TUE., OCT. 24, 2006

Inhibition works for a lot of people. From a purely Darwinistic perspective, it’s best not to stand out. The tallest blade of grass gets cut first; the nail that sticks up gets hammered down … that type of thing. Inhibition is great for survival, but maybe not so good for living. How comfortable can it be to walk through life with the puppet hand of societal conformity stuck up your butt – even if it is an integral part of a performance-art piece you’re doing at the Vortex? The truth is, if you live with something long enough, regardless of how ridiculous it is, it begins to seem perfectly sensible. More often than not, familiarity breeds contentment, not contempt. Remember when your mom said the home styled rat-tail mullet she gave you looked cute but you went to Supercuts anyway and got a fade with frosted tips? Remember how it broke her heart? All you were trying to do was just “be you,” but she insisted you were trying to draw attention to yourself. Nobody likes a showoff. Then again, without showoffs, nobody would ever get shown anything. Every once in a while it’s good to shake things up, and no one is more qualified for thing shaking than your common, run of the mill exhibitionist. Thanks to recent technological advances, exhibitionism has reached a whole new scale. Nowadays we have exhibitionism for the sake of exhibitionism. Here’s a brief, inexact history of modern exhibitionism: Dennis Rodman begat the Soy Bomb guy who begat Girls Gone Wild, Girls Gone Wild 2, Girls Gone Wild “Orgy Island”, Girls Gone Wild “Doggie Style”, and of course Janet Jackson at the ’04 Superbowl (where one nipple begat a whole Beatle). “But wait,” you say, “There had to be something before Dennis Rodman.” Correct, and that something was the 1975 cult classic, The Rocky Horror Picture Show. To date the RHPS has spawned several generations of first-class exhibitionists. All, like the Worm himself, share an unhealthy fondness for black fishnet. Regardless, if you want to get comfortable with getting your freak on, The Rocky Horror is a good set of training wheels, and through Halloween the thezzies down at Zach Scott are putting on a live production of Rocky that competes with the original. Pretty much everybody dresses up for Rocky anyway, but if you needed any extra incentive, the Halloween night performance is billed as a costume party. So what’s it gonna be, fishnet or puppet hand?