Hello to all you unconventional conventions. Welcome to Rocky Talkie or Rocky Horror Podcast. I'm Jacob. I'm Aon. No, you're John the John. Thank you very much for following the man. Yeah. Yeah. Now, before we get started with the show, how was your week guys? Did you get up to anything fun this past October part of the season year? I think it would be easier just to say what didn't we do at all? That wasn't related to Rocky because like, I mean, it's Halloween, right? Like every single thing we've done for the last two weeks has been Rocky. Rocky, Rocky, Rocky Halloween. I don't know what the fuck you guys are talking about. I've had COVID for the last week. There are Christmas decorations up everywhere. So, all right guys, it's true. This one is coming in a little late because we have been so fucking busy with Halloween. Uh We're finally catching up and getting everything uh uh caught up uh here in Rocky Talkie land. It's just been so busy. Yeah, guys, we're sorry for taking a little bit of a break. Halloween madness. It was nuts. I'm sure literally everyone listening to this understand. Yeah, Halloween was whack, my goodness. It was the first time in a while because, you know, we've been, you know, since the pandemic, I think a lot of casts and our cast in particular definitely have had fewer shows than regularly we were used to doing right. Pre pandemic, eight shows a month and now we were sort of down to two and during, for like the Halloween week we did like, freaking seven or something and it was the first time in a while that I was like, man, fuck all of this. I want to be home. I feel that one. It's, it's around show six or seven that you're just like another one. It's, it's like, it's doing more than two on a regular week. Like not on a weekend. It makes, just makes my blood get a little hot, a little, little boil. It's true. Halloween was on a Monday this year which meant that like, so much had to be back loaded into the week before and uh it was just a lot. So, uh so, yeah, I think that's what we're uh what we're gonna do today, right, guys, we're gonna, we're gonna talk about how our Halloween went. We're gonna ask you guys out there some questions about how your Halloween went and uh just do a nice little uh Halloween Rocky recap. Yeah, that sounds good. And then um maybe our listeners can reach out and tell us about their Halloweens because we'd love to hear how those went too. But our first yeah. Did, did you get sucked off in a bathroom wearing a, you know, a sexy goblin costume or did you cry into the toilet? You know, in your sexy maid outfit? I, I want to know me. Text me 817998. That's how you get stories about the sexy banana costume. Oh yeah. Fucking peel me baby. peel me all the way. Wow. Didn't hear the L in that sentence. I was like, do you peed on me all the way? It's because the yellow mixes in with the yellow. So no one knows you just got to smell it, drink more water. And on that note, I think it's time for you to pee on me. No. Uh now it's time for us to talk about the show and do the show. So now that all that Jabbard, you know is out of the way, let's dive into our first segment meg. I believe you're gonna take it away and tell us about the Players Club. Yeah. So our first show that we did this Halloween season was actually a show that we booked. I wanna say back in like April or May. There's a theater organization here in New York City called The Players Club that a friend of our cast is involved with. It's just like the best friend to this girl who was on cast for a long time and isn't really involved anymore. But they're, they're all still sort of affiliated, right. They're still in our sphere. And this guy who's wonderful, his name is Justin. He's fantastic. He's a member of this club and every year on Halloween he talks to them and says, hey, what if we did the Rocky Horror Picture Show? And they're like, yeah, it was fun last year. So this is our second year doing the Players Club. Um He's invited us to come perform with them. It's a very old theatrical organization. It's very historical, definitely a different place than our cast is used to performing in. But the people are very there for it. It's a lot of old school theater, people who have been in the industry for a long time and I think getting to watch us run around would be like darts is very amusing to them. So we do a lot of that. So, uh Justin booked us. Yeah, back in the spring and asked us to come in and that was about halfway through October. So that was truly the start of our Halloween season this year and it was a lot of fun. They had a great time. It was a big party. All these actors like brought their own toast and bags of rice and weirdo costumes that they wore and just got slashed and watched us dance around. Yeah, I, I, I think this show is fantastic. It's, it's a great example of uh what you can do without side shows, right? That aren't in a normal movie theater that are being, you know, hired by an outside kind of entity to uh bring the cast in. I mean, this, this place, Players Club, fantastic historic building. Everything in there was like Guilt and mahogany and like it is, it is all vintage. There's some amazing memorabilia that's on display and there's stuff um uh the, the organization was originally founded by Edwin Booth. Uh, that's the brother of John Wilkes Booth. You know, famously, you know, what did he do? He invented booths. Yeah. Yeah. He's the guy that invented the booth. Um, no, uh Edwin was a, uh uh a stage actor, very famous stage actor in the uh late 18 hundreds. And uh he founded this club and uh there's tons of stuff on the walls in there, like original props used on stage in 1910 and like, you know, uh daggers that were used in the classic version of Hamlet and, you know, signed photographs and, and pictures and artwork. And honestly, it's kind of like performing in an art gallery. Oh, my goodness. Just like that. Yeah. Was outside of the like room we were using to dress in which was just like a beautiful room with like 10 beautiful paintings or first person artifacts from some wicked time period. There was a display case filled with like knives and swords that didn't, that weren't like, like grungy street knives and street swords. They were, like, clearly, like, like George Washington used one of those swords, you know, and he, he never, like, swung it or anything. It was gifted to him by a fucking Czar in Russia. And the czar was like, ah, my people made this off the colors of the wicked and damned. And now it is yours and now we just, you know what I mean? It was like everything was like, don't touch or you'll die. It certainly was. And I think the biggest takeaway that we learned there last year that we kind of learned, not learned, but that we were able to put in a practice this year is definitely know with these outside venues what they expect, right? Definitely get the idea from whoever is booking you exactly what they want because Justin who was fantastic, made it very clear to us. Right. These are older people, the average age there was probably over 50 easily. They have seen Rocky before, but probably not since the eighties. A lot of them have this boomer mentality. So don't go too crazy with all the callbacks screaming over over top of each other. Understand that these people probably still want to hear some of the movie. You know, don't go super long with hosting because you're not really there to encourage them to come to additional shows or anything. They're already there for this show. Don't embarrass any of them too much during hosting because that's not the audience that's really here for it. Uh Make sure that, you know, there's not any nudity on stage because the venue doesn't want that, you know, you really gotta make sure with these outside bookings that you're treating it just like, you know, they would book any kind of, you know, performance that comes into their space and you really want to hammer down what they expect. Yeah. And that's not to say that these people weren't like there for the show or they weren't there to be silly with us. They absolutely were. But if our normal shows are a nine, let's say they were expecting us to reel it into like a six or a seven, which is fine like that. That's totally OK. It was a much more, uh straight show which we did a lot less of, especially this Halloween season, uh because of all of the new and like different venues we did. So it was kind of refreshing to have one show that was like a bastion of normalcy almost and a good way to kick off the whole season. Right. Yeah, it's interesting because my first instinct after performing there was definitely like, they wanted us to go freaking wild. Um because I got the sense that they were like, like this wasn't, we were like the weird street people who were like giving them a taste of that world. They only got for five seconds when they were 13 and they lost their mommies and daddies in the mall and drifted into the, I don't know. What's that store the teenager shot at. But I think that points to like, yeah, I used a good idea to figure out what your audience is expecting of you because that, that whole performance, I wasn't sure like whether I was supposed to be, you know, touching the, the people, you know, and being in that level of weird or like being very dignified and refined, dignified and refined Rocky. Nothing, nothing, no expense spared there. