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and back, captured by someone else in another time, is almost too perfect. If I saw it in a movie, I’d never believe it. Good thing this isn’t a movie.
    “…romeo, romeo, lima, yankee, november, oscar, oscar, zulu…end of message end of t—”

when you dressed up sharp and you felt all right
           This started out as a one-paragraph intro to a rant about how much I didn’t want MTV to remake The Rocky Horror Picture Show . After a few minutes in my text editor, though, it became a lot more fun to just tell this story.
    A few days after my sixteenth birthday, I lost my Rocky Horror virginity in a shitty little duplex theater in Van Nuys, California.
    I’d wanted to see Rocky since I was ten or eleven and my mom drove us past a marquee advertising a midnight showing every Saturday. My parents couldn’t—or wouldn’t—tell me what it was about (my memory is hazy on that specific detail) but anything that happened at midnight on a Saturday sounded great to me. The creepy lettering and word “horror” in the title only increased my antici… pation .
    A week or so after my birthday, my best friend Darin and I were at a place on Van Nuys Boulevard called Cafe 50s. These 1950s-themed cafes were everywhere in the ’80s (some blame Stand by Me and Back to the Future for their popularity) but this particular one was my favorite. Though I’d never actually been to a diner in the ’50s, this one felt the most authentic…which means that it copied what I’d seen in movies better than anywhere else and had Del Shannon’s “Runaway” on the jukebox.
    We gorged ourselves on patty melts and chocolate shakes and vanilla Cokes and extra fries while we talked about all the things that seemed important after you discovered girls, like how to actually, you know, talk to one…thereby instantly convincing her to take an unforgettable trip with you to second base for sixteen seconds of commitment-free passion. We argued about the time travel paradoxes in Back to the Future , confirmed that quoting Monty Python to the 24-year-old waitress is not the best way to get a stand-up double when you’re sixteen (or ever), and admitted that Michael Keaton was a far better Batman than we’d been prepared to give him credit for. In other words, it was a Saturday night like any other, and as midnight (and the restaurant’s closing) drew near, our attention turned toward that most important of teenage activities: doing anything but going home.
    “Have you ever seen Rocky ?” Darin asked.
    “God, I hate that stupid movie,” I said. “And the sequels are even worse. It’s like, we know he’s going to win, so why waste our time wi—”
    “I mean Rocky Horror ,” he said.
    “Oh,” I said. “No, but I’ve always wanted to.”
    “It’s playing across the street at midnight. We should go.” As quickly as I’d gotten excited to see it, I lost my nerve. Through the pre-Snopes grapevine that gave teens of my generation the truth about Mikey from Life cereal (“Ohmygod he totally died after eating Pop Rocks and drinking Coke”), I’d heard about Rocky virgins being deflowered in horrifying ways (“Ohmygod this guy I know went to see it in Santa Monica and they made him take off his clothes and wrote VIRGIN on his chest in lipstick!”).
    “Don’t they do horrible things to people who haven’t seen it?” I asked in my most nonchalant voice, grateful that it didn’t obviously crack.
    “Not really,” he said, “but if you’re worried about it, we won’t say anything.”
    “Okay,” I said, my excitement returning. He was two years older than me, and wise in the ways of the world. I knew I could count on him to keep my secret shame between us.
    The waitress came back by our table. “Can I get you guys anything else?”
    Before I could demand a shrubbery and a phone number, with equal chances of getting either, Darin asked, “Could we get some slightly burnt white toast?”
    The waitress and I gave him the