What’s next for the UK as Queen Elizabeth II laid to rest

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.

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)

Hutterite colonies embrace the manufacturing business – while staying faithful to their way of life

Tucked away at Oak Bluff Hutterite Colony, past rows of communal housing and farm buildings, Aaron Maendel tinkers in a laboratory.

Black-and-white sheets smeared with grey-test formulas cover a counter. A Thermotron — a refrigerator-looking machine — is powered off but standing by to simulate any desired temperature.

Maendel moves to a worktop littered with partly full mixing cups. He pulls out a small, rectangular sample — a sheet showing the drying time of his new fixation, floor coatings.

“Very simple, actually. Very simple machine. Drags a stick through the mud,” Maendel says.

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.

U of W, former professor sued over alleged sex assault

A woman who studied and worked at the University of Winnipeg has filed a lawsuit against the post-secondary institution and her former professor — a convicted sex offender — who she alleges drugged and sexually assaulted her.