Rocky Horror Nail Show Part 3 - Loki's Lacquer Science Fiction Double Feature Collection

At last, we come to the last part of my little showcase for Loki's Lacquer's Rocky Horror themed indie polish collection, Science Fiction Double Feature. I've only got two polishes left to show you, so I'll just have to make up the extra space with extra anecdotes - which I'm sure you'll all just HATE.

Time Warp and Science Fiction Double Feature

First up today is Time Warp, a cacophony of glitters of all shapes, sizes and colours in a colour shifting base. It's designed to capture the swirling, chaotic nonsense of the scene where poor suburban Brad and Janet stumble into a Transylvanian dance party.

This polish is absolutely CRAMMED full of glitter. These swatches are all one dabbed coat over plain black, and you can see how much coverage the colour shifting pigment gives even in between all the glitters.

I wasn't sure if I would really like this polish - it's pretty fucking over the top. I'm pretty sure Tara put in at least a little bit of every single glitter she actually owns! But in the end the fact that it's so over the top is what I like about it. It's not stylish or sexy, but it's ENORMOUS fun, and I really dig it.

It's just a jump to the left...

The Transylvanians, as I said in the last post, act as the Greek Chorus in most Rocky Horror callback shows. This is the role I played during my run, and it was our job to keep up the callbacks in between all the lines, help out with the songs, and get the audience as pumped as possible. It was a role that suited me perfectly - there was a structure we had to work within in the form of the callback script, but a lot of the time we were free to improvise in between. For example, one night a fellow Transylvanian and I basically bullied some boys who had shown up to the Star Wars trailer into staying for the show, with the promise of girls making out. There wasn't actually any girls making out in the show as such, so during Toucha Toucha Me, we decided to wade into the audience right in front of the boys we'd lured in and grab each other very inappropriately. We must have impressed them, because I saw those same boys at least twice at other shows afterwards. On other occasions we would simply shout out new callbacks, if we thought of a line we thought was funnier, and while it didn't always work the rush I got when I shouted something that popped into my head and the entire audience cracked up was just incomparable. Because I'd be shouting these lines from the sides of the cinema, in relative darkness, I felt like I really got the best of all possible parts of performing. If I thought of something funny and pulled it off, I could bask in my success. But if I tried a new line and it fell flat, I could just step back a little bit and pretend I'd said nothing, and the show would swirl on around me. I never went for any of the main roles for just this reason - the idea of being stuck centre stage if I didn't pull something off absolutely terrified me. Sure, I'd get more applause - but it didn't seem worth it to someone as essentially shy as me. On the upside, I can do the Time Warp like nobody's business.

The last polish in the collection is Science Fiction Double Feature, a black jelly with lots of black, red, and white dots in various sizes. This one is inspired by the iconic opening credits, where a set of disembodied red painted lips sing the opening song. (Fun fact: these lips in fact belong to Patricia Quinn, who played Magenta in the movie.)

Science Fiction Double Feature the polish is, unfortunately, kind of dissapointing. I love the colour scheme, and I wanted to love this polish, I really did, but I found it really difficult to use, even accounting for the inherent problems involved in polishes with large dots.

I tipped it upside down for about fifteen minutes before using it, so I didn't have much trouble retrieving the dots. The problem was more getting the whole thing to lie flat - I found the base too transparent to use without putting black underneath, but once I'd put black under it the black dots were almost invisible, but still clogged up the base. 

The base also seemed a lot thinner than is usual for Loki's Lacquer, which didn't help when trying to get it to sit flat and smooth. Mind you, I have a GREAT MANY polishes Loki's Lacquer and this is the first time I've ever just straight up not liked one of them, so they've still got an incredible track record in my books.

So that's the entire Science Fiction Double Feature assortment. It's a really great collection overall - there's an enormous variety for a collection built around a central theme, and I'd be shocked if almost anyone couldn't find something for them in there. For my money, these are the standout must haves!

274306

Even Smiling Makes My Face Ache

Strongman

And finally, I seem to remember promising you all some anecdotes from my adventures with the Rocky Horror callback cast in Paris!

Right at the end of my run with the local Rocky Horror cast, I got the chance to go and visit a friend in England for a couple of weeks. Because Europe is awesome and you can get anywhere from everywhere, we took a weekend trip to Paris. I only had two things on my to do list for Paris (that trip); visit the Louvre, and see a local production of Rocky Horror Picture Show. The Louvre was easy enough to arrange, but I had to do some digging to track down the local Rocky folk. Luckily, it turned out there was a weekly show running at the time, so my friend and I found the cinema in the winding back streets of what was apparently a very arty district, and settled in to see some local culture. 

