Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Rocky Talkie. Thank you all so much for tuning back in. We really appreciate it. Aaron Nicky, how's, how are y'all doing today? Oh, I'm doing just fine, John, I've been having a good week. I'm excited to talk about some Rocky horror. I'm doing great. I started Christmas decorating today and I'm very excited, very excited. I'm John. I do that. I have recently arisen from my 16 hour stream yesterday. It was absolutely insane. I did not expect to feel as garbage as I feel right now. So at the end of the stream, I was like, yo, I'm on top of the world right now. I can go for like an eight mile run and be totally fine. But then I woke up today and I was like, I felt like I got hit by a truck full advisement. Don't, don't do a 16 hour stream unless you've prepared yourself for it. Everyone that sounds pretty fair. I was mostly playing games with friends this week. I had a fun among us session that I did and uh got to be real suss for a while. Aaron is bad at among us. Aaron. Aaron is kind of, you're not wrong. Great. All right. So now that we've all caught up since we haven't talked to each other in the past week, why don't we start talking about some global news in the Rocky horror community? First up on our agenda today, Laverne Cox and her friend were targeted in a transphobic attack. Now we all know Laverne from her performance as Dr Frank Converter in the 2016 Rocky horror remake. Let's do the time warp again as it were. But she's also acted in a lot of other shows and movies. You know, Orange is the new black is one that comes to mind for a lot of people. She's also a really outspoken trans activist, Laverne and an unnamed friend of hers survived a really disgusting hate crime. This past weekend in a Los Angeles Park. Laverne posted a video on Instagram where she discussed the attack saying that the attacker approached her and her friend aggressively asked for the time. Then looked at Laverne's friend and asked them quote guy or girl to which your friend responded. Fuck off. Which yeah. Good for her friend. That's how I'd answer that question too. Honestly. Imagine the fucking douche bro, that you'd have to be to aggressively ask somebody for the time, right? Like how do you, how do you even do that? Right? You like angrily grab them by the shoulder. Like what time is it like? What, what do you even do there? Like, what kind of person do you have to be to ask aggressively for the time to some random person? Like, I can't even ask the time from, like, the cashier at, like my local grocery store, let alone some random person with their friend in a park. Absolutely. Laverne tells us that all of a sudden the man began physically attacking her friend. She pulled out her phone called 911, but the man fled as soon as she had made the call, she put her phone away because he was already gone. Absolutely crazy situation in the video she posted immediately after the attack, Laverne was visibly shaken up as anybody would be like that is insane that that just happens to somebody and she says that she and her friend are both physically fine, but that the attack brought up a lot of feelings stemming from past instances of violence she's faced in the past, Laverne went on to post a follow up video to Instagram the next day where she talked about her own history of feeling unseen and unheard when faced with violence and discusses the many issues surrounding transphobic hate crimes in a global way. So Laverne's big takeaway kind of seems to be summed up in her statement. She said, I think it's important for me to remind myself and remind you that when these things happen, it's not your fault, it's not your fault that there are people who are not cool with you existing in the world. It was not my friend's fault. It is not my fault that this happened. We have a right to walk in the park. Damn right. She's absolutely right. She, her friend, everyone else on the planet has the right to live their life without being targeted or harassed, specifically just vibing in a park. I agree completely. That's ridiculous. While we're on the topic of this, if you or someone, you know, has survived any sort of crime, there are a lot of resources out there to help survivors seek justice and get access to medical care and emergency financial assistance. After the fact, two big national organizations are victim connect that you can find at victim dot org and the Victims of Crime resource center that you can find online at 1 800 victims dot org. There are many, many other organizations just like these, both national and local. But if you need help, either of these places should be able to help you get started. Yeah, we're going to be linking to both of those in our show notes. We hope that you never need them, but we really do feel that it's important to share those resources just in case. Ok. So on a much lighter note, creepy kingdom dot com released an article this week about a group of wedding vendors in Orlando, Florida who came together to do this incredible rocky horror. The photo shoot to showcase their wares to potential clients. This was so freaking cool. I've, I never wanted to get married more in my whole life. Nikki, you're only saying that because you want to get married in body paint. First of all, don't try to tell me there's zero chance of body pain if you and Savannah got married. Second of all, did you see how good those models looked after they were painted? All right. All right. Yeah. No, that's true. They painted on outfits were pretty damn amazing. I actually really like how Magenta's apron framed her belly button. Like that was that cute yet. Columbia's short stripes looked pretty close to correct. One of our New York City cast members, Laurel. She has a really tasteful tattoo of the stripes on her. She checked it against the model in the video said they look pretty right. I mean, that's crazy attention to detail for a wedding vendor presentation. If you want to talk attention to detail, it was literally everywhere in this photo shoot. There were so many different vendors who contributed to make the shoot successful and they freaking nailed it. Body paint aside. There was the hair and makeup, the flowers with the feather accents, those gorgeous black and red baroque linens, the gothic table settings. All the room decor, the place cards, the K oh my God. Yes. The cake with the Corset and the pearls and the Columbia ones. How cute was that. Of course, the whole point of the shoot was for these vendors to be able to come together and work on an over the top sort of project to showcase that they're talented in ways beyond the traditional white wedding thing, white wedding. In the article, the body paint makeup artist Della Mort summarized it very well stating I can only hope this stylized shoe will help more