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But yeah, I mean, that, that show went really great and it was a great way to kick off the the Halloween season. Yeah. Um Then, so that was on a Wednesday, which was a thing. So we have this show on a Wednesday evening that Saturday, we had one of our normal home theater shows. Uh just a standard, I think it was like an eight PM or something at a movie theater at Village East. Uh and then we had an our wicked lady show on a Monday. So lots of, lots of during the week shows for us. So our following show, yeah, I think we, we talked about it last time was on a Monday and we had all of those technical difficulties, right? Yeah. If you want to run down to that one, go check out last week's episode, it's all about what to do when shit hits the fan because that, that was definitely a venue where things went a little haywire. Yeah, someone, someone certainly pooped and threw it into an oscillating fan. So, yeah, but I mean, T L D R on that one. Yeah, we had some technical issues during the show movie. Cut out a bunch. We did our best with it. That was just kind of an effort in how you keep the energy up during a show when things are going wrong, how you keep the audience engaged, how you keep them in that party atmosphere while somebody is scrambling to try and get a movie restarted. It went pretty well. It went pretty well. Uh But obviously one, those things that uh is on our short list for like, OK, how do we make sure that never happens again? And I mean, we had a lot of that this year that that was certainly the first instance, it was not the last which we will get to. Uh and we'll talk about this more later, but I, I don't think it was a negative overall for us anyway, moving on. So this was about what, two weeks before Halloween, right? This Monday was uh 17th, right? So this is our run up to our Halloween season. And um we were very lucky here in New York because right around this, our Wicked Lady show was about the time that we had finally got all of our venues figured out and all of our our ticketing links posted up and like everything just sold out immediately, every single one of our shows for the entire rest of Halloween was basically sold out two weeks ahead of time. By the time all this craziness started, almost everything was gone and we were just fielding comments left and right in our social media and messages and like people sliding into our D MS trying to get tickets for things, which was funny because we don't have control over most of our ticketing, right? And the the biggest takeaway that we kind of discovered this year around that is a Instagram is far more valuable for reaching people. Uh at least here in New York than something like Facebook or Twitter is in fact so much more valuable that it's almost not worth the time for us to post on Facebook given the amount of engagement it gets. Oh yeah, a million percent. I I feel like we could have not posted on Facebook at all and our audiences would have stayed practically the same. And if you're the social media manager for your cast, absolutely, go look into Facebook's business account, get your cast account set up as a business account so that you can go look at the metrics that you can cross post to Instagram and Facebook. So you can kind of do half as much work in maintaining those social presences, but also look at the metrics and figure out what's useful and what's not. We kind of changed up our advertising for Halloween. We ended up making uh short videos for all of our Instagram posts so that we could also post them in Facebook and Instagram feeds. We got a ton more engagement on that. Uh It did require a bunch of, you know, sitting around in after effects and doing animated, you know, kind of three second promos. Um But if you put the research and the effort into it, you can see really good returns on it because boy, we saw absolutely fantastic responses to all of our social posts. And that's probably the big reason that all this stuff sold out so fast for us. So, ok, it's two weeks before Halloween, we had one really interesting show for a bunch of Boomers and we had one crazy rooftop show where everything went wrong and then it was time for us to be in a completely new venue that we had never performed in before. Yeah. Um One of the fun things we did this season was we booked several new venues and this was the first of them. Uh It's a black box theater in Manhattan called Asylum. It's great. It's in Chelsea. It's kind of near where our old theater was so familiar stomping grounds at least. But I don't think we've ever really performed in a black box space as a cast before. So that was really different. Um I got an opportunity to go in and tour the venue, which was nice beforehand. So I got to take pictures, but it really was just, just a black stage right there really wasn't a lot of space anywhere, aside from just the stage in front of the audience, there wasn't really anywhere to hide. It was a little bit different. But I, I thought the show went very well. The nice thing about this space was that we had a lot of opportunity to be interactive. There were a lot of different seating sections so our actors could kind of go in between the seats and sort of play with people here and there on the sidelines, which was fun. I was not at this um asylum show. So that is why I do not have comments for it. Dear listeners though. I know you wait in anticipation with bated breath much like that moment in Rocky horror right before or Frank says patient or whatever the fuck he says, right? You know, I I'm sorry, I can't give you what you want right now. So, you know, turn off the stop listening, skip forward a few minutes. If, if Megs and Aaron's fucking Droning eyes, man is too much for you. And you're just sitting there thinking, oh my God, when I go to fucking hear Jacob, I just want to fucking hear Jacob. Where are you just couple minutes? Couple minutes up, I promise babies. I'm coming. I promise. But, yeah, Asylum was a great show. That was a great venue. I mean, they're, they're a traditional theater venue, right. So we got all of the kind of benefits of being in a traditional theater venue there. They had green room set up, they had professionals on staff that were very accustomed to, you know, giving the cast warning for when, you know, Showtime was what the status of the theater was, when they're opening the house stores where you know, your entrances and exits are how you can get on and off the stage. All of that kind of stuff, um was fantastic in this place because it was a traditional theater venue and you're dealing with traditional theater staff that that's great, take advantage of that when you have the opportunity to do that. And also this was a great venue for us because they sold liquor like we did, we booked so many venues this year that were uh places that sold beer and liquor. And it both helped us in our negotiations with the venues for getting paid for what our cuts would be, right? Because they could rely on, on alcohol sales to bolster their part of it. And let's be real. It, it really helped lubricate the experience in all of these nontraditional settings, right? People, if you're going, you know, to a to a rocky horror that's not in the theater, you kind of have that like is it gonna be as crazy as a movie theater? Is this something different? Am I just watching like dinner theater? Oh, I can get three drinks. It suddenly doesn't matter because I'm willing to scream out slut with the best of them. Right. So this, this venue was excellent. We did have again some minor technical difficulties. We had an issue where, um, we had our movie on a, a hard drive, an external hard drive that wouldn't connect to the computer and it kept disconnecting once we got it connected. So the movie kept freezing. Of course, throughout Trixy science fiction double feature, we paused a couple of times. Our Trixie was a fucking champ and a pro and uh just an all around wonderful guy and did a great job of entertaining the audience by taking his clothes off and putting his clothes back on his is little Greg. So he was wonderful and he kept their attention and we got it figured out by the time Trixie ended. So it was a little bit awkward for that scene, but nothing too bad. But again, I, I wish that there was a way we could have foreseen this happening or have done something to prevent it. But there really wasn't. It was just a problem with their computer reading the drive that we had. So once we got it sorted, it was great. Yeah, lesson learned. If any venue that you're going to ask you to bring a copy of the movie, you know, on a, on a hard drive or something, do it for them, hand it to them and remind them they're gonna need to copy it to the computer that it's on. Don't try and play it off of the external drive because that is a surefire way to get it to freeze in the middle. So we learned that for next time and I'm sure this will be valuable information again. One day wasn't this week, but one day, um so after asylum, the following day, we took a break and we went and we saw the Skibby perform in Manhattan. They're uh a Rocky horror kind of cover band tribute band. Kind of, this was such a good show. This was such a good show. We didn't have to perform at this one. This was just part of part of what we do with um all the money that the cast makes over Halloween. And throughout the rest of the year is we like to do all of these kind of cast outings uh that are Rocky horror related. So if there's a version of the stage show playing, we try and make sure everybody gets an opportunity to go see that. In this case, you got to see these guys last year and I think we even talked about it about on the podcast last