Rocky Horror

Driving home tonight I heard a local radio station doing an advertisement for the USD theater group’s production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. A little spark went off in my head and I immediately began pondering what deranged character I would portray while attending the production, but in the middle of a Janet/Magenta tossup I had a spark of brilliance. At least I thought it was brilliance, after reading this you might think otherwise, but for now we can classify it as sheer brilliance. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (RHPS) is a phenomenal representation of identity in crisis dealing with issues of gender, orientation, assimilation, and general culture shock. RHPS is infamous for its openly sexual, often perverse, strangely irresistible musical ballads and fishnet clad characters, but within the boundaries of purely scholarly review, it does seem to show merit for this class.
The main character, Dr. Frankenfurter, is an alien from another planet somewhat trying to assimilate with the humans he encounters. He adapts to sex very quickly, though with a few spins into gender and orientation confusion along the way. He is a self proclaimed ‘sweet transvestite from transsexual Transylvania’ and spends most of the play dressed in full drag luring unsuspecting men and women into bed. Within his character alone one can see evidence of an immigrant struggling with assimilation and a man struggling with his identity as a bisexual transvestite. Then you take into consideration the frightened squares, Janet and Brad who act as the ‘others’ within the madhouse that is Dr. Frankfurter’s castle. Brad even goes so far as to mention that they must assimilate with the customs of these people if they wish to make it through the experience alive. Even though they are witness to the madness within the castle for a brief span of time (one evening presumably) they quickly begin to transform as they adapt to these strange people’s folk dancing and mating customs.
Yes, I may be reaching a bit in a few of my definitions, but I feel that one of the main goals of a class should be to take away the ability to observe the contents of said class in the real world. Granted, RHPS has very little to do with the real world itself, it is an observable relic of pop culture that litters the real world and a significant enough contribution to the arts that the esteemed theater group at USD decided to use it as their spring musical. For these reasons, I feel that viewing the production of RHPS Saturday night should be a grand finale to this class and encourage anyone who can to show up in full drag to appreciate the solid learning experience and diverse cultural…there will be vulgar dancing and men in fishnets, really, do I need to butter you up more? That's what I thought--I’ll see you there.