couples realize that vendors love a unique challenge. Don't worry about doing what everyone else is doing. Be true to yourself, be that strange and magical creature that your partner is so madly in love with. We will all help you turn your wedding dreams into a reality. Which hell yeah, I think that's so cool that these vendors are helping people see that just because you want to have a big extra wedding, doesn't mean you have to go the traditional route. It's you and your partner's day. You can wear whatever you want and do whatever you want. And there are a lot of super talented artists out there who will be really excited to help create the most awesome version of whatever your vision for the day is. Yeah. Say um Aaron, you know, speaking about uh you and your partner's day that you can do whatever you want. And there are a lot of super talented people out there who are excited to help create the most awesome version of your wedding. Do you wanna um you want to weigh in on that a little bit. Uh Yeah, I just want to point out that her quote is essentially don't dream it be it. So moving on. Uh No. Um Yeah. No, I, I should definitely talk about this a little bit. So I'm married to our incredibly hot producer, Meg. And for those of our listeners who don't know which is probably most of you. Our wedding was at Oakley Court, which is the castle where Rocky was filmed, right? And did you know that that castle is now a hotel? Uh Yeah, dude, we we stayed there together, right? John managed the whole wedding. He wrote an entire audience participation script for everyone. He was a rock star for the whole thing. Thanks. I know one of the things about getting married abroad was that there was a lot of the wedding that we didn't get to coordinate until literally the week of we got to London like five days before the actual wedding and spent a ton of time running around and finding flowers, getting a cake, getting liquor, all that stuff that most people have done way in advance. But it was actually super fun. We spent a whole day with some of our closest friends. Shout out to my bestie Jen. We were cake testing by just walking into different bakeries and trying out their stuff. So anyway, we get to these places, we give them the 12th spiel, right? My fiance and I met doing Rocky Horror. We're getting married at Oakley Court in three days. That's kind of the theme, but we're not picky. Like, can you help us every single person we talked to 100% on board or they knew about Rocky? They understood what we were looking for. They were excited to help us find something that was a little bit different. All of this stuff is art, whether it's flower arranging, cake, decorating, photography, they're all artists. Most artists get super excited about working on stuff that's different and cool. And that's exactly what we found. Yeah, the wedding itself. If I can plug myself during this conversation, the wedding itself was so cool. So fun. I actually wrote the audience participation script for the wedding when I was in line getting an expedited passport because my dog ripped it up and when she was a puppy, I came home one day and she had ripped up my my passport. So I had to get a new one. So I was standing in line at, you know, the place downtown where you can get your passport expedited. And I was sitting on the ground at like 4 30 in the morning on my phone typing up the audience participation script and it was just so cool to put Rocky Horror into a wedding, which is something that I honestly, at that point in my Rocky her career, I had never expected to happen in my lifetime. One of my favorite parts about the audience participation script. Whenever our efficient Hadrian, a very close friend of Megan Aarons myself and the New York City cast would mention something about alcohol. Every single person in the audience had to take a drink. And uh what was the liquor that we provided? Everyone? Rose flavored vodka, which tasted a lot like soap and bullet bourbon. They were not strong choices on my part. They were well, I mean, they were strong choices depending on how you say it. Because by the end of the wedding ceremony, people who were participating in this took the equivalent of like what eight straight shots of liquor because of all the times that people said alcohol or they referenced alcohol or something like that during the wedding ceremony. It was hysterical to go out onto the grounds of Oakley Court with the entire wedding party majorly shot in the ass. It was a sight to behold and looking back on that wedding, it really feels like a plot arc and like a romantic comedy sitcom, like like how I met your mother, the fact that the two of you got to the wedding area like with less than a week to prepare and had to run around the city of London to organize it. Meanwhile, all of your friends are coming in at different times and all doing things entirely separate, but still at the same time trying to helplessly find each other in a city that none of them knew it was such a great time. Honestly, one of the best times of my life, it was a fantastic wedding. Super cool. Remember when we were able to travel? Yeah. Honestly, I, I didn't know that you guys had done all of that stuff. Like right before, I'm not sure I would have been able to tell. Well, like you said, the trick is to turn the ceremony into a drinking game. That way everyone's too shitfaced by the reception. They can't tell the difference. Like they, they just want the cake. They don't even realize that it says happy birthday, Jimmy on it. I can imagine there have had to have been actual weddings held during rocky performances though, right? That's a thing they had to. Oh yeah. There, there definitely have. I was at one held by the New York City Cast many years ago. There's also stories from all over the world from the last 45 years. People getting married at Shadow cast or stage show performances. It's definitely a thing. Probably the most famous was chronicled by Sapiro in Creatures of the Night about the eighth street playhouse wedding in April of 1985. Have either of you guys heard this story? I have, oh, this one's great. You're gonna love this, Nicky. So the wedding as it's been known in the community was a practical joke on the cast and audience that was mastermind by Sapiro where two actors Michelle and Mo 28 street cast members faked a four month long romance with soap opera style rocky relationships leading to a pregnancy and culminating in a big ass staged wedding despite the fact that they were not really good friends. So went out, hired an actor as a rabbi. He announced it on the local radio station. The theater was completely packed and Frank led Michelle down the aisle while a professional singer sang You Light up my life. So get this midway through the ceremony. The rabbi asks as you might