Last Week, Part I: Cake

THE CAKE: 90% less stressful when broken up into days.

Day one (Monday): Buy supplies & groceries. Set back $60. Ingredients for 3 cakes don't cost $60, but it still costs a lot more than you'd think, if you're not buying at the Dollar Store. I also had to buy new food dyes, cake boards, an extra 8" pan, and forks/plates/napkins.

Day two (Tuesday): Marshmallows, powdered sugar, Crisco, food dyes. Step one: eat a handful of marshmallows from each batch (three total). Step two: make fondant. Step three: manage to scrape out the very very last of the brown dye to offset the pink into a nice flesh colour. Step four: Wrap up and put aside to set.

Day three (Wednesday): Baking the cakes. pudding mix, eggs, oil, sour cream, water, red velvet (three boxes of red-velvet, with one spare I had lying around, in order to bring the measurements up two ounces each). ALL HAIL THE KITCHEN AID. Make room in the fridge for two 10", two 8", and two 6" round cakes.

Day four (Thursday): Fill and frost cakes (strawberry jam and chocolate frosting). Wrap middle tier in wax paper due to filling-eruption (hope for the best).

Day five (Friday): Date night!

Day six (Saturday): Rocky night. Four hours of covering cake in fondant, painting details on/around fondant, and stacking the tiers. Lessons learned: When placing pieced-together fondant, make sure it actually connects on the top of hidden layers; when placing stability dowels, don't be stingy, especially on the bottom layer (cake-collapse)!!

Results:

Last Week, Part II: Dates and Balloons

PJ, my first and favourite director of Rocky Horror (who has gone on to be a director, lighting tech, and DP in LA), arrived early last week, and asked me out on Tuesday. We went to Jay's, our favourite 24-hour diner, and just chatted idly for a long time. Holy damn, I miss him. If he could work and thrive here, he might have actually stayed. But he did tell me he is going to try to move to Pittsburgh. I'm hoping. Visiting will be so much easier, both ways.

We saw each other again on Wednesday early evening, when he dropped by to borrow a CD holder, for his DJ gig at Vertex. On Sunday, he dropped by again to give it back, full of the CDs he brought to the club (as a gift, because I couldn't make it that night). We snuggled on the couch for a little bit before he had to go. He has been going non-stop since arriving, and I wanted to give him a nice, sweet, relaxing few moments.

He left on Monday. But me? Glowingly happy for the time we had.




I went out with Ron on Friday. Rochester Museum and Science Center has quarterly "After Dark" events, so I asked him out to it. Bought tickets ahead of time, but apparently didn't need to, as it wasn't packed like the last event (people were turned away an hour into the event last time). This quarter's theme was "The Science of Sound."

Coincidentally, Charles got a gig to play there when I offered that he come too (you could come, or you could play, I guess, haha). He used the opportunity to mark this event as part of his thesis, which he would have messed up without my help (had to record it, and had the camera on HIM instead of the VISUAL aspect of his project instead, which I corrected).

Ron and I wandered around the standard museum displays, while enjoying the extra sounds and music strewn about. We ran into a couple of friends and spent a while at the balloon stand, which accidentally became wildly inappropriate. The balloon stand had empty containers, balloons, scissors, spoons, jingle bells, etc, and was meant for instrument-making. We grabbed some long balloons in hopes of making balloon animals, but found the damn things extremely hard to inflate. When I finally managed to inflate my pink one, we saw there was a kink right at the top of it... which made it look just like a giant dick... which I had in my mouth... Feeble attempts to further inflate it in hopes it would lose that shape were completely lost, as I couldn't stop thinking of what this looked like, and neither could our friends. "DON'T MAKE EYE CONTACT! STOP LOOKING! OH GOD." And then another long balloon inflated and hooked right under my dress. BLAST!
Onto the Tesla coils show, then onto the last part of our evening.

Before the museum, Ron took me out to dinner at a tex-mex place called Selena's (where I've only ever been to meet up with one of the waiters). It was my first time having Mexican food outside a Taco Bell (and my last time at a Taco Bell was back when I had dinner with the Bella Morte boys - how many years ago was THAT?). Very tasty, and thankfully not gut-wrenching, as I feared it'd be. After the museum, he took me to a free concert of Dueling Pianos NYC (who have the least annoying and least geocities site I've come across looking for the correct Dueling Pianos page). We sat all the way in the back of the concert hall, unaware that this would be a massive event. It took a while for them to get started, but they really got fun as the show went on. Lots of Billy Joel, though.

