there are still a lot of ifs but knowing that there's planning emotion for it, super cool. And Nicky, maybe you'll actually be able to go to a Oh my God. I wanna go so bad if your cast is doing anything that's related to Rocky or the shadow casting community, if you've got a crazy story or you want to promote an event or you just wanna brag go to our website that's Rocky talky podcast dot com. Fill out our contact form and we will make you all super podcast famous within the Rocky Horror community and the listeners that we have and only if they listen that long. Well, and with that, I think that brings us to Nicky, ask the question, guys. This is the part of the show where Nicky's gonna ask a question that either comes from you the audience or one that she came up with herself. All right. Are you all ready for this shit? Hell yeah. Hit us, Nicky. Ok. So this question needs a little bit of a background. You go to Rocky for the first time. The first thing you learn at any Rocky show is when you hear Brad Majors, you yell asshole and when you hear Janet Weiss, you yell slut. That's just like a thing. But has anyone ever like sat down and just wondered why? Like, why is Brad Majors not like jerk off? And Janet Weiss isn't a whore? Like why are Brad and Janet called asshole and slut? Well, I mean, jerk off isn't nearly as funny as asshole. Yeah. Oh, well, there, there, there's the answer. Good night guys. Yep. All right, everyone have a great, have a great night. No, realistically though, I did not think we were going to get fucking philosophical on this bitch. Why are any of the callbacks the way that they are? We'll get to that. There's only one question per show. Well, so this one spoiler, how the sausage is made. Nicky. Nicky, let us know what this question was gonna be before we started on this. And I thought this was gonna be a really easy question to answer. I thought I would go open up my copy of Creature. The, I read something that Sapiro wrote 20 years ago and go. All right, Nicky, here's your answer, but that's not the case. And the answer is complicated and nuanced and spoilers. We don't really know, but I'm gonna take 20 minutes to explain it to you. Probably not that long. I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna kick my feet up and let Aaron do his thing. Yeah, I'm getting cozy. All right. So gather around, let me tell you about how Callbacks originated. Crazy. Grandpa Aaron's telling a story, the story of the origination of callbacks. You might have heard it before and I kind of want to go through it to explain when we think calling Brad and asshole and Janet a slut might have first come about why we think that that might have been what they called instead of, you know, jackass or hor and we'll, we'll see how we get there. So short answer is the earliest Rocky Callbacks were very short. They were very witty. They were pretty much always profane, but there isn't a well documented first person who ever came up with asshole or slut audience participation in general is a spontaneous phenomenon that happened simultaneously before there was a lot of media attention with Rocky. Thus, it's difficult to pin down exactly the origination of some of these callbacks. We do know the first call back and I'll, I'll get into that a minute, but we don't know. Basically the rest of them that said through my research, we were able to pin down that the most likely date that somebody first screamed asshole at the screen was sometime in the fall or winter of 1976 1977 at the Waverley or the New Yorker Theater in New York City or possibly at one of the other theaters that were showing Rocky at the time, there were a couple of them that were running Rocky during its initial theatrical release. So take a journey, Rocky. It as a stage play in 1973. It was originally considered an interactive experience when it was running at the theater upstairs in London, audience members would come back for multiple performances. They'd sing along right with all the music. And that's kind of the first audience participation experience related to the Rocky horror show. Early shows. They would pass out instructions for how to do the time warp with your program. So that like they were encouraging you to interact uh during it, there's a famous quote, who knows if it's true. But Angie Bowie, the then wife of rock star. David Bowie. Uh she has been quoted as saying that she was the first one to talk back at a live performance because she screamed. Don't do it at Riff right before he kills Frank. At the end of the play, the show opens in London in 73. Right? It moves to Los Angeles in 74. It opens at the Roxy theater. The same kind of fanatic fans come to see the show in L A and that's kind of the start of the first participation with Rocky in general. Ok. So that was the first stage show, audience participation. But how did we get to this level of movie participation? Ok, sure. The movie has its general release in 75. It premieres at the Rialto in London and it like bombs miserably. It opens then in September uh at the Westwood Theater in L A. And what's relevant about that is, it's the same place where the Roxy theater is for the stage show. And there was a ton of fans who were already like super fans of the stage show in L A. So they had to buy their tickets to see the opening night movie by mail order, right? So they show up at the very beginning, you know, the first showing of Rocky and they're already screaming out and interacting with the film like they would have at the stage show. So like some of the first things you might have heard were like the 246 a chorus during time warp. Right. The Ann Miller bit that honestly most people don't even get anymore. Nikki, who's Ann Miller? Um I know that it's on the Roxy soundtrack. Columbia does her little thing is she a dancer. Maybe she's an ice cream saleswoman. I feel like Ann Miller is such like a wholesome name. That's fair. It's very uh Ann Miller does very sound very like like Ann Miller is my church secretary. That's, that's a, that's a whole different Nicky as a question topic. We're, we're, we're, we gotta, we gotta get to asshole and slut. So buckle up, right? Because, uh, in 1976 that's when the first midnight showing of