expect if there's anyone here, who knows why these two should not be married? Let them speak now forever hold their peace. Yeah, a question that I recall you very wisely admitting from your own wedding. I I know way better than that. No. So as soon as the rabbi asks that another actor comes running down to the stage, shouting the baby's mind, the wedding has to be called off. And at that point so grabs the microphone and announces, ladies and gentlemen, there is no baby, there is no wedding and he Michelle and Moy shout in unison, April fools. What a mind, fuck, insane, insane. We've also had our fair share of proposals at Rocky. Even when I've been with N Y C. There's been a few, one of my favorites is when one of our directors, Eric Fake proposed to his partner of multiple years who he met on N Y C like in the N Y C Rocky Horror cast on a, I think it was a Halloween show and he got all of us. It was completely fake. His partner Rachel was in on the gag too, which made it even more believable. And all of us were like, oh my God, oh my God, it's finally happening. Oh my God. And then it was, it was an elaborate ruse. And we were like, oh, like biggest cock teas ever. And there's been a few times where like, we'll just show up to the show like it's just any other night and then we'll have somebody come up to us and be like, hey, we, we love Rocky. We met at Rocky. Rocky is like a really important thing to us. I'm proposing to my partner tonight. Can you help me out? And we're like, oh OK, because like who's gonna say no to that? You know, we had a couple from them that are cast get proposed to at the beginning of our show, we've had audience members get proposed to at the top of our show and it is super crazy trying to scramble before a show that we haven't been able to prepare for, to help a stranger that I've never met, who wants to make that show one of the most important nights of their life. And it's like, who's gonna tell them no, like I'm not gonna say, oh no you know what? We can't do that. Like, of course, I'm gonna help, but I don't want to screw it up. They're going to remember it for the rest of their life. That's pressure. It is high stress, right? But uh if marriage doesn't kill you 2020 might. But according to the Boston Globe, it can't kill Rocky Horror. Boomer humor. Take my life, please. One of these days, Nicky Bam. Zoom spousal abuse was a joke in the fifties. So the Boston Globe released this article this week titled the pandemic Can't Kill Rocky Horror. So rounding out this week's global news, Margaret Redmond Whitehead at the Boston Globe wrote a very sweet and surprisingly insightful piece about Rocky Horror. In the time of COVID. It focuses on how members of the community, both performers and fans are adapting to try and keep the show alive and relevant when we obviously can't put on a real performance. Certainly not in the theater. The author talks about how casts like R K O the come again, players and te have adapted to working on outdoor and online shows and all the difficulties associated with those that we've come in past episodes being limited to a square on a Zoom call, doing a live performance versus pretaped the awesomeness of being able to broadcast your performance globally, but having to forego a live audience entirely, all that stuff. Yeah, she also talks about how fans who were show regulars in the before times are doing their best to find the same sort of enjoy from the show and the socially distant formats that are available to us. She touched on how active the virtual performance chat rooms are and how the main emotion in most of them is how much of the viewers miss the performers that they're seeing on screen. So she spoke to a longtime audience regular from Connecticut named Bruce Watts, which is a great name. He had driven an hour and a half to Massachusetts to watch a drive in Rocky Horror show. He describes himself as not a football fan, but boy, I love Rocky Horror, which I never thought of that. There are people who love football and will like travel in like their general geographical area to go see football teams play. But like there are definitely people who travel within specific areas to go see different Rocky casts. Oh, 100% right. So Margaret really did her homework for this piece. She talked to a lot of the community members as she wrote this, among them were Sylvia Peterson from come again players Tori from Tesseract. And of course Rocky horror legend Roy Rossi, this was such a good article. You could really tell it was written from the perspective of someone who cares about and understands the community and how important we all are to each other. She ends out the piece by saying, while the pandemic has fostered innovation in this prolifically creative community. It has also engendered acute loss. Communal experiences are not food or shelter, but there is a core of sustenance, the kinetic energy, the kind of homecoming that can lead someone to make a long dark drive across state lines to fish nets and open arms. For his part. Watts is waiting to get back to the midnight theater. If they say I have to wear a mask. Sure, I'll wear a mask. He says, I'll probably draw a big set of lips on it. That was an amazing sentence. All of that. That was just, that was the smartest sentence I've ever read. Yeah, that's a lot of this article. I, I know it can feel a little dry to all of us because this is the stuff that we've been dealing with like on a daily basis since March. But I do think it was written from the perspective of someone who genuinely wants to bring light to who we are and what we do share our community with a wider audience. That's awesome. I really appreciate the show and performers being shared in such an honest way with potential audience members. I feel like this totally encapsulates the way that most of our community is feeling right now. Like safety is our priority, of course, and we'll do whatever we have to do to make sure that our casts and our audience members stay healthy. But for a lot of us, this community is our family and we all really miss each other and we can't wait to get back to stripping down to our underwear and making fun of the stupid movie together. Stop, stop, stop that. Oh, my God. Well, speaking of underwear. Yeah, let's move over to community news. Yeah. Hi. I'm Kelly and I'm Leandra and we host Rocky Horror Minute, the podcast where we discuss the Rocky Horror Picture Show in excruciating detail. One minute at a time. We're doing this show to share our love of the lyrics. You've never seen a prune in real life? No. Same with Raisins, right? Our passion for performance. Oh my God. I was like bad knees stupid. Sober into detail. I know that everybody's curious. That car is a 1964 Ford Falcon Deluxe Sedan Ford or 54 D and to unlock secrets that would otherwise