year. And boy, I was excited to finally get to see them this year. Oh, it was great. I, I went by myself last year. I didn't have anybody to go with and getting to go back with the whole cast. This time was wonderful. I booked the tickets well in advance, we got great seats. They were right in front of the stage. Uh So their audience participation situation this year was really high, which I think made it kind of fun. Such a strong show. All of their performers were fucking 10 out of 10 and so hot. Every single person was hot on that stage. It was really impressive. Yeah, their show is kind of a master class in how to do the closest thing you can do to a stage show and still stay on good legal grounds, right? And, and not violate any kind of problems with stage show licensing or film licensing or anything like that. They don't show the movie, they're not doing the stage show, they're doing the songs from the film, but every single one of them is done as a medley. In addition to that, they also rearrange some of the songs. These are the requirements that you need to, to hit in order to qualify as a different type of license so that you can just get the musical lic is to do a show like this and you're not running afoul of the film or the stage show licenses. Now, the thing they chose to reorder is they flip sweet tea and time warp which is funny because it actually gets it back to the original 1973 order where Frank comes in before time warp. But it was, it was really funny to kind of be like, oh, yes, you can do that. And that's the way that you, you can get this and God, that just the quality of performers they have on that stage. So they tour with this show. Um And it's very good The band and the, the two main performers, uh Laura Molina and Nick, seriously, they tour with this show and when they're in New York and you know, for parts of their show that are on the east coast, they make all the phone calls to all of their like Broadway acting friends who come out and do this. And it is incredible. These are powerhouses that have like toured with Broadway shows that have been in Broadway shows. They have been on television. These are like, you know, quality quality actors and they just pour every bit of themselves into singing Rocky horror songs and God, it, it, it gives you that feeling like when you first see the stage show and you go, man, there is a whole different aspect to Rocky that I've never really thought of before. Yeah, that's really cool. I, I wish I could have gone. It sounds like it was a blast. It really was. And it's one of these things that, like, I hope we get to do more for this, you know, over the coming year and, uh, it, it's just a great thing to expose the cast to. Right. Especially some of the newer people who like that really haven't waded into the deep end of, you know, the stage show and the history of Rocky and all of these kinds of things to see these very pretty people, very talented people singing mashups of pop songs with Rocky in a way that is just so good. It, it really makes an impression and I think it, it almost gives some of the new, new kids a little bit of perspective almost, right? We had a lot of brand new people on board right before our Halloween season, we brought them in, in like mid September. So I think it's cool to be able to show them like this isn't just a weird thing that like we do here and nobody else, you know, like this is a thing that other people are doing to, you know, Broadway people, people who are booking Joe's Pub, right? This show is going on tour. It's more than just the weird little thing that we do a lot around Halloween and also twice a month at our movie theater, you know. Yeah. So, I mean, if you out there have the ability to uh get your cast to be able to go to some of these kind of functions that kind of open and may, you know, maybe it's not directly rocky. Maybe it's, you know, you're able to get everybody passes to go to a, a horror convention or something that the cast shares an interest in. That's fantastic. It's a great opportunity and it's a, it's a great way to, like, really show what the work goes towards. Right. You know, because we work all year and, oh, look, everybody gets a free $100 ticket to a show. You know, it's, it's great. Personally, I would have liked Ben and Jerry's but, you know, whatever you can come over and have Ben and Jerry's buddy is the cast gonna pay for my Ben and Jerry's. No, you got me for the, uh, that, that's what I'm saying. You could have spent the cast money on opening a Ben and Jerry's franchise and then gotten unlimited ice cream. You want a franchise? Now you're asking for a lot. I would have bought you a pan. Here's the thing though. A franchise is a, is a set amount of money. But once you have the franchise, they send you ice cream for free. You just, you get unlimited ice cream. It's like, it's like a, you know, never. It's like you pay $1 and then you get $2 back and you can do that forever. I think that Jacob's method of running a business was learned when he set up a lemonade stand and he just thought that the lemons were free. Well, here's what you, do you tell Ben and Jerry's that you're selling all of your ice cream? And they, and they think, oh, wow. They, they must be making so much money. They're selling all of the ice. But you don't, you, you just eat it yourself. And Ben and Jerry's never knows because what are they gonna do? Send a Ben and Jerry's guy down? He's gonna look at the ice cream and be like, oh, you're, you're, you're disputing this. You're not. No, no, they don't know. They're never gonna, have you, have you worked in higher business? Aaron? No one knows what anyone else is doing. Why would you defraud Mr Ben and Mr Jerry? They're very nice old men. They are pretty nice old. They're the good guys. They're from Vermont or something and they give a bunch of money to abortion. That's actually a really good, you know what I was thinking like the Ben and Jerry's guys were the Wall Street guys, but they're not, they're, they're better than that. So it is an independently owned and operated business. I mean, you've all heard the story about how Jerry killed the dog that one time. Oh, my goodness. I'm going to, yeah, I'm gonna tell this story. Well, who, ok, so no one's ever been able to master grape ice cream for some reason. Uh Ice cream decisions can't make grape ice cream except one time. Ben and Jerry were like, well, no one can make grape ice cream, but we're the best. So let's try to make it grapes. This is gonna be important later are definitely poisonous to dogs. So uh Ben, I don't, he's not seeing anymore this like, killed their relationship. But at one point, Ben was dating Jerry's sister and Jerry's sister had a dog and Ben was working on this grape ice cream and he finally like, overcame some obstacle and he finally got like a working prototype and he brought a bunch of it over to the sister when he was seeing her on a date, he was seeing her at her house. And so he had this grape ice cream and they were sharing and eating it together. The dog was around and he was like, you know, the dog wants some ice cream, he wants to be in on it and Ben, what the fuck does he know? He's like, yeah, sure. Here, here you go, dog um have a few licks. The dog takes a few licks of the ice cream and instantaneously falls over and dies. So Ben's a fucking Ben's like Dr Oz pretty much is what I'm saying, but he didn't know that. I mean story that is a true internet myth. So 90% of the time it's true. 100% of the time. Ok. Hold on. I'm gonna have to Snopes this one later. The grape thing is true in, in both that ice cream. People have a hard time. Making a grape ice cream and grapes are poisonous to dogs. They're not that poisonous to dogs, but something about the way in which Ben figured out making grape ice cream made them that poison, made that ice cream that poisonous to dogs. So and so so immediately after he figured after that happened, he was like, ok, we're never touching grape ice cream again because it does this. So he did. That's why Ben and Jerry's also does not have grape ice cream. Still. I have been told by very reputable sources, namely Aaron that a one Doctor Ruth Winter is a doctor of ice cream and that her job is to do ice cream science. I don't know if it's still her job. Well, it was at one point. So I would like to call out Doctor Ruth Fink Winter and find out if this grape situation is true. Ice cream wise. I would like to learn why you can't make grape ice cream. So Ruth, if you're listening to this show, let us know, tell us about the grape ice cream. Well, that I think wraps up ice cream facts for the day back to Halloween pumpkin facts before we move on uh to disclaimer purposes. So, a I looked up that, that 90% you know, internet myth that is 100% a myth that came from a false information source apparently. And it's just ballooned into a thing people say Ben did not kill Jerry's sister with grape ice cream. But apparently fucking grapes are that poisonous to dogs. Don't even, like, let your dog eat a tiny bit of a grape because apparently one grape can be fatal to dogs. So, Ben and Jerry's didn't kill a dog. But holy shit, grapes will. No, we learned something today. I mean, that's the important part anyway. Right. Don't give dogs grapes. Yeah. All right. That's enough of us pontificating. You were actually at some of these upcoming shows that we're going to talk about. Right? Bar Nine, you were there. I was, we're finally here. Dear listeners, dear listeners. If you've had yourself muted, if you've not been