Little Bursts of Independence

Achieving independence does not always involve breaking away from another country, speechifying, or mortal combat. My path to sovereignty involved a trio of transitions marked by courage, rebellion, and "a sweet transvestite from transexual Transylvania."

When I was first granted the freedom to cross the street without adult supervision as a young boy, it blew my mind.

Even in that innocent and trouble-free time of life, my overprotective Jewish mother planted paranoia and overcautiousness in my psyche. “If you do not look both ways three times, then God Forbid, something awful might happen.” She said "God Forbid" three times.

My parents were concerned that I had become a fearful person when I reached late high school. I can’t imagine how.

The Heights Art Theater in 1941
(decades before Rocky Horror)

But in 11th grade, at the Heights Art Theater at the top of Coventry Village, the epicenter of Cleveland’s hippie counterculture, there was a monthly midnight movie, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, to which I was inexplicably drawn. It's hard to believe it now, but in 1978, RHPS was perceived as risqué—even deviant— entertainment.

Looking both ways once, twice, and thrice, I crossed Coventry Road with other artsy friends. I embraced the celluloid rite of passage with wonder and abandon in my junior and senior high school years. I am not sure I fully grasped what a “sweet transvestite” was or the deviant subculture the great Tim Curry embodied. I just realized, implicitly, that I somehow belonged in this world. As I threw rice at the screen and shouted, “Damnit, Janet,” I was tiptoeing into a strange, fantastic reality outside of restrictive, square Shaker Heights. 

By college, my risk-taking took the form of smoking marijuana and consuming the occasional magic mushroom with my roommates. I combined smoking pot and attending Rocky Horror, but seeing a midnight movie in a Yale lecture hall lacked the louche atmosphere of the Heights Art Theatre back home. 

 

By young adulthood, rebellion came to the fore as the naughty cousin of mere independence.

This July 4th, I can see that these youthful turning points were my own declarations of independence. It did not take a musket or a militia to achieve that independence, but I did need a modicum of nerve to cross over to the other side. Even at my present age, I celebrate my independence—from overprotective parents, societal norms, and the peer pressures of youth.