Confessions of a Teenage Rocky Rat

How it starts...

I have always been a bit of a different sort of person. I can be painfully shy and introverted, yet I am a somewhat natural performer, and through that, I can play outgoing and vivacious if I am so inclined. I'm a people-pleaser.  I have been through a lot in my 35 years on planet Earth. A lot of BAD stuff, and some not so shitty. Not all of which I will delve into in this record, but all of which brought me to the point I had reached at the age of 16. The age when I was first introduced to my friend Kasey, who would in turn introduce me to Rocky.

I was not what you would call a popular kid in school. I was a geek. I was Bi. I was an ex-band-kid and a drama-freak. But that isn't to say that I didn't have friends. I seemed to be able to find the others like me, and form coalitions. Outsiders united into our own social construct. The other queers and D&D nerds, kids who dreamed of what we now call Steampunk, alternatives, Goths, Punks, and a few druggies. All of us on the fringe. But we liked it that way.

Kasey was a little different. She was a little more mainstream in school. She had an aura of a girl you didn't really want to mess with, but she knew some of the cool kids, and they treated her for the most part with respect. She was a year ahead of me. A Senior. She was worldly (she'd lived in Vegas, baby!), and her mom had a good-paying job. She had a nice house, access to a car, and her mom's bank card. And, man, did she know how to get people to like her. I said before that I am a people-pleaser; Kasey was a people collector. And one day, in our shared English class, she collected me.

I can't recall exactly what she said that first day, although I am pretty sure it was something about how moronic the rest of our class was. I was shocked at her candor, and how freely she spoke. I laughed along with her, thinking how much I wished I could be like her. Just speak what I thought as though it didn't matter who heard, or what they thought, or who's feelings might get hurt. But that was all it took. Our friendship snowballed so fast, I can only remember snippets now. Outings we took, skipped classes, driving adventures- lots of driving adventures, and sleep-overs. Being friends with Kasey was a world I had only had a small taste of, the year before when I dated a 19 year old and then broke his heart (another story), and with everything screwed up at home, and my own demons, it was a very welcome world.

She never talked down to me, even though, in my mind she was superior. She showed me some of the "good stuff" in life I had missed, up to that point (like Ben & Jerry's- Cool Brittainia. It was a REVELATION!). She was a fellow Blockhead, which is rare enough now, but back in the mid -late 90's, she may as well have been a unicorn. Better yet, she was a Jon Girl, the perfect mate to my Jordan Girl tendencies. She loved Broadway musicals. We breathed Evita, Les Mis, and Phantom. We drank together, smoked together, and she took me to some of the scariest Ghetto-parties I have EVER been to. She was a wild-child and my broken-down spirit from having grown up too fast was dying for a little of that rebel life. She was "Tha Bomb"!

One night, as we sat in her room watching The Craft and chowing on our weekly pint, washed down with regular Coke for me, and Diet for her, she said, "I know what we are doing for Prom night!"

"Prom night? I didn't know *we* were going."

"Well, *we* are. So you better get your mom and dad to say yes. But we are. And we are going to the Rocky Horror Picture Show after! There's this theater in Portland where they show it every Saturday at Midnight and people dress up in costumes from the movie, and lingerie and shit, and it is supposed to be AWESOME! So that's what we're doing!"

Rocky-Hummah-What-a-Huh? I had no idea what that was. But I wasn't going to let her know that.

"Cool. So do we have to dress up, too?"

"You bet, Bitch! Watch it again this week and figure out who you want to dress up as. I don't know if I'll dress as a character or not yet, I just want to be slutty as hell!" , she laughed.