listening to the drawn out Drivel of Meg and Aaron pontificating to you, hear me now and turn up the volume for here. Cometh me. Jacob the Life Bringer, the Life Giver Bar Nine. All right. So Halloween this year was on a Monday, the Wednesday. Before that Monday. I'd like to think of this as like the beginning of our like absolute Halloween countdown because our cast had shows from this Wednesday all the way up to that Halloween show Monday night. So this was like the start of our marathon. Um And it was at this place called Bar Nine. They were really cool. I'm sure Aaron can talk to this more later. But they, they gave us like a cut on the ticket sales and on the bar sales. Fucking what that was crazy. That was absolutely crazy. And it was like, the stage was clearly meant for musical acts, or at least that's the vibe I got. It was very small, which was really fun because it wasn't a small box. So everything was really tight together and the audience was right there. So the show was scrunched up together and the blocking and everything was like, I don't know, I was, I was closer to everybody and everything was intensely exaggerated just and scrunched up which, which made it fun. And also just the audience was right up close to us and were so interactive. They were, they sang every freaking song. They were like yelling at us the whole time and all of them without fault, every single one of them was a fucking 10 was just, it was gorgeous. It was the wildest thing. It was the hottest show I have ever been to. I was flabbergasted and there was a pool, uh like a shooting pool table in our dressing room. It wasn't like, it was like just the back of this bar that had a pool, but like, so pool in the dressing room was pretty cool to me. Oh, man. Yeah. So this actually uh the, the origin for how we booked, this goes back to two weeks before and uh this was your doing sweetie? Suppose that's technically true. So here is this origin story. So it's the week before maybe one full calendar week. So let's say we're looking at fucking the 18th or the 19th of October. Right. Halloween has already started right, right after we finished this our wicked Lady show basically. So I go, let's, let's go out, let's go somewhere. We're not gonna be able to like go anywhere. Let's blow off some steam. So me, Aaron and our friend Marty go to this bar. Bar nine. It's a dueling pianos bar, which means we have two pianos that sit on the stage, run by very talented musicians and you can send these musicians money and they will play any song you want pretty much. Uh, and they'll listen to a few notes of it or they'll listen to the chorus and they'll pick it up and they'll be able to like yada, yada their way through this song. It's very impressive. I always end up spending like a butt load of money when I go there because I'll just Venmo them like $10 and ask them to play the stupidest shit. But the whole night you'd be blown away. How many professional musicians are intimately familiar with the hit song, Scottie doesn't know. Oh, yeah. They've all learned it in my neighborhood. It's great. Uh, they make a lot of money off of it too. Anyway. So the bar closes. It's closing time. The performer has stopped performing. The lights are on in the bar and the bar owner is like smoking a cigarette and everyone's gone. I'm perfectly sober. Aaron and Marty are shit ass drunk in this bar smoking cigarettes with this bartender. And one of them brings up Rocky Horror and the fact that we're about to embark on this 12 day long Rocky Bender. And the bar owner goes, oh, well, when do you have shows? And they go, uh, oh, they're starting on Thursday and then we're going all the way through till Monday and the manager goes, well, what if we did a show here on Wednesday? We don't have a show on Wednesday. You want to do a show here on Wednesday? So everybody kind of looks at me and I go, what kind of card are we gonna get? You know, what are we talking? And he goes, oh, well, we give our performers, I think it was 10% of bar sales. And I said, ok, well, what about tickets? Like, what's the ticket split? And he goes, oh, I mean, I guess you could sell tickets if you want to. We don't really sell tickets to this and I say I, I can sell tickets and he goes, yeah, you could do whatever you fucking want. So that's the sound I make. That is so weird to me. I know what, what if, what if we set like a, a really, really high price and seven people show up and he gets fucked on the like that, that seems like a horrible business decision from his end. Right? Like, from what I gathered he hadn't played through this scenario all the way through in his head to the point that that was even a thought. Right. The, the thought of like, oh, you're gonna sell tickets was such a foreign thing to him. There was nothing beyond like, oh, I mean, I guess you could, and, I mean, we'll see as this story unfolds that, that might actually come back and bite him a little bit. Right. So I go, ok. Yeah, let's do it. It was three o'clock in the morning. It was a three o'clock in the morning decision that I later regretted because I was like, oh, I gave myself a whole other fucking show after I had just told the cast, like we're done, we're done booking shows, but it worked well. I coordinated with this bar manager and these like bookers and we sent them sort of like the, the graphics and the promotional material we put up, I think a block of 60 tickets that sold in maybe an hour, an hour and a half online and we put them up and then, yeah, it was immediate, it was very cool to watch happen because it was the first time that we were really in control of our own ticket sales. So I told the bar manager and he goes, oh, we'll put more up for sale because you'll have no shows. I was like, ok, sure. That makes sense. So I think we sold 100 tickets or something and it, this wasn't a big bar. Um, and then we, we had some door sales too and we just kind of sold to anyone who wanted to come in after the 1st 100 were sold. But, you know, it wouldn't be a Halloween show if there weren't technical problems, this place was really great. The, uh, the, the bar manager was very accommodating and helping us out. Unfortunately, due to the age of some technology and some issues, we ended up having to bring our own projector in. That was fine. We have one for the cast. That's, you know, a nice high end projector. You can get close to a screen, but we had to play the audio over Bluetooth, which of course resulted in not the best audio quality throughout the entire show. And it does the weird Bluetooth thing where it like kind of buffers. So it's a little late or a little early or it jolts a little bit, which is very difficult for shadow cast performers that take all of their cues from the audio. Yeah, but uh I mean, our performers were there for it. The number one thing I kept telling the performers and it started this night and I kept going through, I think every single night was they're looking at you, they're not looking at the screen, they're not paying attention to whether you're out of sync with the movie. They're not looking at the, the actors lips on the screen, they're watching you, they're watching your show, do your thing. And that was true here and it was true all the other nights too and I will stand by that. Yeah, this, this was phenomenal. Harley came down from R K O to perform uh in this show with us. That was super awesome. Absolutely. Love getting to see Harley do Frank and to top it all off, this was the first night that our editor Aaron from Tennessee was up here. God, that was so much fun. It was, you're editing this right now. So I know you can hear me. Yeah, Aaron came up uh for our Halloween season, got to spend the weekend in New York and uh this was the first Rocky show that he had ever seen. So uh we'll definitely have to have him on one of the episodes coming up. Can talk about uh what it's like to finally see Rocky for the first time after hearing us blather on about it for 60 some episodes. But uh big shout out to him. He was so much fun coming up here and partying with us. And uh yeah, this was, this was a great show. This was super fun. And uh you know, we'll definitely be talking about doing it again with him. The thing that happened, that kind of burned him though was that we had sold these 100 tickets, right? Like we had sold 100 tickets that kind of filled up the bar to capacity, at least the area of the bar that, that, that was, could see the stage. And unfortunately, as the bar manager told us after the show, he did absolutely gangbuster sales before the show started, bar was raking in money, hand over fist. But the minute that the show started bar sales completely plummeted and dropped off because we had overpacked the venue too much and people couldn't get to the bar to order drinks. That's a little hilarious after they were like, yeah, just oversell because no one will show. I mean, it worked for us. We got all that money in ticket sales but it, it fucking crashed afterwards. Like there were no more booze was sold. So, yeah, definitely something to be aware of when you're going into new venues like this. And something that we're gonna have to remember is, you know, we search out new venues in the future is be a little more conscious about how much space they realistically have. And uh be aware that the bar manager may not know what's gonna work for a show. That isn't what they usually put in that space. But overall, it was a great show. We had a wonderful time. They welcomed us back. We'd love to go back. It would be fantastic