PWX Wrasslin’

Random event on a Friday night: a wrestling event at a walking-distance theater. (Same place I saw Beats Antique, oddly enough.)

After crawling some galleries and listening to the chilling words of a sculptor who believes himself very close to the end of his work (via death), we toddled over to the theater, got our tickets, and awaited the show.

Now, I will say that I had a phase of watching wrestling back before the F became the E, so I was generally prepared for the drama and blustering.

What I never really twigged to as a child was how the magic was done. I knew that wrestling was “fake” because people told me it was, not because I saw the strings, so to speak.

It was pretty damn awesome to get to see those strings on Friday night. The drum-style floor, the way they take falls, the careful out-of-the-ring brawling, etc.

The show lacked a cohesive story, unfortunately, I had trouble distinguishing heels from faces in many of the combats, and the show was Three. Hours. Long.

For real. All three of us were practically asleep by the time the final showdown began.

It was a blast, though. I think we all got caught up in the drama, leaning forward on the ref’s over-to-top pin counts (that somehow never quite made it to 3).

The one real disappointment was the women’s match. Deana warned us that clothes would come off, and the women seemed rather… sculpted (which is fine), but it was still kinda sad. Neither woman was very muscular. They didn’t fight well at all. In fact, they stopped fighting for one woman to take some fluffy belt off of the other one. Erm.

They also had a bizarre tendency to fall with their legs spread open. Very strange, that.

I wanted to see women’s wrestling that was an appropriate companion to the men’s, instead of a companion to the male gaze.

Even the crowd wasn’t buying it, but then they were kinda confused about the whole event. They didn’t seem willing to dive into the fiction, and often cheered and booed for both sides of the match or threw out cutting criticisms of the audience, the performers, and the event in general.

It was a weird event. But fun. Particularly the Boy Scout in very brief shorts in the 6-man bunkhouse fight.

Um, yeah.

The next one’s November 30, and I suspect we’ll be going, possibly with Deana’s brother.