It’s 11:30 on a Saturday night and most teenagers should be out partying or in their beds with visions of sugarplums dancing in their heads. For some teenagers, though, this time is spent huddled in the dark in front of a theater in St. Pete Beach, clutching a five-dollar bill, waiting for the ringmaster of the night to give them the all clear to go inside. Kids these days are waiting to go see a live preforming cast of Rocky Horror Picture Show a tradition for twenty-five years. Sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll wrapped into a two-hour special, complete with a floorshow.

Rocky Horror Picture Show’s live performance happens every Saturday night at the St. Pete Beach Theater, starting at 11:30pm and ending at around 2:00am, making it every parents late-night nightmare. The cast calls themselves ‘Interchangeable Parts’ and are a volunteer-based cast of all the craziest, cookiest people of the area. The show is an audience participation production where the infamous movie is played in the background while the cast acts out the show on a stage in front of the screen. The show is like nothing you’ve ever witnessed before, a medley of talent, dancing, screaming and singing all mulled together in a sort of stew of lude and crude behavior. Be warned, Rocky is a PG-13 show, nothing you’d want to bring grandma or your twelve-year-old sister to.

Before the show begins a ceremony takes place that every first time Rocky audience member dreads and every veteran itches for, the Virgin Ceremonies. If you have never seen Rocky Horror with a live, performing cast you are what Rocky members call a “virgin”. This article can not divulge all that goes on in this ceremony to keep the purity of the event, but if you are a first timer be ready to have to do things you never thought you’d do with a crowd of sixty people watching you. The end result is worth the embarrassment, for you will have been christened into the weird world of a die-hard Rocky fan.

The love of this movie stretches farther than St. Pete Beach. Every Halloween weekend a Rocky performance is held at the Tampa Theater called the ‘Larger then Life’ show. Larger then Life is the largest Rocky performance in the country. It is a show that rocks the majestic, ancient foundations of the Tampa Theater to it’s core with screams and people of all ages, sexes and races running around in a little more than their birthday suits. Larger then Life this year was preformed in front of a sold out crowd of fans that had traveled from across the state just to watch performers mouth the words of their quarter century old film pioneers.



Now that you know what Rocky is about, you might want to know what the movie really holds. Rocky Horror Picture Show is a movie created in the mind of Richard O’Brien, a stunt-man actor who wrote and composed all the visions and music of the movie while also co-staring in it himself as a character called Riff-Raff. The plot breaks down like this; the story begins with a straitlaced star-crossed couple, Brad Majors and Janet Weiss, who is played by film star Susan Sarandon, pledging their engagement immediately after serving as attendants at their friend’s wedding. On the fiance’s way to pay a visit to their teacher and man who introduced them, Dr. Everett von Scott, they get a flat tire in the middle of nowhere. They decide to walk back through the woods to a remote castle they had passed in hopes to use the occupant’s telephone. In the castle, Dr. Frank N. Furter, played by Tim Curry, a gender-bending scientist from the planet of Transexual in the galaxy of Transylvania, is giving a party with the help of his servant and groupies: Columbia, Riff-raff and Magenta to celebrate the creation of his new strongman playmate, Rocky Horror. Frankenfurter, however takes an immediate interest in Brad and Janet leading the two lovers to test their loyalty to one another in this parallel universe they’ve found themselves in. The story unfolds in a web of laughter singing and space-aged action, to know the ending get yourself down to St. Pete Beach Theater and see it with your own two eyes.

Rocky holds much more then a twisted plot of insane characters, it also is filled with music and a dance that will go down in infamy; the “Time Warp”. If you haven’t heard of the “Time Warp” don’t worry, the lyrics are the instructions to this simple dance. Once the time arises in the show, you will know what to do. The dance is “just a jump to the left, and then a step to the right. Put your hands on your hips and bend your knees in tight, and it’s the pelvic thrust that really drives you insane, let’s do the time warp again!!” After you do the dance once you will know why it is best done repeated, and in the theater, you will have to.

Now that your mind has been opened to this wonderful world of Rocky grab your stilettos, a bag of rice, a clear voice for screaming and head down to The St. Pete Theater to see Rocky Horror for yourself, but be prepared, after seeing it you may never understand how you lived without it before.