to go back. That was, I don't know. And performing there I think was my favorite, like performance space just because, like, there was a, uh, a dog, like a, a stuffed dog. I guess you, you would call it, um, off to the right of the stage and just a bunch of other, like, cute little knickknacks all around and the space was again really tight and the audience was super hot. Like, I just 10 out of 10, everything about that place. I really liked fun. Fact about that dog, uh, is not a dog, it's a coyote and his name is Rocky. Yeah. Oh, my goodness. They have a taxidermy coyote named Rocky who oversaw the entire affair. Right? I wonder though if, maybe they just tell every act who performs with them that, that Coyote is named after something in the realm of the act performing. Like if they had a band named Slayer performing be like, oh, yeah, that, that Coyote. Yeah. His name is Slayer. Love it. Oh. And, uh that brings us into our crazy shows. So next up was the hard rock, hard rock. Whoop. De whoop. Ok. We have a rugged, troubled history with the hard rock cafe in New York City. Much like what two lovers may experience, you know, as, as they struggle for power. Um, months ago, long, long ago we performed at the hard rock cafe and it was Gangbusters. It was absolutely fantastic. Hull cast had a great time at the audience really enjoyed us. We really enjoyed them. One of the biggest, biggest stages. Uh I think we've performed on ever and just like at least 20 TV s all throughout the audience, right. Performing to like a dining room of people. It was a great time from what, what we understood the hard rock people also thought it was a great time. But there was like a legal kerfuffle involving uh someone we had talked to and photos they had taken of us and hard rock using those photos. Something poor happened in communication and hard rock was essentially like, hey, you know, we like you guys, but there's a lot of weird legal shit and we don't want to like accidentally step into anything. So we have to let you go. Well, months and months passed and now we're here and a change in leadership at Hard Rock HQ. Uh There's a new, like scheduling manager who's like scheduling acts or something who doesn't know about all that legal kerfuffle. And so we were invited back. We did two shows um that Thursday the day after the R nine show and they were absolutely fantastic. That's my, that's my intro to this. You guys, you guys go. Yeah, that's basically what happened. There was a changeover in, in booking managers, so we were able to go back. Everything was nice again. Um All the people that we worked with we had gotten along really well with. It was a shame about this legal situation, but I it didn't really have anything to do with, with our cast, which is nice. So they welcomed us back once they were able and the shows went off without a hitch again. They were, the audiences were great, not as packed as they were last time, I think. Um they have a kind of a little bit of a situation where they let people reserve tables for free and then rely on food and beverage sales, which makes sense for the venue because then they're paying less uh for the rights of the movie. But it means that people will reserve tables sometimes and then not show because they're not out any money, right? They haven't like paid for the ticket. So that leads to, to a little bit of a, a patchy audience. But the people who were there were very, very there for it. They were in costume, they brought stuff to throw, they bought prop bags and things from us. Um, and they were, they were rowdy and they were engaged and they were fun to perform for. Yeah. And I mean, you can't say anything bad about the venue, right? I mean, this is the hard rock cafe in the middle of Times Square. It's on 42nd street. Like this is one of the most professional venues that we've did for all of Halloween. And I mean, it really showed they have dedicated green room space, they brought the cast full menus and said, what do you want? We're gonna feed you during your two shows. They kept us plied with whatever drinks we wanted. They had multiple union tech people on staff to, you know, handle lighting for us and handle running the movie and making sure that they were doing all this stuff. Still not without minor issues. They somehow managed to play the, uh US version for the second show. So surprise, no superheroes, but like that was it, it, it went off without a hitch. And honestly, I think the only big takeaway for it is try and get them to ticket shows. Even if a venue is going to primarily rely on food and alcohol sales. You, we, we really should have pushed them a little harder to at least do $5 tickets, $10 tickets, something that would guarantee more butts and seats because it is, was kind of a bit of a waste that there was, you know, 2030 open seats in this venue not saying it was poorly attended. I mean, it's still 3, 400 person venue and we filled it, but it would have been, would have been nice to see it a little more packed. One other thing about this venue was I think the cheering, like I, I didn't, we had two shows I performed in the later one and I got to the venue just as the first one was wrapping up and I was in the green room when we finished and the audience started applauding and the green room is behind the main theater a little bit and a little bit down a hallway and the cheers were massive. We, I could hear screeching at the top of people's lungs for like 30 seconds to a minute. It was like the wildest applause that I feel like us as a show has gotten in. Certainly a very long time. It's a fantastic venue. What, what, what else can you ask for out of the middle of the heart of Manhattan? You know, and I gotta say, I it's so funny that you had that moment and that, that moment was here because I had that moment too later in the week and I'll talk about it, but that's like a nice feeling, you know, where you can just, just kind of take a pause and like appreciate the shit that's going on around you, you know, and the food, Aaron Aaron glossed over it. But man, getting to just, just getting to order food and getting it for free. It was such a blessing. Like I, I really felt like I was a fucking diplomat. You know what I mean? It's like, yeah, just, just put, write down what you want on this paper and someone will come by and then you'll get a meal. My goodness. That was amazing, man. The food really does it for you, huh? Oh OK. I know you guys can just, you, money is like irrelevant to you. But Jesus Christ, free food. Come on. That's got tickle a part of your brain, part of your brains where you're just like, hm. Yes. Yes. Come on. Right. It's, I, I hear free food to that extent, that degree. It's like this isn't like a piece of gum or a lollipop at the doctor's office. This is a fucking restaurant giving you as many meals as you want. Right? You could have just ordered one, you could have ordered nothing, but you also could have ordered like seven hot dogs. You know what I mean? Like what I think the difference is I, I was about to perform in my underwear so it like hits different, you know, 100%. I was about to perform my underwear. And so I had a full plate of nachos meant for a family of five, but I, I see how our motivations are different. Oh man. Well, if you're here for the food, wait until we get to the city winery. Uh because you're gonna be sad in this. But did they have food there too? Oh dude. No spoilers. We got to do the Standard show this one. Goddamn it. All right. So uh Hard rock Cafe out of the way again. Fantastic venue. Such a great time. And after that, we performed at the Standard which is a hotel with two locations in Manhattan. We performed on the west side location which I, I don't know if both locations do this, but certainly on the west side, this is something they regularly do. They have, um, either movie nights or like performance nights. They have an outdoor sort of area mixed in with their restaurant slash bar, um, where they invite either groups or just films to be shown. And, uh, that night was the Rocky Horror Show and we performed and, oh, goodness, ok. So this isn't super duper pleasant, but it's not reflective of the, of the venue. And I want to be clear about that. This has nothing to do with the standard. But what I remember most from that show is there was someone in the audience I should preface this also with the movie. Had a lot of issues starting for whatever reason, nobody's fault. But there was a long period of time after there's a light where the movie stopped and didn't start and for about 30 minutes, we just didn't know what was going on. And so people were getting antsy, you know, a lot of people were getting drunk in particular, there was one group who had one individual who was getting very, very sloppily drunk and they were cheering this on, right? Every, every tiny drunken thing. That was kind of funny that he did. His group was like, ah, and so he did more and eventually it got to a point where he was, he had a big, big pitcher. I don't know what was in the pitcher I wanna Pope water. He had a big, big picture of water and he would take a little drink of it and spit it back into the pitch and then drink more and then spit it back into the pitcher and then on and on and on. And his friends were just like cheering this on and I, I, I don't know that that was something special, you know. Yeah. Yeah, man, that, that I, I was aware of this as it was happening. I didn't watch it for myself because I was trying to fix the movie. But people kept telling me, I'm glad