.

Having posted that vid of Tim Curry singing a few days back, how could I not put this up?

Sweet Transvestite - Tim Curry
From The Rocky Horror Picture Show


Oh my, Mr. Tim. I caught my first sight of him in his debut role during the general release of RHPS, the summer of 1975. Before anyone knew about it but the folks who'd seen the stage show, long before it hit the midnight screenings. No one knew what to make of this film, and it bombed. The three or four times I got to see it with my two best friends, there was almost nobody in the theater with us.

But we were enchanted. I was in my mid-teens, sheltered and naive, and that creature up there hit me in the naughty bits like a slice of lemon wrapped around a large gold brick, to quote Douglas Adams. What little I'd known about this sort of gender-bending strangeness was vague and shadowy. (My parents were theater people, and their attitude towards such things was not exactly negative, more amused and eye-rolling.) So I was really pretty unprepared for...that. I'd never seen anything like him, never even imagined anything like him.

And did he warp my little mind? You bet your ass he did. He ruined me for any kind of straight, "normal" sexuality. It's not just that he was strange and half-and-half and vaguely threatening, but that he was so beautiful. Look at his face on the word "tension" - he's like a cut jewel, glittering and lazy and inviting. His loose-limbed confidence and candy-coated arrogance; the haughty, laughing hunger like a cat enjoying a mouse's fascination; and the strength of his body combined with that catlike hip movement as he gets up from that chair - all of that burrowed into me like a drill, and I was never the same again. It's still one of sexiest, if not the sexiest, male performance I've ever seen, and I never get enough of watching it.

All hail Dr. Frank N. Furter, the hottest alien ever to land on our benighted little world! Don't dream it, be it, you exhorted us. Amen.


Off to bed, says my shoulder. Ah well, at least there'll be sweet dreams...