be lost to time. Oh, are you asking if I know the name of the Cheetah and why it had such a problem with the snake? Visit us on the web at Rocky Horror minute dot com. For more information or look for us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, youtube or wherever you get your podcasts. That's right. So, in community news this week, we've got a bunch of virtual show stuff. The ordinary kids are hosting an encore of their awesome performance that aired last week, everyone liked it so much that they're gonna be rearing it on December 18th and 19th. This time they're gonna be adding a 15 minute blooper reel. I am excited to check that out. Uh Honestly, yes, like that is so fun. Outtakes are always a good thing to watch. I honestly wish that more movies still kept their outtakes at the end of the credits. They're so good. Some of my favorite movies I remember specifically because of the outtake reels at the end of them, like like Toy Story Two and Liar Liar. Like their outtake reels during the credits are just absolutely hysterical. I love them so much. It's really nice that you get to like, laugh along with the performers of whatever art outtake that you're watching. Especially because, you know, you've probably done a really silly thing while performing too. The encore performances will be held on Zoom just like last time and they will take place on Friday, December 18th at eight PM and 11 PM, Eastern Standard Time and Saturday, December 19th at nine PM Eastern Standard Time. We'll all definitely be watching. It was a really good show and I think we're all psyched to check out the bonus features this time around so big. Thank you to Polly for writing in with this love you guys over there at ordinary kids. Keep it coming. And while we're on the topic of virtual performances, did any of you get to check out the F F O holiday show this past weekend? Yeah, I really enjoyed it. I love theme shows and it was so fun to see the different holiday costumes that were thought up over the years. Yeah, same. Just like their last few virtual shows. They cut together a whole bunch of different holiday theme shows from their past years. It might have been four cut together this time. Maybe five. Hard to tell. There was a lot of footage there. I loved all the ugly sweaters. The little headbands with mistletoe dangling in front of them. Dr Scott and Frank were in it for the whole show. Those were super cute. There were so many costumes on display. Santa Eddie. Oh my God. I loved it so much. It was a really fun performance all around and it seemed like they got a pretty big audience for it too. There was a ton of toast and confetti being thrown the whole time. Great job F F O. We loved it. We can't wait for the next one. Speaking of toast though. Yeah, on the topic of toast. Uh let's talk about Fred and his pins. So Fred Moro, the guy who sells all the castle is a hotel merch has a new pin available. It's Riff raff staring through the castle window during his solo and there's a light, it glows in the dark guys. It glows in the dark and it's super cute. So if you want one for your Frank jacket, um or maybe you want to keep your Frank jacket screen accurate and you want it for literally anywhere else that pins can go. Pins can go a lot of places. Nicky. Are you adding me right now? Are you, are you adding me right now? Anyway, boys, if you want one for anything? Because it's awesome. You can check it out at Etsy at Etsy dot com slash shop slash rock. Yeah, these are really neat. We just got our Kickstarter preorders sent in the mail and I've already used the bottle opener probably a dozen times. Well, Fred has pins and bottle openers and a lot of other merch up there for sale. He has all of the, did you know the castle is the hotel buttons and pins. He's got these cue pins that are like heart shaped butts, wearing underwear and garter belts and stockings. Yeah. You know what I'm talking about. There's seriously so much it'll make for great Christmas shopping for you or your friends if you want to weird out your conservative relatives, which I am 100% doing. So, let's talk about some other people that are really good at weirding out conservative relatives. If you're looking to keep shopping, shameless. Plug my cast Friday night specials. Just put out our holiday themed Rocky Merch up for sale online. We've got all kinds of stuff. Shirts, pins, posters, Christmas ornaments. There's so much. So if you want to check it out, visit us at Rocky Horror and J dot com slash shop. So before we close out community news, we've got one more fun little thing to share with all of you. The Hoboken cast recently posted a 25 days of Rocky Horror challenge to Facebook and Instagram where you can post a picture every day or every few days if you're not super on top of social media all the time, you know, kind of like me. I love challenges like this. They're all things like a picture of your dream role, the shadow cast or your favorite Rocky meme. It's fun. It's interactive with the community and I think it's a nice way for everyone to get to know each other a little bit better during the holidays. Agreed, you can find the challenge on their social media, Facebook and Instagram and I think they posted it to the big shadow casters group. We'll be linking to it in our show notes if you want to check it out. But don't feel like hunting around if you participate in the challenge, tag us at Rocky Talkie podcast. So we can see, we love you guys and we want to see all your pictures and we're going to be posting some of our challenge responses to our social media too and it'll all be linked in the show notes. If you want to come see our responses. If you've got some news, you'd like us to share on the podcast. If you're working on an awesome Rocky horror project, you want to tell the whole community about or if your cast is working on something cool and you just want to spread the word. Visit our website rocky talky podcast dot com and click on contact us. We can't wait to hear from you. And with that, I think it kicks us over to Nicky asks a question. Nicky asks a question. Ok, guys, this one is really exciting because I'm not asking the question. Are you ready? No, wait, I'm not ready. It doesn't make sense if it's not your question, I'm ready now. So this week we had a write in and it wasn't snook in and it was absolutely fantastic. This is from someone named some asshole from New England, which, which part is the last name? I think it's like some asshole and then from, is like their middle name, like a suffix and then New England is the last name. That's my guess that's how they have to fill it out on government forms. Yeah. So Mr Mrs New England, thank you for writing in. Let's get into it. So the message is I've heard for years from a select few members of the Rocky Horror