his group was entertained while the movie wasn't playing. That's all I have to say about that. So, yeah, this was a, an another in the uh in the technical conundrums for this uh Halloween season. A completely different flavor of problem. This one was interesting. So what happened here was they project the movie uh playing off of a Blu Ray player? Cool. Sounds fine. We've got a copy of the Blu Ray. They went and got a copy of the Blu Ray. We didn't even have to bring anything with us. That was great. Apparently, they had just bought a brand new Blu Ray player and a brand new copy of the movie and they had played the thing through twice the day before. No problems perfectly fine. And then like Jacob said about three quarters of the way through, there's a light like right at Riff's entrance during, there's a light Blu Ray player freezes so, ok, that's fine. We'll just skip forward or back, restart the Blu Ray player or whatever, you know, easy enough meg goes over and tries to help the uh the tech guy who's running the things for tonight, which um their in-house guy was just like a DJ. He honest, I had to go up to him beforehand and go, hey, are you the guy who's also gonna push play? Uh Once I, you know, finish hosting and he goes, oh, I guess I am so a bit of a, ok, you know, could have figured that out a little bit better, but like this seemed fine. No, he was scrambling to try and get this thing fixed. Blu ray player would not, would not skip past that point. Meg tries to go in and mess with it. It won't advance past. There is a light. We're like, what do we do? Where will it go to? It'll go to the middle of lab scene. Do we just skip the first three quarters of the movie? No, we can't skip time warp. We can't skip Frank's entrance. That's like we might as well just not be doing anything at that point. Fortunately, uh he had an extra laptop there. So we were able to log into Amazon and stream the damn movie off of Amazon prime off of one of our cast accounts. Uh And he was able to quickly swap over the video feed to his laptop, but it took quite a while to sort all that crap out. And uh, yeah, the uh the venue kept selling liquor throughout the whole thing. So the audience was pretty well placated on that one. But, um, man, you cannot predict some of these tech issues. You know, can I just say, as this is all going on, by the way, their projector is hooked up to the laptop. So everything that's happening is being mirrored to the audience. So all of my scrambling around trying to skip to the forward in the movie and back in the movie and trying to find somewhere to go and minimizing it and looking for something else and restarting the fucking DVD player. They're seeing everything which was horrifying. It was like, I wouldn't be embarrassed to be in front of an audience in my underwear, obviously. But this is the closest equivalent that I can think of. That's interesting because while we were out there and like we like, we weren't sure what was happening. Uh I could, I saw like every now and then stuff on the screen would change and, and we could tell that you were messing around with it and trying to figure it out. And so I thought, oh, we're seeing what they're doing, right? We're seeing like how they're trying to fix it. But also there were, there was a lot of long space where we didn't see anything happen and the screen was like frozen on one frame or black. And now that I know that everything was being mirrored, it makes me think, man, how long were, were they just like, uh, oh, well, we don't get it. It's, we're giving up. I don't know, don't know. You know what I mean? It was, it was a lot of shuffling with that. It, it was, it took long enough that right before we came back. So we, we were able to jump back to the start of time warp when we came back in. But I was both hosting that evening and I was doing crem. So right before we started, I got to walk out there and do that. OK. So let me just remind you what's happened in this movie so far. It was that funny show crim thing I've ever done, which was really funny. Turns out, uh you can improv yada, yada your way through the 1st 40 minutes of the movie without a problem. So, uh that was a lot of fun. And uh I mean, the audience was there for it again. This was a great venue where I think that the fact that we were performing in a space that was selling liquor really paid off for us. It wallpapered over the technical problems. It kept everybody engaged and still actively doing stuff. It kept the venue happy because everyone was still ordering drinks and we were able to just, you know, work around the technical issues. Everybody understands that with small little things like this, you know, small theater and literally, this is not even in a space designed for performance. This is outside at a bunch of tables with a projector set up with a screen, you know, um they were very accommodating, they were very understanding and the audience still had a great time. Some of them probably a little too good of a time. So Jacob, if you were excited about food before at Hard Rock, let me tell you, I'm bummed for you that you missed this show. Uh So our next show was at a place called City Winery by Chelsea Pierce. So it was right on the water. This place was fancy as hell. They invited us. Well, before Showtime, I think our show started at 7 30. There was a little bit of a snafu where they, they said a 7 30 start time, but they told us seven PM. So we were in a bit of a hold. But our people started getting there around 4 35 o'clock just to set up and get a feel for the space because we hadn't seen the space beforehand. So we got to run through a bunch of our tech stuff and a bunch of our blocking just to make sure we kind of had it down and then they fed us, which was really nice and they had a ton of food and it was all made on site and it was just fabulous. It was so fucking good. I, I feel like you're selling this short. They set up a full second green room for us with a buffet style 56 trays, just full of the house specials that they serve at this $50 a plate restaurant. And it was pasta and chicken and greens. And they, they came and asked us, uh which kinds of wine would you like in the green room? So we were like, uh all of them. So they brought us like five bottles of wine that we got to enjoy like this, they spared no expense. They are clearly like very used to having ban comedians, that kind of thing in this venue. Um But they hadn't done much, you know, of kind of like the small scale theater stuff. So it was different for them different for us, but they really know how to treat, you know, the talent that's coming in. Um And I, I should say by the way, this was one of our sing along shows where our cast and our crew and our audience all sing along to the numbers. So it was a lot of fun. The audience was very there for it. We did have some tech issues up top of all of the issues that we had at all of these venues of which you were finding there were lots. This was the one I was the least mad about. It was great. Yeah. Fortunately the issues were all before the movie really got started. Like the guy who was running all the tech for it, he was very helpful. He did a great job. Um But the start of the show comes up, we get about, I don't know, three or four bars in the science fiction double feature, it freezes. I turn to him and I'm like, what? And I just hear, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. Coming from the booth. I walk over and I look and his laptop's restarting. And that was the cue for our musical director who was on stage at the time. He was, well, uh you guys know him as the guy who wrote that amazing Cinderella rock version. Uh He did not miss a beat and immediately starts vamping into the funniest stand up routine that I have ever heard it. It was, I don't know if he plans this or not. I think he was just talking, but he was absolutely talking. He was talking about a fucking movie that he watched the night before, right? He starts going off on this like, oh anybody see scary movies. I like scary movies. I watched this movie. Let me tell you about this movie. But the knowledge that he has about this stuff is just so good and so funny that literally by the time it got fixed, I was just sitting there being like, do we wait for him to like, finish the jokes here? Because like, I feel like this is a great stand up routine and I don't want to cut him off. It was hysterical and he played the piano all the way through. He fucking like, scored himself. Yeah. Which was amazing. That's fucking hot. Jesus. Yeah, because he would talk about, oh I saw this movie and it has this music in it. It kind of goes like this and da da, da da. But I always thought they did it wrong. It should be in this minor key. Du du du du du and the audience just loved it. I legit think that like not a single person walked out of there thinking, oh there was technical issues at the beginning like it just flowed so well and was covered for so elegantly that um it was by far the best flowing of the shows that had technical issues. Yeah. Yeah, easily. Um And the show itself after we got that stuff up top sorted out went really well. Yeah. Our, our audience was great. Our cast loved the space. It was a really small stage which we, we were expecting it to be small. We weren't expecting it to be quite as small as it was. Uh because a lot of the stage was taken up by the projector again, something to note for next time because I do think we will have a next time time at that venue, we can work that out, we can take it into