I wore my corset under my dress, to prepare for the Rocky show the next night, and I had to repeatedly ask Ron to assist me in standing after I'd sit or crouch in a lower-than-usual position. My corset has a bent bone that sticks me in the back, but oddly enough, my feet gave out before my organs. I also wore my pretty dress that I bought as a bridesmaid dress (but didn't make it to the wedding). Ron took a photo of me in the ball-pit. I had a wonderful night.



I had many wonderful nights :)

Last Week, Part III: Rocky Horror Reunion Show

I already wrote a little bit about my Rocky jitters, but there's a little bit more (not much - even recapping will exhaust me to no end).

My cake collapsed on the way over to the theater, and on top of that, I forgot my coat. Our pre-pre-show notes were outdoors, in the rainy cold weather, outside the bar across the street from the theatre. But at least I got to drop my cake off inside before I had to head back out (we weren't technically allowed in the theatre til 11pm). Not five minutes inside the theater, while everyone dressed and got props ready, did I get down on my knees, inches from one of the Frank'n'Furter's asses, to help buckle garter straps. Ah, memories.

For anyone who doesn't know about the experience of going to a screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, it is a night of crazy debauchery and yelling callbacks to the screen, while the shadow-cast performs the whole show, in costume, up in the front of the theatre. There are regular callbacks every cast uses, and some callbacks unique to each cast (with the occasional inside joke). Think "Mystery Science Theater 3000" but more loud and obscene.

The pre-show was a mixed bag - great gags, great dedications to fallen cast members, great little mini history... but then singing happened, "Paradise by the Dashboard Light," but they played the karaoke version. Karaoke version without microphones makes for a sub-par performance. I don't know what they were thinking there. Oh, and then the "virgins" had to be "deflowered," by way of the usual "easy way or the hard way," involving stripping down to underpants, orgasm choir, getting auctioned off, and other sundries. Then we had the rules ("fuck the rules!" "fuck my rule, it's longer, harder, and more fun"), which I always enjoy. The rules are standard serious, but even they have ridiculous callbacks (no smoking, "unless you're having sex with a cast member, and if you're smoking during sex with a cast member, you're going way too fast, and probably using kitty-litter-condoms!"), and then finally, we started the movie.

Much to my surprise, the first part of the film was in black & white! I had no idea this was the original intention of the theatrical release. The movie was black & white til The Time Warp. Never knew. I mean... the lips is prolifically red, right? Right.

I'd watched my dvd copy earlier that night just to situate myself with my scenes, and the callbacks just came flooding out my mouth, even after ten years, after I'd long forgotten, and most surprisingly, I was able to get dressed, not even watching and still callback the visual cues (like during the credits, or finding Magenta's eyes - stuff that doesn't make sense unless you're watching the film). And at the performance, the callbacks came back even more, and I remembered ones I hadn't earlier, and even heard a bunch of new ones, and a bunch that were older than any cast I've been in!

One of the Criminologists dropped out of the show, but still showed up to help with crew. He was actually my favourite Crim, and he was the only one I didn't mind being with during the Crim-Orgy (where all the Crims shared a scene). The others I didn't know at all, and one of them hit on me relentlessly, more than is acceptable at Rocky Horror (the same guy who had once denounced Rocky and the cast when he decided to try being a born-again Christian). So weird.

Josh (who directed when I first attended Rocky) and I had equal enthusiasm, where we waded listlessly through the crowd, shouting our callbacks with gusto, but also feeling old and drained just being there. It's weird how exhausted I felt, but still went through all the motions without thought. More so than ever, the callback for "Let's Do The Time Warp Again" rings true: "Let's do the same shit again!"

I saw so many old friends (neither of my Rocky exes showed up, which I felt split down the middle about, 100% because I like the first ex, and the second ex is a horrible person who did horrible things to me). Many old friends decided not to perform or be in the crew, and just enjoyed the show as audience members. We completely packed and sold out the show, and so many people got turned away. To be honest, we could have kept it a private show for just cast members, because almost half the people in the audience had performed at one time or another.

Afterwards, I found a broom, and got to sweeping the aisles (Rocky Horror is a messy affair). Spent about an hour cleaning and chatting with folks after the show, and then we all headed to Jay's, but didn't stay long. Signed a lot of programmes like they were yearbooks. I wish I thought of doing that, but arriving late and leaving early didn't give me much time for that. It was 4am by the time we even got there.

What a night.


(photo by Andrea E. Leahey-Carella)