CHEERS TO…COMMUNITY THEATRE
Mayor Tony Mileto backstage at The Rocky Horror Show
Cheers to community theatre 💋
More specifically: cheers to community theatre that understands culture doesn't just happen on stage - it happens in the audience, in the dressing room, in the casting choices, and in who feels welcome enough to say yes in the first place.
This season, the Orange Theatre Company has invited a collection of local community leaders to step into the wonderfully salacious world of the The Rocky Horror Show - a production that has spent the last 50 years gleefully disrupting conservative ideas about gender, sexuality, performance and identity.
And yes, it's camp. It's absurd. It's fishnets and corsets and pelvic thrusting. WE LOVE.
But culturally? Rocky Horror has always mattered because it gave generations of queer people, weird kids, theatre kids and outsiders permission to be seen loudly and publicly, and often before broader society was ready to embrace them.
Which is why public participation and allyship still matters.
A special cheers to Mayor Tony Mileto for saying yes, throwing himself into it wholeheartedly, and understanding that sometimes leadership looks like showing up for your creative and queer communities in fishnets, a corset and feather boa under stage lights.
Visibility matters. Representation matters. And communities become safer, richer and more connected when leaders are willing to stand publicly alongside the people who make them vibrant.
The Rocky Horror Show is on at the Orange Civic Theatre until May 23rd 2026 - and you'd be a silly bitch to miss it.
This piece first appeared in Excessive Consumption - a weekly dispatch on culture, branding, politics and whatever other modern internet brain rot the algorithm has emotionally assigned me that week.
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