From Locust Ridge to Transsexual Transylvania: Legends Lost

She wore a wig. He wore fishnet stockings and a corset. They both wore high heels. Two of the greats left us this week.

Yesterday’s upsetting news that Tim Curry, whose indelible turn as the mad cross-dressing scientist Frank-N-Furter in 1975’s Rocky Horror Picture Show gave the world so much subversive joy, had at long last beamed up to Transsexual Transylvania, left many an outsider in tears.

The world was already grieving; on Tuesday, we learned that Dolly Parton had succumbed to a brief battle with cancer. There was an avalanche of appreciation for Parton, but both performers were, if I may use an overused word, iconic.

When Parton died, a hyperbolic headline flashed across my screen that said, “Apocalypse draws near as last remaining universally beloved human being passes away.”

That seems about right. I do not feel qualified to fully appreciate Parton as a country performer because I do not particularly like country music. But I liked Parton. A lot. 

Joe met Dolly in the '80s. He knew someone who knew her, and they were invited onto her tour bus before a concert. She was decked out to the nines and about to go onstage, but she shifted the focus to Joe and told him he had nice hair. Quintessential Dolly. (Quintessential Joe.)

She stood for a distinctive blend of rhinestones and grit, for kindness, and for being oneself. A philanthropist who never forgot her Smoky Mountain roots, she famously championed those who were different, especially members of the LGBTQ community. 

She would have fully embraced Tim Curry, whose indelible portrayal of a sinister transvestite inspired so many misfits.

Curry, a young British actor in the '70s, risked career suicide by taking on what would become his signature role. At a time when drag queens and transsexuals were unheard of in mainstream culture, and when, as Guy Trebay wrote in The New York Times, "Sylvester Stallone, Robert Redford and Burt Reynolds were the reigning box-office champs," he refused to portray the character as a caricature or a victim, instead imbuing this fantastic freak with power and agency. 

From his campy, vaguely threatening signature entrance, as he descended in an old-fashioned cage elevator, to his weepy rendering of "I'm Going Home" just before his character's demise, Curry-as-Frank-N-Furter slayed. 

Curry’s Frank-N-Furter meant so much to me and others growing up in the ‘70s, when The Rocky Horror Picture Show played at The Heights Art Theater on Coventry Road, hippie central in Cleveland. Here was a dazzling vision of how to completely and utterly own being different at a time when I struggled with being different myself.

Dolly Parton. Tim Curry. They were singular, iconic talents whose uniqueness inspired everyone who beheld them. I like to think they exchanged appreciative nods when they met this week at the pearly gates.

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