community that it is frowned upon to wear horizontal stripes, especially black and white stripes to a showing. I've seen this on a number of websites and heard it from a few community members. Supposedly this is because a crew member wearing such a garment is visible at some point during the movie. However, I've never managed to spot them and a lot of people have never heard of this phenomenon. Is it an urban legend? Is it real? If so when is it visible? Yours? Some asshole, I've never heard of this. Have you guys heard anything about this? Nope. Sounds really weird. I have not heard of this either. Well, uh thanks everyone for listening. Have a good night. You can follow us on. No, no. Ok. We're not gonna disappoint the Duke of New England. Ok. Answer the question. Where do you even start? Like, it's clearly something chalked up to like an urban legend. I mean, like, I guess you could break it down and maybe with like a bunch of Googling, you might be able to figure it out. But yeah, that definitely doesn't sound like something that I might be interested in doing. Ok, let's do that. Let's break it down the first part really easy. Is there a crew member in the movie wearing a striped sweatshirt? If there is great. That's what the legend says. Maybe it's true and that's where it comes from. We can check I M DB. It lists three places where crew members are visible and we can check those against the movie. Seems reasonable, right? So for reasons, I have all of the frames from the Blu Ray ripped, you know, pretty good way to go through them. So we should be able to cross reference this knock this out done. Ok. So it says on I MD V during wild and untamed thing, a crew member can be seen walking on the catwalk above this stage. So this one's true. But scene is a really generous word. There's about 50 frames where you can make out a person vaguely up in the catwalk. But it's, it's barely a person. It's more of a smudge, let alone anything that looks like they're wearing a striped sweatshirt. So this can't be the reference they're talking about. So during I can make you a man, a crew member's hands can be seen pulling a string attached to the palm horse as Frank pushes it behind the elevator. This one's actually true. There's a few 100 frames where you can see hands and forearms of a guy crouched behind the elevator and he's just yanking on the strings tied to the palmo horse to get it off of the stage. But it's just a guy's hands and forearms. There's no sweatshirt here. So the next occurrence is during the time where a crew member can be seen on the left side of the frame wearing a white shirt. So we're getting closer. Yeah, this sounds promising. It's a crew member in frame wearing a white shirt. Maybe it has some stripes on it. Let's go check it out. Unfortunately. No, this is just, this is just false. Yeah. No, no crew members appear at any point during time. Warp sweet tea or undressing all the way through the elevator. I went through every single frame. It, there's just no one there that shouldn't be ok. Where did this even come from then? So using the way back machine on archive dot org, we can confirm that this fact, air quotes first appeared on I M DB sometime between 2004 and 2005, but it didn't cite any source and it's still there today 16 years later. So if this was posted as an honest mistake, my best guess is that due to the four by three cropping on some of the early V H S releases, someone may have mistaken a Transylvanian for a crew member, but this isn't real, you're not real. Aaron's not real confirmed. But how can you tell exactly when it was posted? What's the way back machine? The way back machine is an archive of snapshots from websites at certain points in time that were all taken by search engines. So it spans all the way back to the early nineties and it's pretty much the sole record we have of a lot of the internet from the early nineties, all the way through the two thousands. So you can use this tool to jump through the history of a page. So for example, you could go there and see what rocky horror dot org looked like in 1996 or 2005 or 2010. And then you can use that information to carbon date when things appeared on certain websites. Even if those websites don't have a publish date or the publish date is misrepresented, which we were actually gonna encounter later. That's actually really interesting back to the question. Ok. I'm positive there is no crew member visible in time warp. That's really unfortunate for our urban legend because it was the best lead that we had so hilariously. The one place where you actually can see crew members in Rocky Horror is not even listed on I M DB. During hot Patuti Eddie completes his first lap chasing the Transylvanian's down the ramp and multiple crew members are very clearly visible just hanging out on the right side of the screen for like 10 frames, multiple people, you can just clearly see them there, but there's no stripes on any of them. And because of all the shuffling from the Transylvanian's, nobody really notices them. Ok. So I'm gonna break the fourth wall here for a second. We aren't doing research on the fly here. We get, we, we get sent questions from all of you in advance. We received this question this past week and everything that we've talked about are exactly the steps that we took to look into this answer. And after scouring through the film frames, we are totally stumped. So at this point, Aaron took over research for the question and did some major digging. So first of all props Aaron. Thank you. But he's going to tell us all about that. Now, take it away at this point, looking into the question, we've looked at the frames. I knew that there were a couple occurrences in the film where you could see a crew member, but nothing made any sense. The most obvious example on I M DB was simply not even true. So the question claims that they'd seen it on multiple websites that seems pretty straightforward, right? So let me do some Google searches. Sure enough, there's a few results in 2010, there was a Yahoo answers question that got posted. I I screen capped it here, John. Do you want to read this one? Yeah. Sure. So it says, why shouldn't you wear a striped sweatshirt to Rocky Horror? Every website I see says not to do it but no one says, why can anyone enlighten me please? I always thought anything goes at Rocky Horror Show. And then there, the one answer is, I have no idea either. And I've been involved in Rocky for years, wear whatever you want. The rule about dress is there are no rules and that was from Alice one decade ago. Awesome. So that was obviously worthless, but obviously true, right? We all know you can wear whatever you like, but it does give you a date, right? Which is what we were looking for. This is a question that someone asked at least a decade