Well, that's it. We did 8 shows of The Rocky Horror Show on Broadway. It was just good. It was a great experience. It was a trip into a whole different world, made odd and wonderful by the fact that it's a world we supposedly live in. We played on Broadway forever. We do live shows all the time, and yet, everything was different. There's a backstage full of people and those people are actors, so they're warming up and "preparing" and it always seems to me like they're kidding. But, they're not. Not at all. They really do all this stuff. You know, the stuff you see in movies. We just put our suits on and go on stage. They do all this other stuff, singing, screaming, stretching - you know, the stuff you would do if you were a kid pretending to be an actor.

And it all works. Everyone in the cast was really wonderful, and we got to watch them. We would sit on our little "narrator's perch" and watch parts of the show every night while waiting to go on. I guess all the warming up pays off, because everyone was good. It was great to watch "Brad" hit it right down the middle (isn't it sexy when I use sports metaphors?). He is just dead on every show, every move. And it's great to watch Frank (The Tim Curry part), because Terry really works the crowd. He runs the room. Brad is completely in the story, and Terry is completely in the crowd and it works great. Sebastian Bach (Riff Raff) is a rock star. A real, hair, rock star, with more slang and handshakes than most other people from Jersey. And he has a great voice. And with him playing it rock star, it does a whole other complicated thing to the experience. It's pretty great. And seeing whole families coming to the show over and over (some seeing 4 shows in a weekend) was wonderful. This pro-sex, pro-life (not in the anti- abortion sense, of course) life show, that's REALLY sex oriented being enjoyed by young kids, seemed great to me. Just great. I liked whole families sitting watching real hardcore sex jokes. It seemed so healthy and cool.

By the time we were done there were particular P&T heckles, and I liked that. We got a wonderful reaction. When the lights came up on us, they went crazy, just nuts. And cutting out the heckler's tongue seemed to just kill. It's so odd, because, I guess we're on about 20 minutes. And the rest of the time, we're being lead around backstage, or just sitting in our dressing room doing card tricks. It's so different from our show. In our show, we walk on stage, and for over 2 hours, we're in charge of everything and I just lose myself there. I'm working hard; nothing else is on my mind. I'm trying to get these really hard ideas across to a lot of people. But, here, everyone else was doing all the work. I felt so separate from the show going on. I felt I was floating over the top of it. And the feeling after the show, was like the feeling of having gone to visit friends for a nice evening. I felt good after the show, but not like I'd done a show. It had nothing to do with the feeling of doing a show for me. Nothing. And I guess this is real showbiz. I don't think actors ever get the feeling from a show, that I get doing the P&T show. They hold on to things that are more personal. I mean they go from show to show. Teller and I put in new bits, but it's always the same show. It's always us. And we don't have to separate. I can never feel, "well, I was good, but the show wasn't" - we are the show. And these people aren't the show. You can imagine them all being great in a bad show. That's weird. That's very odd.

I got to walk out on stage in a corset and stockings and the whole thing. It was a BIG laugh. A huge reaction. We did the Fire 42 and we did it perfectly every night. We did every trick with no mistakes. But, when I walked out on stage and got that huge laugh and then got big laughs on everything we did and huge applause, I was still very separate. I felt like I was writing for myself, but separate for myself, "let's put the big guy in a corset and have them do a homo fire-eating." It's all ideas that are going to play wonderfully and people are going to like it, people even love it, but it's not really what we do. I would come out and get this big reaction and I could feel myself doing "timing" things that I never do, and posing and working the laugh. I never really do that in our show, I'm doing ideas, not gags. And I'd look at Teller doing the Fire and he's playing it really big, and this theater is smaller than the theaters we play, but it ain't P&T, it was like we were doing some Milton Berle show or something. But, it was just right for this show, and we did our job and did it well. I loved watching these real pros work and I loved being backstage at a real Broadway show. At the end of the show, for the curtain call, I tried to get into the spirit of the Time Warp, but, as a friend said, I looked like "a wrestler at a square dance." Yup, in my head, I may be decadent sexually, but I look like a farmer.

So, we spent a week having a guy that looks like a farmer get into drag and get big laughs and I loved it. I just loved every minute of it. It seemed like a vacation from being myself. That's good. And a chance for a couple of Broadway stars to see what it feels like to be a Broadway star.

It's just a jump to the left.

Penn

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