account. But by this point, if not in our Halloween season, but like in our cast sort of renaissance existence over the last year, the one thing we have gotten good at is performing in weird ass spaces. So this was one of the, the times I think this City Winery show in the Standard the night before were our times to shine at that skill. You know, we really got to flex that muscle. And yeah, that was the Saturday before Halloween and uh the Sunday before Halloween uh was another one of our sing along shows this time at a venue that we had done previously. Uh this time at Caveat, um It's placed down in the Village. They're a fantastic venue. They have an amazing technical setup. They have fantastic staff and this one, this one went off without a hitch. Yeah, I think this might have been the only show aside from hard rock that was just perfectly smooth start to finish. Nothing bad to say. It was another thing along the audience had a great time. It was a big party and everything went great. It was a really good day before Halloween show. Yeah. The only big takeaway from that one, it was much easier to clean up when we didn't put streamers in the prop bags. So when you're uh when you're working in a venue where you got to clean up afterwards, you know, maybe cut some of that stuff out if you don't want to clean it up after. Now, there's, there wasn't a lot to say about this one. Um It was our, our performers were amazing. They sounded great. They looked great. You know, the tech was really well done. Like, uh will even played uh Cinderella Rock beforehand. Yeah, that was so great. Got to hear that live, which was fantastic. It was a good show. It was a fantastic show. And then, then what Halloween? Halloween? Oh, Halloween. All right. So this was at the uh movie theater that we perform at uh twice, twice every month. Uh But it was in their big, big, like, classic movie house kind of thing. This is a 400 person theater. It's got three levels, it's got, you know, a mezzanine and it's beautiful, beautiful space. There's a chandelier uh at the very top much like, like it feels like a real, like a Broadway theater. You know, I, I don't remember 100% but there, if there is like um art like painted art right above the top. There is, there's a big go up there. Um It is, it is like that except there is no room to perform in, there is maybe two ft in front of the screen. Like, and, and the worst part is it's not like a good cramped space. Um Earlier we were talking about the Bar Nine show and it's like a tiny box. But the tiny space inside of our theater, inside of the big, big theater, it's like just a hallway. There's an entrance to the theater and you walk down the entrance way and it ends right at the screen and then it splits into two so that people can get to their seats on either side. And that's splitting into two that like ramp that splits into two. That is all we have to perform in. It is like two, maybe three ft across is super duper cramped and not super duper long. But it's the only place in the whole theater that everyone can see you because it's such a massive theater and every one is so high up. So, yeah, it's really rough to perform in, but great to be around all those people. Yeah. And this, this show was exactly what you want out of a Halloween show. Uh John and I opened it up. Hosting the crowd was absolutely batshit crazy. They were screaming, they were yelling. They were, I would say a good half were dressed up. They had all brought stuff or they had bought stuff. We had made sure that we had gotten our uh our merch out of storage for this show because it was Halloween. We're gonna, we're gonna sell as much stuff as we can. We unloaded a ton of t-shirts. Everybody was talking to us after the show. And it, it was fantastic. We also had um a film crew there from the Rocky Horror phenomenon. Those guys, uh Andres and, and, and his crew came over um from Australia uh to talk with a bunch of people and, and Lili and all them in New York and they decided to film our Halloween show. And uh I, I think we put on a great show for him, you know, uh there were absolutely no technical problems during this one. Thank goodness. Um, the audience was so engaged and so there for it, it, it's just phenomenal to hear the acoustics of a, of a fully packed 400 person theater screaming out callbacks all in unison. This was my little moment that I had, um, about halfway through the show. There wasn't much to do for me. Right, because once we're all kind of set up, everyone tends to be pretty self sufficient during the show. So I'll kind of hang around backstage or in the dressing room, usually in case someone needs help with a costume change or if someone needs help with them. Yeah. Anything props or? Oh, help. Can you fix my garter or something? But there wasn't space for this here. So I kind of felt like I was getting in the way a lot as people were trying to do their own quick changes and stuff. So I spent a lot of the show kind of loitering around outside and sweetie, you came up to me and were like, go upstairs, go up and like stand in the mezzanine and like, just take a look. So I went and I did and it was so loud and they were all screaming callbacks. And as I went up, it was almost Eddie's turn. And Jacob played Eddie for our Halloween show and he did a really good job. One of the things that we had gone over right before the show was you came up to me and you said, hey, can I start from the top for the balcony and run down the staircase uh through the mezzanine into the orchestra and do Eddie that way. Like, so I guess you were engaging with the whole audience and they all saw you run down. Yeah. Yeah. Get, get through the whole theater on the Eddie rundown. My favorite part of Eddie is like, what is the most weirdest, best way I can enter as Eddie? Well, this is a weird, good way and you timed it out and you did it perfectly. And so, yeah, why not? Right? You might as well do it. So as I was up in the mezzanine, you were kind of standing up at the back of the balcony, getting ready to run down. So I came up to where you were to watch, you do your little sprint. So I stayed up there and you sprinted down and you got to the orchestra right on the beat and it was like, perfect, you landed it and you did the spin and you got the music, da da, da da. And the audience went bananas. Everyone was screaming and because of where I was, it was like, I, I heard it all, I guess because the sound sort of rose up to, to me and watching you do that spin and then hearing everyone just lose their minds was so good. And I got a little choked up and I was like, oh my ducky is out, you know, getting screamed at by 400 people and it was cool as fuck. So like congrats, you did a really good Eddie. I don't think I've told you this yet. Yeah, thank you very much. And I was, I was also wearing a helmet this, this night specialist of nights. So we were all dressed up because it was actually Halloween night. So a lot of us brought costumes or were wearing some aspect of a costume during the performance. I was Eddie. So I needed a helmet and I wore a pot on my head because I for Halloween, I was also a pothead and that was what I took off and threw around. Um After I did my spin, the inner screen accurate, I don't know. Let's call him demon inside of me is angry about it. But boy that, that was clever and it, it, it is, it was really funny. So I I approve of the pot. I approve of the pot. The pot is funny as shit. Thank you guys so much. That means so much coming from both of you from like a year ago or however long ago learning this in your basement in New Jersey to now where we, it's been such a long road and I am so proud of myself and I feel so happy. Thank you guys. Well, good. You did good. You learned it nice and you wore a pot and it was funny. And I mean, I think that is actually kind of the biggest takeaway that we had from this whole season, right? The amount of people that we on boarded over the last year, right? Coming back from the pandemic who really got to show off during Halloween, right? We did, I mean, this is, this is the last show that we did, you know, for our Halloween season. Um We had another one, you know, just a few days later. Um But we did seven shows in six days for the, the main run of Halloween. Every single one of those shows had somebody on stage who had either never performed at all before or had never performed in the role that they were performing before. That's crazy. That's absolutely crazy that so many people stepped up, got their costumes together, did their rehearsals for some of our singalong shows, went and did vocal training and completely different blocking than what's on the movie learned all all of this stuff and it is possible you can take people who have never really done much Rocky or shadow casting and whip them into shape and get them on stage in time for these Halloween shows. And it, it worked phenomenally and they all did an exceptional job, so proud of everybody. And, uh you know, we had a lot of learnings that came from it. We have a lot of things that we will definitely be doing differently next year or in, you know, over the year as we are gonna be in more of these venues and stuff. But I am just blown away that it all happened that it all happened and it all went well. Yeah, everyone works so hard. I feel like that was my biggest takeaway was that I spent a long time booking this stuff, right? I there was a lot of pre-production that went into this and I got a little in my own head about it under the workload of, of juggling this and