ago. So 2010. We keep digging. Right. We're, we're trying to hunt down the places that people have seen this online. We find what appears to be a 2019 college fashion dot net article that's completely in line with this urban legend that our asshole from New England has described. So this is an article that's one of those catch all articles that's meant to get high Google Ranks when someone searches for anything that a newcomer to Rocky Horror might ask stuff like, what do I wear? What's the experience like? And as you find with most of the articles, like, it makes a bunch of costume suggestions and links to the affiliate store links on Amazon so that they get referral bonuses. That's how they make their money. Honestly, of all the bullshit. How do I dress as blot Rocky Horror articles? I filter through a ton of those for the news site every week. This one's not bad. So there's a blurb that appears part way through this, Nikki. Why don't you read what it says here? Ok. Let's see another warning if you don't dress up for a midnight showing, which is totally fine. Be sure not to wear anything striped for a brief second. In the film, crew members in striped shirts were accidentally caught on film. It's now considered taboo to wear stripes to R H P S showings unless they're a part of your costume. What's interesting about this other than directly matching the urban legend that we're seeking is that it claims to be in 2019 article. But by going back through archive dot org, you can actually see that it was originally posted in 2011. It was a pretty different article back then. It wasn't pushing referral sales and it had a lot more advertising going on. But no matter how far back you went, even the first time it was posted in 2011, it still contained our urban legend. So I believe that this article is probably the origin of the incorrect statement that a crew member was wearing a striped shirt. However, it's not the origin of the don't wear a striped sweatshirt urban legend in general. I would guess that the writer of the article possibly due to hearing or reading the don't wear a striped shirt urban legend connected it to the incorrect I M DB factoid and they put two and two together and somehow made eight. We know for sure that it's certainly not the first reference to wearing a striped shirt at Rocky as the Yahoo question from 2010 predates it by almost a year. As does another example we'll find in just a minute, we continue our Googling at this point. We encounter a 2015 wi see how article entitled How to do the time Warp. It is chock full of information just as hard hitting as that. It's your pretty typical wiki how article it's oversimplified instructions baffling drawings that are actually pretty good examples. If you really, really want to fit in the first time you go to Rocky Horror. Not important. What is is that there's a section that discusses what to wear to see Rocky. And again, we find our urban legend here, John, why don't you read this one? So it says to avoid stripes. If you're going to a Rocky horror show and many performances of the Rocky Horror Picture Show where the Time Warp Dance comes from, people might make fun of you for wearing stripes. This supposedly references a scene in the movie where somebody wearing a striped shirt was caught on camera accidentally, but it's a tradition of its own at this point. Oh, ok. I thought we hit a gold mine at this point because wiki how cites their sources and there was a citation for this section. I was ecstatic. Amazing. I scroll down, I click the link and I'm on the college fashion dot net article. Goddamn it. OK. So this is actually really funny. This is a great example of how misinformation or an urban legend can spread. One source takes an existing urban legend. Don't wear stripes to Rocky Horror. Adds a bit of incorrect guesswork to the mix makes a claim and is later cited as a source for another article and so on and so on. There's an article posted in 2019 from a UK site that's in the same referral market as the college fashion article. But it also is clearly cribbing from either wiki how or the original college fashion piece. So it's at this point that I knew that the search for the origin of the urban legend wasn't actually gonna be all that simple. I had the idea, it might have originated earlier than I thought like before the two thousands. And if it had I needed to use different resources. So my go to there is usually the Rocky Horror News Group. I've mentioned that one before. Yeah, it's like early internet bulletin boards, right? So hunting through those, we find an absolutely hilarious post that gives us a glimpse at what could be the true nature of the urban legend. So this is from 1998 and it's in the middle of a giant thread about of all things and coding standards for posting it in the news group. This is stuff like what kind of asking encoding for text is supposed to be used, what each emoji means, a maximum character limit for signing your messages, like really interesting stuff. But deep inside this thread is a two messages exchange between Mrs Trotsky and Mike Bennett, longtime community member. He's a massive content creator from the early two thousands. He produced a ton of web content. It's all archived in the way back machine. Uh He was also a contributor and eventual interim editor of crazed imaginations. That's the long running Rocky design. That ran for years. He, he managed it for almost four. Anyway, here's the exchange that happened, Nikki, you wanna read, Miss question? Can anyone tell me what's supposedly wrong with wearing stripes to Rocky? Is it just something dreamed up by board or H P S veterans to dupe the newbies? And John Mike's response was, well, my tuxedo has had them for the past 14 years or so. Whoever says that wearing stripes is wrong and can't see the big picture, the stripes can foster camaraderie against the audience. He also spelled camaraderie wrong. And when and when given out in a ceremony acts as a goal for those looking for a place to fit into the rocky scene. They were never meant to be symbols of power, only symbols of honor. I'm pretty sure if I'm not totally responsible for the phenomenon. But I can tell you that when I was on cast in Orlando back in 83 I was also in the United States Navy, about a half dozen of cast members and freaks always dressed for the occasion. In tuxedo jackets. We were constantly being asked by audience members how many times we had seen the movie as a response, we thought we would put our stripes on our sleeves known as service stripes in the military to denote the number of times each gold stripe denoted 100 shows. There was also a red stripe for when someone reached their 69th show nice, nice, nice. So they got to wear the rag. So I know not, not a fan of that. It went from nice to not real