“I’m more prone to take a professional stance,” she says. “There’s so much volunteer theater but it needs to be professional.”

She likes acting in Rocky Horror, she says, because it means “being happy, being positive with each other.”

Each April Fool’s weekend, the cast has some extra fun with each other and with the audience. This Saturday, Rocky dressed as Elvis and a pair of actors turned Frank-N-Furter into a two-headed creature.

That’s okay, Rappolt says, but only to a point.

“We all need to take it serious,” she says. “When we don’t have scheduled funniness, we should be doing it serious.”

Therapy in Fishnets

When the lights come on at 2:10 a.m. and the audience files out past a Cambridge Police Department officer, the fanatics and one-time virgins mill outside.

Richard Thal, the Boston man who had brought the Spanish exchange students, laughs as he tries to gather the crowd of high-schoolers. Although many of his friends frequented the Exeter Street Theater’s Rocky showings, this was Thal’s first time, too.

“It was wild,” he says. “I kept thinking, ‘What in God’s name are all those Spanish kids going to think?’”

Many of them say they couldn’t understand the movie at all. But they were able to pose for photographs with Gastlyn, the man in the red dress, who stuck out his tongue for the picture.

Lisa Grossman, the high-school junior from New Jersey, says this show was better than the first one she saw back in Montclair. This time, she even managed to stay awake.

“There’s more energy,” she says. “They didn’t let you throw things at the other one.”

And as for how the ordeal influenced her thoughts on colleges, she says “not very much at all.”

Greeting her friends in the cast and crew as they struggle out with their bags, Linda Brennan sports her Rocky get-up, a jean jacket with a Rocky Horror patch and a pin that reads “My Lips Belong to Brad.”

When she came to the show for the first time in January 1996, she was a sound board operator at a community theater in Newton—and was “dead against horror films.”