Audio By Carbonatix
You’ve huddled under the newspaper, you’ve fired the squirt gun, you’ve thrown rice, toast, and toilet paper, you’ve done the pelvic thrust until it drives you insay-yay-yay-yay-yay-yane. Maybe you’ve even shouted, “Same room, different color!” with the unusual suspects at the Carefree Theatre in West Palm Beach. But until you’ve seen the Carefree Players perform at the pre-Halloween screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, you might as well still be a “virgin.”
The historic movie house’s 16-year run of the 1975 cult hit is the longest in Florida and the fifth-longest in the country. While every Saturday-night show there has an inevitable Halloweenyness, the October 28 extravaganza should bring out three times the usual crowd of 200 spectators, as well as a higher-than-usual number of Magentas, Rockys, and Frank N. Furters — thanks to the costume contest.
This is also the one night every year when newcomers to the Players, called virgins, get payback. According to cast director Joy Bryson, newbies are initiated throughout the year by Player Brendhan Horn, known to most as “the virgin-sacrificer.”
“They get [virgins] up on stage, and they have to lick whipped cream from someone’s toes, chocolate syrup from someone’s navel,” Bryson explains. “It’s usually kind of sexually oriented but harmless.”
And so along with the movie, the contest, and a live band, Saturday’s event includes the “virgins’ revenge,” which is arranged as an auction: “We give them the opportunity to buy the ickiest, gooiest, nastiest things they can to dump on [Brendhan],” Bryson says.
The revenge doubles as a fundraiser for COMPASS, a Palm Beach County social-service agency for gays and lesbians. For its part COMPASS has provided 1500 packets of condoms for distribution at the event: The verbiage on one side is background on Rocky Horror, with safer-sex guidelines gracing the other.