fast. Originally, they were just a thing between us, but we soon were giving them out to anyone we knew was reaching a milestone to add to the prestige. These stripes were given out in a quick ceremony during the preshow being in the military, I then traveled extensively throughout the country and everywhere I went, I took my tuxedo in case I found a theater that showed Rocky invariably, I'd be asked what the stripe meant. And I tell them the story. I can only assume that in my travels and the travels of others that have received their stripes. This story and the use of stripes has grown. Ok. So this is a pretty obvious well crafted troll and I really wish that it could wrap up our urban legend in a neat little bow, but it's almost certainly not true. The question that was asked also poses a problem. Is it something just dreamed up to do Rocky Newbies? I mean, this was asked in 1998. Yeah, there's no way that that's a real answer, but it certainly leans into the urban legend. Is that where it ends? Is there no better explanation? Oh, no, we've still got a long way to go. Ok. So I searched through everything the news group had to offer that two message exchange. Was the only reference to the urban legend that's been archived from the news groups between 1994 and 1999. There's one other place I thought to look and that's the even earlier archives of S F Lovers. What the heck is that? I wasn't even familiar with this one until I started looking into it. S F Lovers was the first pre internet email mailing list for science fiction lovers. It began in 1979 between government employees at the Pentagon researchers at Arpa, which is the progenitor of today's DARPA phd S at Stanford and U C L A and other institutions. So a hoity toity email mailing list and as far as I'm aware, it has the earliest documented digital archive of online discussions about Rocky Horror. Oh my God and the urban legend is in there. No, that would be way too convenient. Fuck. It does have the very first internet Flame War about Rocky Horror. And that's about if the movie is better or not with audience participation, that's a topic for another episode because I gotta tell you guys, it is hilarious reading emails where a 19 eighties Pentagon official is telling a scientist at U C L A to go watch it on V H S if they're bothered by the A P so much. So by now, we've at least narrowed it down that someone had heard of this urban legend in 1998. But I was completely running out of leads. I had to wonder at that point if maybe the story has its roots in the stage show. So I modified my searches to no longer be looking for just movie references started including the stage show. But what I found was downright confusing because live right now on the official Rocky horror show website promoting the last tour and the upcoming tour is a section that's specifically for virgins telling them all about coming to see the show and buried in. There is this section Nikki take a look. So it says dress optional while some of us look good in a dress. Some of us don't. You may find that after a show or two, you may like to wear something a little more outrageous stockings, basks, high heels, females may also wear these items. You may even become a diehard fan and start to make the perfect copies of the costume worn during the show for now, just wear something casual. But remember to follow the three step guide of clothes that should never be worn to Rocky as follows. One suits. These are only worn by people who thought they were booking for Phantom of the Opera or Chicago, but dialed the wrong number. Two sandals an or anything remotely connected with the acquisition of British rail rolling stock serial numbers and three sweatshirts with stripes. C next section. Oh, oh my God. Perfect. The answer we have been looking for we jump down and we find in the dancing section that's the next dancing section. We have dancing although not compulsory. You may feel that during the time warp, you are the only person in the audience, not on your feet. Pop quiz. Can you spot the two versions in this photograph? Score one point. If you said the two ladies in the foreground, score a further two points. If you spotted the people sitting down in the second row. However, if you said the guy in the striped shirt, you scored 20 points. See dress section of previous page, Aaron, I think you messed up. There's no photograph in this document, Nikki. It's not a mistake. There's, there's no photograph on the page either. There's no context at all. It appears to be some self referential joke. Oh, what the fuck? That's not it. Is it some dumb joke on the Rocky Horror Show website? It can't be. This is like the 2019 show website. That email list message was from 1998. There has to be something earlier like there, there has to be an answer we have. You'll find it, Aaron, you found it, right? Tell me you found it. Well, back to the way back machine. I went. So now I've got to dig through the history of the website for the theatrical Rocky Horror show in the UK. So of course, I did the site underwent about a half dozen redesigns since the first recorded version from 1998 but we can trace through every single one of them. There's variations of The Virgin Guide that have appeared throughout the entirety of the last 20 years. But here's the thing. The earliest version from 1998 has really similar text warning against the suits and sandals, but the stripes are mysteriously absent, not to mention at all. You're joking. Ok. So you move forward through a few redesigns and you finally encounter an update that was made in 2006 where the joke appears. But this time it has an image associated with it in this picture of what appears to be audience members in a movie theater doing the time warp. There's a guy in the first row who's wearing this hideous white and black stripes sweatshirt. So the joke does have an image to go along with it, but I'm confused. It seems really out of place. It's a picture taken in a movie theater and this is appearing on the official page for the stage show, someone else had to have agreed that this was weird because during a redesign between 2006 and 2009, the image and all of the associated copy about the sweatshirt was removed. Much of the other copy remains including the suit and the sandal stuff. It's gone for almost an entire decade, but it reappears when there's a redesign in 2015, but the images are missing just like they are today. And also the copy slightly changed, some phrases were updated to sound more modern from the 2006 version. And this one matches what's on the website today. The fact that the phrasing for this got updated gave me pause because the sections were removed for so long, right? And then they reappeared later, but they're missing images. So I suspected that maybe the official site wasn't the