Rocky starts at the Waverly theater here in New York City. That's kind of the first instance of a massive cult following for the film. People are showing up to see it. They're showing up over and over again. There's so much demand that in June of 76 a second theater starts playing Rocky in New York and the regulars start bouncing back and forth. Why is this relevant? Because over Labor Day weekend, 1976 that's what is widely regarded as the first audience participation. So, if you've ever heard Sal talk about this, he loves to tell this story. Sapiro was the head of the fan club for a very long time. He always says that Louis Faris was the first person to stand up when Janet is in the rain and yell, buy an umbrella, you cheap bitch right before there is a light. He also said, how strange was it when the crim says, you know, I wanna take you on a strange journey. So those are the first two audience participation lines that are widely regarded as what was out there at the time, a couple other theaters that were also playing Rocky because it was its general release. Those being in Austin, Texas, uh in New Orleans, there was a theater in South Africa and there's reports that all of these, that they were rowdy shows and people were screaming things at, at the screen. So technically, it could have been any one of those different places. But you gotta remember. This is 1976. This is the end of summer and what happens at the end of summer. Halloween, it's, it's what we just went through. Halloween. Rocky's biggest time of the year and all of these people are coming out dressed up in 76 because it's a brand new hit, well, not hit movie but a movie that they absolutely love that they're coming to see. So everybody starts dressing up simultaneously. 1976. The Zeitgeist is S N L is the hottest show right on television. You know, late night comedy. You've got Dan Aroy doing point counter point with his catch line, Jane, you ignorant slut right before he starts explaining something. This is a riff on 60 minutes, right. That was, uh, at the time. So there's a lot of that kind of profanity in the zeitgeist, right? That this is an easy thing to transfer over to make a, a topical reference, right? And that's always the thing that you're trying to do at Rocky is make a topical fun reference. So as Rocky spreads out to all these theaters over Halloween and more and more people start coming in, the callbacks start spreading out. It's widely believed that asshole and slut were some of the very first ones that were starting to get called back. They're easy, they're quick, you can scream them, you can scream them at almost any point in the movie and they kind of make sense. They certainly were around by the time that there's any public recordings of Rocky, right? In 1980 the movie fame comes out and one of that scenes is the entire audience screaming asshole, right? That was filmed in 1979 at the eighth street Playhouse. So by 1979 everybody knows to call Brad an asshole and everybody knows to call Janet a slot. If you go to the 1983 audience participation album, like it is loud and in your ears there, everybody has long since taking this on to be the script that, that everybody is coming to. So while we don't know exactly who was the first one, it was probably some drunk guy at the Waverly theater around Halloween 1976 who stands up and goes, you know what? You're an asshole. And that's that because Brad's an asshole. So, Nicky, I hope that all of them are exactly this level of difficult because I actually had to do some research for this more than anyone should think. Our producer even reached out to Ron Maxwell, friend of the New York City cast and absolute legend in the Rocky horror community. And the question gave him a whole ass existential crisis the same way that it did for us. Our producer spent all night talking with Ron about this came up with some informed speculation on why people might have chosen slut and asshole. So while these aren't official comments, I mean they are Ron Maxwell approved. So Brad is an asshole right at the beginning of the movie when he has neglected to fix his spare tire, right? That's uh oh, it should have gotten the spare tire fixed asshole, right? That's probably the first time you're gonna hear Brad called an out asshole. Janet gets pissed. She rolls her eyes at him because it's totally an asshole move. Thus, Brad's an asshole. Janet on the other hand might be a slut because bitch was already used during the umbrella callback, right? There's a finite number of snappy things to shout at women that'll catch on with an audience full of drunk morons. So we already use bitch, she's gotta be a slut. That's the word from Ron Maxwell. I also want to mention it was Ron that clued us in to check out S N L's point, counter point. That was the deepest dive shit. I feel like a changed woman after that. Honestly, I I'm glad that we have you because if Nicky was just like, hey John, why did they call Brad and Janet asshole and slut? I'd be like, I don't know because they fucking are next. Well, that's the beauty of it, isn't it? I got all these dumb ass questions and I got Aaron to give me the genuine answer and John to make me feel bad about myself. That's what I'm here for. But yeah, I mean, if anybody listening has a show or community question, all you have to do is go to our website rocky talkie podcast dot com and fill out the form in the contact us section. I'll ask it on the show and we can all learn about it together and that's about it for this week. We really hope that you enjoyed our first episode. We're all super excited to grow this show and see where it goes. We're on Facebook and Instagram at Rocky Talky podcast dot com. So if you liked us, please go check us out there and again, for the millionth time, if you want to write us and send us some really cool shit to feature on the show or if you want Nikki to ask a stupid question so we can all make fun of her. Hey, hi, go to our webs, go to our website rocky talky podcast dot com and you can fill out our contact form. We are super, super, super, super, super, so excited to hear from you. We'll see you guys next Thursday. Bye bye. You said see you next Thursday. I'm supposed to just end it with a what?