making all these bookings in conjunction with working my regular job and trying to make all of the shows that we were doing at the time go. But like, man, seeing everyone just sign up to take on more shows and more shows and everyone like being right there in the fucking trenches, like willing to do all of this stuff that I had gone ahead and signed us up for because I'm a fucking lunatic. It was humbling man. Like everyone did a really, really good job. Nobody complained any more than like you would expect. I think I complain the most out of anybody. Um And everyone was just really nice to each other and really good sports about everything and even when shit went wrong, you know, like you take it in stride and it was, it was great. It was really good to see that we're able to do that under pressure as a cast. You know, this is something I think about a lot just and I've, I've, I've already mentioned this kind of earlier in this episode, but how much N Y C R H P S has changed in the past year from what we used to be going from same theater, same dates, same times and freaking Halloween man just all over the place, all over the city. It, it makes me feel, it makes this whole cast feel so much more professional. Um And I wonder, like, I, I don't know, I think that's, that's why we're all doing so great. Like what you just mentioned about how much everybody showed up. It's like there's more things for people to show up to and the things that they get to show up to is so diversified, right? Doing a show with us is not just doing the same show at the same theater, it's going to a new place and getting to experience new people and a new venue and new lighting or sound or, or equipment or screens, you know, um Every new thing we do is like a blessing is a great gift and I am so here for it. I'm having such a good time with this new Rocky horror and thank you so much meg for making it happen because 100% this is like 90% all you or maybe 100% all you. I'm not in behind the scenes. I don't know, Aaron put a fucking applause track and a laugh track and a fucking all the good tracks right here because this is for fucking me and Meg. Good fucking job. You're amazing. Thank you for giving all of us this fantastic opportunity. Time and again, I'm having such an amazing time. Ok? That's the sound of me being a little too choked up. But yeah, I mean, the, and this, this is the thing that, you know, not everyone out there has the ability to have 100 and 5200 different different venues in their town that they can go to presenting Rocky as a completely different experience is very worthwhile. And I mean, Halloween, what better time to try it because if you do your promotion right, you will sell the tickets for Halloween. I think that we've seen that nationally across the landscape. Halloween has sold out very well for most casts this season just based on what I've been seeing online based on, you know, all of the promotional materials people were putting out, almost everybody was selling out or having really good sold shows for Halloween. And I think that uh that's a great sign of what kind of the future of Rocky holds, you know, at, at, at least at the once a year Halloween level in some places and the momentum that can be built on that in places for the rest of the year. I know that Halloween's always a big recruitment time for us. We certainly got applications from people who are in the audience this year. We certainly have sold out shows all the way up through December now. You know, that that's kind of boggling, you know, we, we wouldn't sell those shows out as early in years previously. So there's a lot to be said for trying different things, trying new different things and like if something goes bad, you only gotta do it once, you only gotta sit through the one, the one night of crazy technical problems to go, ok, maybe not ever again. But those nights where you find a bar nine or an our wicked lady or a, or a city winery or hard rock where things go really well and you love the venue and you love the audience and you go, you know what, maybe this could be part of our regular repertoire. That, that's, that's what it's all about to like really kind of push the limits of your cast during Halloween and, and I think that, uh, we did a lot of that this year. Yeah. Yeah, we absolutely did. And I think, especially with really good venues, like some of the ones that we found over the past last couple of weeks, it's worth having those growing pains because things like mounting the hard drive, things like making sure you have the, the right blu-ray player instead of one that's going to shit out on you. That stuff only happens once too. Absolutely. I mean, you know, that one of the first things we're looking at, you know, is all right, what is the technical set up in a box? What's the laptop hard drive wire combination where we will not have this problem, you know, ever again? And I think that it's, it's the kinds of problems that, um, you never really thought about before the pandemic, right? Like we never really traveled and did a ton of shows in weird places and had to worry about, you know, this kind of stuff. So it's really fun to see that even 47 years in the landscape is still completely changing, you know, and I think that others have echoed this across the community. More people are doing things in bars and other small venues, more people are doing things in nontraditional theater spaces, places that aren't necessarily designed to have a stage show in them or, or a movie in them and there's just gonna be growing pains as those things come out. But I think that this, this Halloween has proven across the community that that can be very successful and that, you know, people still really love Rocky, you know, the audiences are still there. We, we performed for probably I'd say close to 2500 people throughout Halloween and based on the amount of people clamoring to get tickets, the amount of requests that we have, I think next year we could do twice as many. You know, it's really, really bodes well for the future of Rocky, just seeing the amount of engagement that Halloween has had. It's horrifying to think about, but also kind of cool, right? You want to do a 3000 person show next year? I mean, yeah, not, no, you know, stadium. Here we come. Yeah, I don't know about that, but we might be able to rent out the zig field. So that's where uh 40th was at. For those of you out there who aren't quite cool. Would that be right? I love that venue. That, that is a massive, massive movie theater. We would love to hear what some of your favorite Halloween shows were. Like anyone who's listening, if you want to write in, if you want to tell us about your, your best show, your weirdest technical fuck up a thing that you learned that you should do now moving forward as a cast as a, a technical group, right. What are you keeping in your oh Shit box. We didn't have an oh Shit box before Halloween and we have one now. So we're keeping lots of things in our oh shit box. We didn't even talk about that. What was something that you took away from this Halloween season? Right. Really? The first one back after the pandemic? Truly? Yeah. Send us a letter record a bit for us if you're feeling so inclined, otherwise, we're gonna reach out to you and make you record something. We would love to hear from everybody out there in the community because I mean, we're so blessed here in New York that it's just like the perfect, perfect place for it. I I want to hear your guys's horror stories or your success stories. Just how did Halloween go for you out there in the community? Did you just say that we're hashtag blessed? You know, and that's our show. We would like to thank nobody this week. Actually, we really want to thank Aaron Aaron. Came up for Halloween had a blast with us. Thank you so much. We appreciate everything you do this week and every week you're so cool. It was so much fun meeting. You can I just say er we we we look similar in age so we could have been born at the same time so we could be blood brothers, we could be blood brothers in another Universe. Aaron. I love you. Thank you for the cozy and for the blanket. I, I've done a lot of things with that blanket and I've, I've had a lot of drinks with that koozie. So you're in my heart and in my lungs and in my spleen because I'm drinking you. So, yeah. Wink. Wink, nudge. I love you, buddy. Well, like we said, if anyone has a question, they want us to answer in our, ask a question segment. If anyone has a cool Halloween story to share with us, uh, anything you want to air on this podcast, we will read out or we'll invite you on to air it yourself. Um Just go to rocky talkie podcast dot com. Share that shit with us. We can't wait to hear what you've got to say. And if you want even more Rocky talky content, you can check us out on Facebook, on youtube and on Instagram. And I think we still have an active tiktok all at Rocky Talkie Podcast. Hell yeah. And next week guys tune in because we're gonna have a fantastic historical and deep dive. Ask a question segment with a special guest. So you won't want to miss that one. We haven't even invited him yet. We're gonna, hi. Hi. It's my dad. It's Mr Roger Gordon. Mr Roger Gordon. All right. Uh We'll see. We'll talk to you next week. Bye bye bye. It's not Jacob's dad. Bye. No, it's Mr Roger. Gordon. We're at this bar. It's like, are we not gonna sing? Scottie? Doesn't know right now, doesn't that? And me in my, every Sunday, that's it. She says she's out shopping but she's under me and she's not stopping.