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One night during my junior year at college, while high on considerably more than life (it was the '60s, so sue me), I took it into my head to go — by myself — to an Alfred Hitchcock retrospective playing in the Memorial Union. The film that night was Psycho, which I had seen before...but never with the entire world seeming to melt at the edges and change colors in the middle. Yet things were going along pretty well until the last 20 minutes, when I became convinced that Norman Bates' mother — in all her shriveled, eyeless glory — was sitting directly behind me and would soon reach out to stroke the back of my neck.
I remembered this a couple of weeks ago, when I happened upon Psycho playing on cable. Talk about flashbacks! It made me wonder how many others had had bad entertainment experiences — I mean really bad, the absolute pits — and so I put out a query on my website. I was deluged with replies. People have suffered all sorts of entertainment traumas. Many, as you would guess, have to do with that ever-popular combination of alcohol and rock & roll. Several end with forcible ejections from the human body, occasionally on some other concertgoer's head.
Teresa wrote about going to see Queen in 1978 (''Freddie Mercury was still alive then'') in a pair of satin pants that were all the rage. A drunk threw an empty bottle, bonk!, on poor Teresa's head while she was trying to work her way down to the front so Freddie could admire her groovy threads. She regrets the stitches, mourns the pants. Her sad conclusion: Blood doesn't wash out of satin.
Sometimes it's the talent who's out of control. Ayla wrote about going to see Hole in Adelaide, Australia. ''Courtney Love staggered on stage, played a few songs, then started ranting about being stung by a huge Australian bug. [She] stormed off stage screaming she was going to die.... Not cool.'' And Susan recalls a show where the always-inspired Billy Idol grabbed the drummer's sticks and began playing his own leather-clad crotch. Tasteful!
NEXT PAGE: ''Mary was taken to The Godfather at the age of 13. Her parents rarely went to films, but they'd heard there were 'some great Italian wedding scenes'''
