“Rocky Horror” is a fixture at Whitman College and at schools all around the US (or so I’m told). I remember my first time going to a “Rocky Horror” show: the scandal, the promiscuity, the whole shebang. I didn’t understand what was being said in the movie or what was going on but I realized that this was ok, maybe I didn’t have to understand, maybe the confusion was part of the experience. As I came to that realization, I met Dee and Edith. They were two former Whitman students from the class of ‘69 (nice) and as bemused as I, but when I asked them what they thought of the show, they only had four words for me:

 “Too lame, too tame.” 

I was taken aback but without any further prompting, Dee and Edith launched into an explanation of how “Rocky” used to be.

“Well first of all we didn’t have the movie in the background, we just chanted the lines from memories while the people on stage performed it” 

“And the story was completely different, for starters there was this king and a prophecy….” 

“So anyway, it turned out it was his mother the whole time!!”

… Now, I did not tell Dee and Edith that what they were explaining was in fact not “Rocky Horror” but rather, “Oedipus Rex” (I thought it would be rude to correct them so far into the story). But it dawned on me that “Rocky Horror” wasn’t released until 1975, which was six years after they had graduated. Perhaps “Rocky Horror” was “too lame, too tame” compared to a Greek tragedy about prophecies, violence and incest– but what isn’t? Seems to me that maybe Edith and Dee just want to have something to complain about.