Glee.

Right. Am pissed. Well, sort of. No, am not pissed. Something involving tautology.

The resident lunatics are behind me and they are pissed. And we've been watching Rocky Horror (surreal in the extreme) followed by Once More With Feeling and Tabula Rasa. And Flash Gordon, which is so bad it's good.

But irrelevant.

We went Google searching for Anthony Stewart Head as Frank 'N' Furter. We found pics. We squeed. We are now in search of mp3 files of him singing Sweet Transvestite, and we do know they exist. They do. Where? Anyone?

I don't know why there's so much debauchery going on.

Crossposted to hathy_col and purplerainbow. Sort of.

Say you're happy now... once more with feeling!

“Blue moon, you saw me standing alone...”

I said, “Life should be a musical.” I was right.

Admittedly, not the most auspicious start ever. Pedar and Colleen’s directions were not a match made in heaven; one or two frantic websearches later, he declared we’d find our way. We did. I was impressed.

Colleen, Enid and Hannah met us at the door, and there was much of the squee. I introduced Nupur and Joshua, who seemed a little shy, understandably. We’d only been sitting there for about five minutes when Clare phoned, having made the journey from Arrowe Park in about half the expected time. I left Enid with Nupur and Joshua – Hannah, Colleen and I made the rambling journey across Ormskirk to retrieve Clare. We skipped over park and hill, singing and talking, and fetched up at Ormskirk station in typically manic fashion. Clare seemed… well, bemused, but she got into the swing of it eventually.

We went home via the pizza shop – two margarita, saves arguments – and made appreciative noises over Colleen’s brand new mp3 player, which is blue and cute and Hannah and I shared headphones to sing along to Everybody’s Changing with the requisite swaying from side to side. Clare threatened to disown us both, but happily that didn’t transpire.

With a stop for milk on the way, we began the party in earnest with the pizza and the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I’d seen it in passing a few years ago – Hannah hadn’t seen it, and everyone else had – and we sat back and enjoyed the weirdness.

Because it is weird. Very weird. I still want very much to see the stage show, which sounds like it’d be much better than the film. We watched it in quiet disbelief, did the Time Warp (possibly the first indicator to the little ones that life is a strange, strange thing) and sang along to Sweet Transvestite.

Stand-out moment, however, was provided by Hannah, who stared at the screen with a thoughtful expression and asked: “Has he just killed Meatloaf?”

Poor Hannah. It was a difficult night for her all round.

After it was over, I stood up and made a proposal. Actually, three, and I lost the effect because I kept on changing my mind in the middle, but I began with: “Rocky Horror – surreal.”

General consensus – yeah.

Secondly – “Once More With Feeling!”

Agreement.

Thirdly – “Alcohol!”

Vociferous agreement. So we did drinks, vodka and orange for most and that strange apple vodka stuff Hannah brought back from Spain for me (tastes like nail varnish remover) and gave heavily diluted versions of the same to the kids. I don’t think they really drank theirs; all that comes later, anyway.

The video player was temperamental and making it work involved the invocation of several minor deities. I took the opportunity to take a peek at Colleen’s room, which is a shrine to geekdom. I love it. She had that Charlie’s Angels pic of SG-1 on the wall, which I have always liked.

The video worked eventually, although we realised we couldn’t pause or stop it. So that mean just watching it, me wrapped up with Hannah on the sofa and everyone else draped close by. Life should be a musical, I think. We all knew the words to all the songs, and Hannah got floopy at Under Your Spell. It is, as Enid observed, such a filthy song when you actually listen to the lyrics, but it’s so romantic and pretty that I think that’s a forgivable offence.

And I got floopy at Standing, of course. I’ve thoroughly scandalised Colleen with my newest suggestion. Hannah agrees with me, actually – we’re calling it mentor/mentee not-slash. Clare says this sounds like a variety of Polo mint. Colleen is squicked by Buffy/Giles. I said she said that about Remus/Hermione. She says she’s still squicked by Remus/Hermione, my efforts notwithstanding. I like the mentor/mentee thing. When my arguments ran out, I sang.

