Doug Barron eagles 18th to take lead in Shaw Charity Classic

Rocky Horror star prepared for a rude reception in all the best ways

While it enjoys the longest theatrical release of any movie in history, The Rocky Horror Picture Show was all but ignored by critics when its revolutionary brand of camp first hit silver screens in 1975.

And before it whipped up a cult following, Rocky was a fringe theatre hit in London whose first run’s final night — which had attracted such luminaries as Mick and Bianca Jagger — was derailed by an unlikely culprit: glitter. According to the late Tim Curry (who died at 80 in August), the shiny stuff ended up where the sun don’t shine.

“Well, Rocky got some glitter down his trunks and it set up an irritation. When we arrived at the theatre, he was standing in the shower and the show couldn’t go on,” he told the press in 1974, after crossing the Atlantic to lead the show’s American theatre debut.

Glitter is one of the things audiences may not throw at the stage at The Rocky Horror Picture Show screening tonight at the Centennial Concert Hall. Unlike in the anarchic midnight screenings at the New York’s Waverly Theater beginning in 1976, where audiences chucked everything but the kitchen sink, a prop bag will be courteously supplied at the door.

Bibi, the ‘anti-Bibi’ and the ‘wanna-Bibis’

According to the 1970s anarchist slogan, “No matter who you vote for, the government always gets in.”

That’s certainly true for the election in Israel on Tuesday, even if the winner is not Prime Minister Benjamin (Bibi) Netanyahu himself. All the other party leaders, says Israeli journalist Anshel Pfeffer, are just “wanna-Bibis.”

Or rather, all the rest except one. Former general Gadi Eisenkot, the main opposition candidate, is the “anti-Bibi,” Pfeffer says. He’s a working-class hero who joined the army as a private and worked his way up to chief of staff of the Israel Defence Forces (IDF). He retired and went into politics only four years ago, he’s modest and honest, what’s not to love?

Eisenkot certainly stands out among the party leaders in terms of style, but not so much in terms of actual policies. He was realistic enough to know that “total victory’ over Hamas was not likely, but his “Dahiya” strategy of causing “immense damage and destruction” (in Lebanon in the 2006 war) foreshadowed the cataclysm that the IDF has inflicted on Gaza since 2023.

Frustration on menu as construction drags on

Nearly four months of construction outside the front door of a longtime Portage Avenue restaurant has driven away customers and left its owner struggling to cover operating expenses.

Today’s horoscope

MOON ALERT: Avoid shopping (except food and gas) and important decisions after 10 p.m. today. The moon is in Pisces.

ARIES (March 21-April 19)

This is a great day to make art, which is good news for your sign as so many of you are artisans. (You can do anything with your hands, even without training.) Enjoy time alone and give yourself the luxury of doing what you want to do.

TAURUS (April 20-May 20)

Family history, solo sojourns paved path for celebrated author’s latest novel

It’s 1967 and Lee Clarke has just been kicked out of UCLA when he receives his draft letter in the mail. Rather than report for basic training, he hops in a car and sets off across America on an amphetamine-fuelled road trip to bid farewell to his fractured, dysfunctional family before crossing the border into Canada.

Such is the premise for B.C.-born, Portland-based Patrick deWitt’s sixth novel Dodge City, published in September by House of Anansi. He’s in Winnipeg tonight at McNally Robinson Booksellers’ Grant Park location to launch the book.

The 51-year-old deWitt came to prominence with his sophomore novel, 2011’s The Sisters Brothers. The book was a critical and commercial success, winning the author the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize and the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, and was adapted for the big screen in a film starring John C. Reilly and Joaquin Phoenix.

His 2018 novel French Exit was also adapted for cinema, and his 2023 novel The Librarianist won deWitt the Leacock Medal for the second time. Dodge City is deWitt’s fourth novel to make the Giller Prize long list.

Movie preview: Winnipeg-shot biopic on Arthur Rimbaud as daring as its subject

Simultaneously huge in its biographical breadth and intimate in its scale, Patrick Wang’s film A. Rimbaud is a portrait of the 19th-century poet Arthur Rimbaud, a grand, 175-minute biopic that eschews the genre’s convention with the adventurous spirit Rimbaud applied to the written word.