Very quickly, I realised there was something I hadn't accounted for; a lot of the callbacks were in French, and my French is very VERY poor. I'd been getting by at restaurants and shops with lots of pointing and goodwill, but there was no way I could keep up with the rapid fire colloquial Parisian French. My friend DID speak excellent French, however, and agreed to translate for me as much as he could so I could keep up. Unfortunately, he was also extremely conservative, and I don't think he had really considered what going to see Rocky Horror in Paris would entail. You see, the humour in Rocky Horror is pretty fucking low brow at the best of times; the callbacks take it one step lowers. But the French...hoo boy, they just get right down in the gutter and roll the fuck around. My poor friend got redder and redder and less and less willing to translate, until there came a point where the person playing Doctor Scott mimed putting his fist inside a teddy bear, and my friend finally put his foot down and refused to translate any further. It was alright though, I got the general gist of that joke anyway. 

After the show, I immediately went to the stage door and started attempting to talk my way in to see the cast. However, as I said, my French was very poor, and the person I was attempting to negotiate with either spoke very poor English or wasn't interested in speaking anything but French to me. A very friendly American girl saw my appalling attempts to communicate, and very kindly stepped in. As soon as she made it clear to them that I was in a Rocky cast in Sydney, the whole situation changed. I was whisked backstage with only enough time to grab my friend, and suddenly surrounded by half dressed French people all asking me questions in varying degrees of understandable English at once. The lovely American girl had tagged along, and became my de facto translator for the night. It turned out that she was actually one Ruth Fink-Winters, who was (and still is) head of the official international Rocky Horror Fan Club. I had no idea who she was at the time, but when I got home and told my Rocky friends about it, they were suitably impressed.

Once they'd packed up their props and costumes, the cast somehow talked me, my friend, and Ruth into going drinking with them at a local cafe. My poor friend wasn't really on board for the whole experience, but I dragged him along all the same. The language barrier did prove a little problematic on occasion. There was one point where the whole cast was laughing at the guy who had played Eddie, and pointing at his ponytail and laughing again, so I asked Ruth to try and fill me in. The joke apparently revolved around a colloquial term for ponytail being the same as a colloquial word for penis, but I never did really get the details of that one. Some things, however, came across astonishingly clearly - that was the night I learned that French boys really DO have absolutely no shame when it comes to hitting on a woman over and over and over until she relents or flat out tells him to get fucked.

By the time I decided I really should be leaving, my friend had already gone back to our hostel, but I was pretty confident I could make the whole taxi business happen, so I wandered outside to flag one down. The cast had warned me that getting a taxi after midnight in Paris simply wasn't going to happen, but I'd waved their concerns away. I'd only been standing by myself for maybe ten minutes, before a group of guys came wandering up. Being a girl alone on the street in the middle of the night, I was pretty wary. But they were very polite, and pleasant, and asked to borrow my lighter. I made them give me a cigarette first, and everyone was happy. And then they started trying to convince me to come to a club with them. I protested it was really far too late, and that I couldn't possibly, and they just. kept. trying. You're too pretty to go home yet, they said. You should come with us, we'll take care of you, they said. Not knowing that if I'd just put my foot down they would have backed off, I fled back to the cafe and happily some of the Rocky people were still there, and offered me a ride back to the hostel. (After laughing at me for dismissing their advice re: taxis).

That turned out to be a ride even more confronting than the show had been. The driver kept his eyes on the road maybe 20 per cent of the time despite navigating at VERY high speeds for such winding roads, and the rest of the time he was turned around trying to talk to me in the back seat. I jokingly tried to get him to quit trying to flirt with me and watch the road by remarking that he wasn't very subtle, but he insisted he didn't know this word, subtle. Once he noticed I had a pierced tongue, his English mysteriously improved enormously. "Oh, I see your tongue!" he announced. "I hear those are excellent for blow jobs!"  "You know the English for blow job, but not subtle?" I snapped, and he replied simply, "We are French, they teach us the important things in school!" For all his trying, I did end up back at the hostel with my friend, and despite his appalling driving, I ended up back there in one piece.

And with that, I'm going to bring my Rocky Horror coverage on this blog to an end - for the moment ;) If you want to know more about how being in the Rocky Horror show affected me on a personal level, I've got a great big thinky piece on the subject up at Already Pretty right now.

Science Fiction Double Feature Collection are available now from the Loki's Lacquer Etsy store. International shipping is available on request.