Oct
23rdGender Blender
I’ll begin by saying that I love the Rocky Horror Picture Show. And, to be fair, I am not a huge fan of remakes. All those facts aside, I have issues with the recent news that Laverne Cox has been tapped to play Frank N’ Furter. As a small tidbit of background, I used to go to Rocky Horror at midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. It was a staple of my teens and twenties, and the raucous energy of the 12th Street theatre in New York was intoxicating even on a slow night. I recently got to go to a Rocky Horror viewing party here in Nairobi, where my husband and I were among some of the only people who were actually dressed up. And, bless his heart, I got to fulfill a dream of making up someone as Frank. And it was beautiful. Of course none of the non-Americans in the room had any idea what was going on, and I was literally the only person doing the call backs, but the fact that it’s a film with staying power, that transcends oceans (the host of the party is a huge fan and he’s French), really says something about it. Who would have thought that the cast (mysteriously missing creator Richard O’Brien) would have been on the Today Show forty years later, talking about the anniversary of the film? It’s indicative of how far things have come in society and its embrace of what had previously been considered “fringe” culture. Much to my […]