"There's a Light in the Darkness of Everybody's Life"

Tra la! tra la! I just checked: this "old" (2004) iBook meets the requirements for loading the "new" Mac operating system (Leopard).
I never worried about my OS, because when I was writing the geography books for teens, I only used my computer as a combo typewriter/mailbox/encyclopedia.

But now I am a "producer" (!), as a techie friend informed me, my old OS can't download software I need [relative term, but it feeeeels like need], like the free photoshop alternative GIMP. I'm already dissatisfied with the limited editing I can do on iMovie and iPhoto.
How quickly we humans want to go see what's over the next mountain.

But sometimes the old stuff works GREAT.
Last night (after the B. block party), for instance, I watched Rocky Horror Picture Show (RHPS), from 1975, for the first time in... 20-some years, and its operating system works just fine.

Seems I'm deep in some midlife life review, because I keep saying, "for the first time in xx years," when xx >10.

Ever since sci-fi moved into the vacuum in my life left by the Catholic Church and geography books (etc.), I've figured I should watch this movie again, which played a minor role in my young life; but I worried it would be a sad tattered affair, like the awfulness of running into an old lover and feeling sorry for them.

Mais non, pas de tout! to paraphrase Dr. Frankenfurter.

If there's anyone sexier than Tim Curry in fishnets, to this day, I don't know who... though there's a certain starship captain who's awfully cute when he's campy.
(Not forgetting the shockingly young Susan Sarandon, when she's liberated into Franky fandom.)

In fact, Rocky Horror doesn't actually add to "straight" sci-fi, it just amps up the out-land-ish boundary-breaking stuff that's already there, a few notches.
Or quite a few notches, because even 33 years later, it's pretty wild. A musical about a sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania? That shows (tastefully but indubitably) the naughty doctor deflowering both the heroine and the hero?
We've barely caught up to this movie.

[But look, sci-fi is often transgressive. Flying under the censor's radar, Star Trek also raised the gender-identity question. In the very last episode of the series, "The Turnabout Intruder," Kirk's identity is trapped in a woman's body, and only Spock recognizes him, because he "knows the captain better than anyone in the universe"--and because he can mind-meld.
Which is why I chose for my vid the photo of Spock melding with Kirk in a woman's body to illustrate the line "the conjunction of the mind" in the Marvell poem.
I mean, if Kirk is still Kirk even when he's biologically female, what does that say?]

But here's the thing about RHPS that surprised me the most:
it's British!

How did I miss this?
Well, it was pre-Internet days, and I never researched the movie, the way I casually check out everything that interests me these days, on this little box.
Anyway, the central couple, Brad and Janet, are American, and everyone else's accents are all over the map, so I just made that culturally imperialistic assumption that everything is American, like we did back then.

But I should have suspected, because though Rocky Horror fit well in my life, it was far from the American mainstream (as was my life, I see with hindsight). It's more like 1970s Monty Python than Saturday Night Live.

Listening to RHPS creator Richard O'Brien's audio commentary, I learned that he and others in the cast had been involved in Hair, and that makes sense--reflecting as it does the culture of my childhood much more than "Star Trek," which was, in fact, awfully square in the 1960s.

(I didn't watch Star Trek until Watergate, among other things, took the air out of the tires, because it wasn't even on my parents' cultural radar. They had us watching Truffaut films.)

Thinking along those historical lines, I'm working on my next video, which is making me so sad I don't know if I'll finish it, and is so personal, I don't know if I'll post it.
(Oh, maybe on GuGeo, which oddly enough feels less vulnerable than youTube, because I have the feeling--the illusion, sometimes--that I know you guys.)

The project started out light enough as a response to the question many people ask (including me):
"Why do you like Star Trek?"

Obviously there are many easy and fun answers (tin foil bikinis! rubber alien brains! Kirk's smirk!).
But underneath, I love Star Trek because twice in my life it has shone as the "light in the darkness of everybody's life," as Janet and Brad sing in RHPS.

These darkest times in my life coincide with times of historic darkness: Watergate and those helicopters lifting off the roof of the US embassy* in Vietnam coinciding with my mother leaving the family (and me starting high school), and September 11 and the following war(s) coinciding with my mother killing herself.

So, I've been gathering images from those years, and weeping.
Stuff like ST and RHPS made me laugh, while they deal with very "serious darkness," as Story by Story says, and that's why I love them.

(And I think Jesus had a great sense of the quirkiness of life, but, meaning no disrespect, the RC church as I experienced it--big caveat there--has so domesticated the spirit, it's become like those bloated humans in WALL-E who can't even stand on their legs anymore.)

I want to say thank-you to my fellow humans who make these and other life-giving things.
Whether or not I finish this vid, maybe I'll start writing thank-you notes.
Now there's a mid-life thing to do.
____________________________

*Also very grown-up: checking one's facts (even belatedly).

From photographer Hubert van Es:

"In fact, the photo is not of the embassy at all; the helicopter was actually on the roof of an apartment building in downtown Saigon where senior Central Intelligence Agency employees were housed. It was Tuesday, April 29, 1975."