If you want a good seat, or a prime spot in the costume contest, it's advisable to show up at the Castro Theatre a good hour before your cinematic sing-along experience. And by the Castro Theatre, I mean the four blocks of Market Street surrounding the Castro Theatre, onto which the line of Ariels, or Belles, or Elsas, depending on the Disney darling of the evening, will be waiting.
Sure, there will be some kids mixed in there: mostly 3- to 8-year-old girls excited to wear their princess outfits on a day that's not Halloween. There are the twentysomething to fortysomething women, also excited about their taffeta gowns, so giddy their flasks of whiskey clank in their purses alongside their tiaras. There are couples: one person dressed as a princess and one as Prince Charming, or one as a princess and one as the villain. And then there are just lots of adult men. Their princess costumes are usually the best.
Never mind that the goodie bag you'll receive from an usher upon walking through the theater doors is filled with children's things like bubbles, plastic combs, noisemakers, and other tools of audience participation. The Castro Theatre sing-along experience really isn't for kids. At its most basic level, it runs on the nostalgia of people who were kids during Disney's renaissance (the period between 1989 and 1999 that gave us The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, and on and on), combined with the documented socioeconomic factors that have led to that generation's extended state of — oh, let's just say, living in their parents' basement a little longer than most would like.
But to witness a packed theater full of adult humans who vote and use their turn signals and work in upper management all gleefully screaming every word to "Poor Unfortunate Souls" right along with the purple-tentacled drag queen octopus that is Ursula up there on-screen, without even checking the lyrics, is to see something else entirely, a phenomenon worthy of at least one Cultural Anthropology 101 lecture: We are witnessing the coming of age of an improbable lovechild. On the one hand are the freaky, pansexual subcultures once deemed too deviant for public consumption (The Rocky Horror Picture Show crowd); on another is the combined power of 1 million ostracized high school theater enthusiasts' most awkward years; and on a third hand (tentacle?) is G-rated mainstream children's entertainment from a global media conglomerate. The kind that partners with McDonald's to make money off selling kids hyper-heteronormative story lines about virginity, morality, and damsels in distress via tiny, choking-hazard figurines, right along with the fries.
The kicker, of course, is that the original fairy tales these movies were based on are incredibly fucked up. And try as they might, Disney execs couldn't whitewash the 18th-century kink and repressed sexuality out of any of these gems. (Beauty and the Beast's alpha male, in particular, deserves someone's graduate thesis: "No one's slick as Gaston, no one's quick as Gaston, no one's neck's as incredibly thick as Gaston... you can ask any Tom, Dick, or Stanley, and they'll tell you whose team they prefer to be on!")
And while other cities have their equivalents, there's something in the Castro Theatre's proud, freak flag-flying history that truly elevates the camp and joy in this particular strain of nostalgia: The reassuring idea that no matter how many wonderful weirdos get squeezed out of S.F., there will always be new ones arriving, each flush with the thought of finally living out their own modern-day fairy tale, no questions asked — taffeta, bubbles, and all.
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