original source for this either. We still don't have any solid reasoning behind the urban legend, but we do finally have an example of the legend that has nothing to do with the crew member appearing in the movie or that crazy explanation from the news group, right on a hunch that maybe this exact version of the legend on the Rocky horror show site came from somewhere else. I took the exact phrasing from 2006 and narrowed down my search even more. What that revealed was awesome because the exact copy and text appears buried deep in a page on the official time warp dot co dot UK fan club page. The exact same don't wear stripes, dress suggestion from the 2006 Rocky Horror show site followed by the picture of the man in the sweatshirt and the same updated copy that appears on the Rocky Horror Show site today. Here's the kicker though, if you go back through way back machine records, we can trace the original posting of this page all the way back to 1997. That's prior to the first news group post where we have the first documented instance of somebody asking about the urban legend. I am 100% positive that the time warp site is the origin of the urban legend. That is so crazy tracing all that stuff back. It's like digital archaeology. Hold on. But what about the urban legend itself? Why aren't you supposed to wear stripes in the first place? So thinking that I was sure I'd found the earliest reference that I knew existed and seeing as it was the UK Fan Club, I decided to see if I could contact somebody who might actually be able to tell us that very answer. Fortunately, David Freeman, the original Webmaster for the Time Warp Site still maintains it to this day. So I was able to reach out to him a quick note about David. He is a legend in the rocky community in his own right. He was an early London shadow cast member in 1988. His photographs are in Sao Piros Creature of the Night Books. He was the production photographer for the 2015 UK tour and this is all on top of his work for the UK Fan club, hosting their conventions and so much more. So I reached out to David and I told him about the question that we'd been asked and about all that, I'd found digging through the archives and I was so elated when he replied, John read this email that we got from him. Nice detective work. So indeed, in 1994 I wrote our original Virgins Guide for the fan club's web pages. I'm a photographer as well. So I used some of my images from the Prince Charles and Baker Street Cinemas in London to illustrate the guide. I was one of the first members of charming under clothes. So was there most weeks and occasionally would take some shots of the audience as well as the cast. The comment comes from a joke about the guy in the audience and the second photo on the page being a virgin and the fact that he wasn't not dressed up instead he was wearing a stripy jumper that stood out a mile in the photo. I referenced it in the first section as something you should never wear at Rocky. So I have accidentally started an urban myth when all I intended was a joke. Rocky horror company in several newspapers slash websites have since taken my guide R H cope with permission others without and paraphrased it when needed this guide itself got updated to reflect what was allowed in the cinema. Rocky Horror picture show versus the live stage show, Rocky Horror show participation. I eat no water, rice, et cetera as it is dangerous for the electricals and performers at the stage show. After your email. I'm rather proud to be the creator of this Freeman's monster myth due to my slightly warped sense of humor. Holy shit, you found it. I'm pretty damn sure that's the origin. In 1994 David Freeman posted a virgin guide for the UK fan club. It was an in joke accompanying an image taken at the charming and underclothes show in the early nineties at either the Prince Charles or the Baker Street Cinema in London. Newcomers to the community would find the joke online or it was repeated by the community to troll those newcomers telling them you can find it online. The official Rocky Horror Show cribbed the Time Warp site in the early two thousands and that exposed a whole new group of people to the joke, but it lost a lot of the context where it shifted and was removed. But eventually you can still find it today on the Rocky Horror Show site. From there. Some enterprising writer for college fashion picked up the don't wear a striped sweatshirt myth and combined it with the separate unsubstantiated urban legend of the crew member that was visible during time Warp, which not true and formed a super urban legend that's verbatim in the 2011 college fashion article. That article was used by a source in the 2015 Wicky Howe article and it's been repeated ever since using each other as a form of self referential citation which obstructs the original source. So if anybody has a source prior to 1994. I'd love to hear it, but I'm pretty sure we got to the bottom of this one. Yes, totally. I mean, unless David was just trolling you, you know, since you're so new to the community on the grand scale and all what? No, why would you say that? And that really is all the time that we have today for. Nicky asks a question. Wait, no, if you have a show or community question too, all you have to do is go to our website rocky talky podcast dot com and fill out the form in the contact us section. I'll ask it on the show and we can all learn about it together in all seriousness. I absolutely love this question. I love doing the research. Digital archaeology is a fascinating way to explore the Rocky community and an extra big massive. Thank you to David Freeman and everyone at the time. Warp UK fan club and, or our producer Meg who helped in some of the more tedious Googling and of course, big. Thank you to the asshole in New England who sent me on this wild goose chase. Thanks a lot fucker. And with that, that's all for this week before we go. We just want to thank everyone who took the time to rate and review our show on itunes, Spotify or soundcloud and everyone who watched us on youtube. We love you guys and we really appreciate all of your support. We are on Facebook, Instagram and tiktok, all at Rocky Talkie podcast cast. So if you liked us, please go check us out there and please come right to us. We want to hear about all the cool rocky stuff you and your cast are working on and we want to share it on our show. If you're working on a rocky related project you're excited about or if your cast is doing a show and you want to spread the word. Go to our website rocky talkie podcast dot com. We can't wait to hear from you. We'll see you guys next Thursday. Bye bye. See you. You really are new to the community. Yeah, you've never been here before. Go fuck yourself. Oh, I plan on it and stopping recording. Yeah, that's done.