Life should be a musical. “And it’ll grieve me because I love you…”

It’s so good, Once More With Feeling. Not something to watch on your own; it’s something to laugh at and cry at and throw popcorn at. I really do get floopy at the words “Wish I could stay” from Giles and Tara’s duet-type bit. I’m pathetic. I know. But it’s so sad. We sang along, explained plot points for people (me) who haven’t seen seasons three, four, five, six and seven (urrrgh) and watched Tabula Rasa straight after.

A moment’s digression – I’m not cutting Buffy spoilers because I’m assuming, rightly or wrongly, I’m the only person who hasn’t seen the episodes. If anyone wants me to cut, say the word.

Tabula Rasa, then – a real mixture of comedy and angst. “I think I’m kinda gay” remains the stand-out bit. The end is so horrifically sad I think we all turned to alcohol after that. We had a change in mood after that, as Colleen wanted us to watch Flash Gordon.

Why, I don’t know. It’s bad, bad, camp and bad, but so bad it’s good. Has the wonderful line, “Flash, I love you, but we only have fourteen hours to save the world!” I thought I’d fall asleep in it – I almost did – and Nupur and Joshua did, but when it finished, we were all a bit hyper. I occasionally get a phrase into my head instead of a song, and the phrase of the day was, for some insane reason, “nancy-boy ninjas.” It rolls off the tongue so smoothly I couldn’t help but feel I was quoting something. No-one can think of anything I might be quoting, but before I decide it’s a product of my own warped mind, I think a Google search is in order. In any case, if we ever start a band, we have a name.

In order to not wake up the little ones, I think we decided to move into the dining room and camp out on the computer. Apparently Anthony Stewart Head once played Frank ‘n’ Furter in RHPS. Google is your friend. When we found the pictures, I think we all stared for a while, while I re-evaluated my librarian fixation and Hannah just looked very, very happy. It was around then that the last batch of drunken LJ entries were made. I wasn’t all that pissed, to be honest. Hannah and Clare were. We were playing Truth or Dare originally, but eventually played Truth or Truth instead. Some secrets were revealed, but I think they should remain… secret.

The night slipped away faster than we thought it would. I did another Google search – oh, yes, rock ‘n’ roll – and discovered sunrise was 5.12 am. We decided to wait and meet it, because the time was falling away in great sweeps of alcohol and soaring snatches of song. I was in a poetic mood, clearly. Hannah, on the other hand, was in the mood to throw up. She was the sweetest, cleanest, most civilised drunk I have ever come across. I was holding her hair back when she said clearly, “I hate my voice. I want a refund.”

“Yes, Hannah,” I said, and remembering earlier incidents of this sort, “Can you sing the alphabet song?”

“A,” she said confidently. “B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, LMNO, P.”

“Q,” I prompted, but apparently this was a level of academia she didn’t want to attempt yet, so I asked, “What’s two plus two?”

“Two!”

“Four.”

“It should be two. Everything would make much more sense.”

“I won’t tell Clare you said that,” I said, and took her back inside. She was very civilised, as I said. Drank milk and water and began the long climb up to sobriety.

By half four, the sky was blue and not black. I remembered my quoted time was for London, not Lancashire, and reasoned that sunrise would be earlier further north. So we took out four chairs, some quilts, a sleepy Hannah, and sat in the garden, avoiding the snails, and waited for the dawn. It was perfect. Grey, yes, cloudy, yes, cold, yes. But silent and strange and beautiful, and perfect. We were quiet by then, watching the world grow light, and musing on the fact that this happens every day, and yet there’s no-one to see it except a group of pissed teenagers with an eye for beauty.

Then it rained.

We went to bed, finally, at about five, and slept soundly through till ten when Colleen gave me coffee and I managed to function like an ordinary human being, for a given value of “ordinary.” We got up before Nupur and Joshua, who slept through the debauchery, and eventually turfed them out of bed, too. Pedar appeared some time later, having agreed to give us a lift, and now I’m falling asleep.

In the end, it worked out all right. The kids saw the films, and slept through the real party. Couldn’t have worked better, actually. Their innocence apparently remains intact. And I continue to wait for the acrobats to start somersaulting past the window.