The Time Warp... Again...

Last night I hiked over to in the snow, determined at last to see "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" and find out what all the fuss is about.

With a lipstick V on my face (for “virgin,” someone who hasn’t seen the movie before) and my Audience Participation Kit, courtesy of Red River, in my lap, I pondered the possible uses of a squirt gun, a flashlight, a bell, a strip of toilet paper and a bag of croutons. At the appropriate moment in the movie, someone in the audience called out, “Everybody into the aisle for the ‘Time Warp.’ ”

That jump to the left and step to the right was actually the third time warp I’d done this weekend, and it wouldn’t be the last.

After the on Saturday, I stopped by the Concord Arts Market in , where it was Steampunk day. For those of you who are, well, around my age and are inclined to think a steampunk is something you use to clean your iron, I’ll try to explain. Steampunk, as far as I can make out, is an artistic style that mixes Victorian fashions and gadgets in ways that those items were never intended to be mixed by their inventors. Aviator goggles might adorn a velvet top-hat, or feathers might sprout from a broken pocket watch. You’ll see lots of copper and brass, lots of gears and dials and cranks … and that’s just what folks are wearing over their frock-coats, lace collars and high-buttoned boots while riding their tall bicycles. I won’t pretend I’m qualified to discuss the deeper aesthetic and sociological meaning behind all this. You can Google it if you really want to know.

In my calf-length, velvet-collared coat (a find) and a bowler hat, I fit in fairly well. Some exhibitors’ outfits were more entertaining than their wares, but my greatest shopping score was at the tent of the Multicultural Family Center. Khina the quilter, clad in a perfectly conventional knitted wool hat, was kind enough to let me take her picture with her marvelous creation. As I carried it around the square, I was the envy of the exhibitors, many of whom said they’d had their eye on the same piece.

The most amusing tent, called Mrs. Manseau’s Emporium of the Eclectic, wasn’t actually selling anything. She had a table full of bits and pieces — watch faces, old keys, buttons, hex nuts — and was demonstrating to visitors what hip-looking jewelry can be assembled from the stuff at the bottom of your grandmother’s junk drawer. She had also set up a photo booth to look like the bridge of a steamship, and she took my picture as I steered it across the square, no doubt on a collision course with the tent full of cloth purses.

Later that afternoon, as we all know, the entire East Coast slipped through a wormhole into December. It was our second snowfall of the week, and the first one had taken me completely by surprise Thursday night. I stepped out the front door with my umbrella, headed over to to hear Archer Mayer read from his new book, "Tag Man," in which the hero is a guy who likes to break into houses just to mess with the residents’ heads. I popped the umbrella open, and it wasn’t until the corner of Monroe and State that I began to wonder whether the stuff falling on it was, in fact, rain. It looked suspiciously white, and it wasn’t falling at the speed raindrops ought to fall. Not until I crossed State to start downhill toward South Main did I finally believe the evidence of my senses.

Okay, so it had snowed a few inches before . It melted the next day. Another storm coming? I didn’t think it would be any more sincere than Thursday’s. When a friend in Maryland posted on Facebook that they were expecting five inches, I started to wonder. However, I’d made up my mind to see Rocky Horror before it left town, so I set out, undaunted by the raging nor’easter. I figured at least there wouldn’t be much of a crowd in that weather, but I was actually put on a waiting list and sat in the lobby watching my fellow moviegoers arrive. These people were, shall we say, not dressed for the weather (except for the ones wearing trash bag ponchos). Feather boas were the warmest thing most had on. A man in a bustier ran in with snowflakes melting on his bare shoulders. And I truly marveled at the cojones on the guy who walked in wearing high heeled sandals over bare feet. Not, that is, that I looked at his cojones… I mean, there was a leather bikini… no, really, I was looking at the shoes…

Well, there were a few of these die-hards for whom the weather was too much, and I got a seat. As I marveled at Tim Curry’s dance moves — I hadn’t known the man could dance — I strained to hear the inane dialog as it was augmented by the much cleverer (and louder) audience replies. Oh, and those croutons were supposed to be toast. Unable to get the bag opened in time for Curry to call for “a toast,” I ended up chucking the whole thing in a random direction while crumbs from the non-virgins’ toasts went down my shirt.

It was back into the time machine for Sunday morning, when was celebrating the 400th anniversary of the printing of the King James Bible by reading the lessons from that version and taking much of the Eucharist from the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, complete with Shakespearean grammar and those idyosincratick spellynges by whiche thou knowest thatte thou art outsyde of thisse thine own centurie. Snaking my way home along half-shoveled sidewalks where green leaves lay encased in slush ice, still brushing bits of bad pun out of my hair, I was hardly thrown off my stride by the five-foot diameter snow jack o’lantern on State Street. Yeah, another time warp. Whatever.