“Hell hath no fury like a woman fashion policed by a man who looks like Fred Flintstone.” —Proverb
The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough was, I shit you not, the song Pandora chose as I rolled up on the quaint craft fair out front of the 907 Pro Wrestling venue last weekend. “LFG,” I said to the voices in my head about this cornball synchronicity, because Cyndi Lauper of all people would understand the very niche existential crisis I’ve been grappling with these past few months.
Despite my commanding MILF facade, I’ve been in the thick of it, friends. I watched my cute little ring announcer career devolve into the most boorish and insufferable glass ceiling scenario you could imagine earlier in the year, and then I got hit with a wave of work-life chaos you wouldn’t believe if I tried to explain it. But at some point in the midst of that shitstorm, a literary agent slid into my DM’s and coaxed me into signing with him to write a book about professional wrestling. And now I’m contending with a certain freaky paranoia that comes crashing down, without warning and at all hours, when you’ve found yourself going rogue and breaking kayfabe.
Buy the ticket take the ride, Kayla, echoed in my ears, like a Use the force, Luke kind of thing, only it was that mumbler again with his smoker’s rasp. Personal space, old man, I echoed back. Hey, maybe you’re out of place, what’s good enough for you is good enough for me, Cyndi sang as I tucked my cash inside my phone case. I threw myself out of the car and strode with high drama toward the rec center doors in my ‘Wrestling is Shakespeare’ t-shirt and optical illusion pants, as though the craft fair people were watching.
Usually selling tickets to the wrestling show is a lovely older gentleman in a biker jacket who goes by the name of Mr. Danger, but today he wasn’t on the scene. In his place as the gatekeeper was none other than my nemesis, el jefe and Fred Flintstone of this whole sordid family-friendly affair. “How’ve you been, Miss Andrea?” said Fred Flintstone, fake friendly, calling me by my government name in what was clearly a calculated attempt to throw me off my game. But I stayed the course and refrained from going off. “YO,” I said, breathing fire, as I slammed my fifteen bucks admission on his little table and stormed into the venue.
I marched right up to the merch area first thing, because numero uno on my agenda that afternoon was to buy a sticker from my spirit guide Mask of the Nanook, the towering polar bear-themed wrestler whose billed weight is 549 bottles of Coca-Cola, and whose northern lights suplex gives me a chill every time. I needed a Nanook sticker as an automotive talisman, something for my hatchback window to protect against all the MAGA hat men in big trucks who road rage at my little Prius every day while I’m going about my business on the mean bastard streets of this dying colonial city.
“How much for a sticker,” I said to Nanook. I was still in a mood, no patience for a hello or how are you.
He looked taken aback beneath his shiny blue lucha mask with fuzzy white bear ears. “Take one,” he said, all pretend nonchalant.
“How much are they!” I insisted he tell me, and he conceded that they were four for a dollar. How is this cat making any kind of profit? Does he think I’m not aware of what Sticker Mule has done to going rates in the novelty adhesives market? I demanded a price of one sticker for one dollar as he tried persuading me to steal a sticker while he looked the other way.
“Take my money,” I hissed. We stared each other down. Bryson Axl and Pimp Yancy looked on in consternation. It must have finally occurred to Nanook that I was on some weird mission and was about to get salty about it, because he finally agreed to exchange currency for product. I felt awash in relief. I had passed the karmic test set before me by my spirit guide and could now proceed to my seat.
The show was starting. The new ring announcer climbed the steps they never bothered to set out for me (ahem, cough cough, just saying) so I could wear my knockout dresses instead of always having to be in pants in order to swoop up into the ring like some Penelope Ford wannabe (though I must giving myself props for developing a proficient ring swoop all things considered). New guy got the show started while I DM’d my Twitter cronies and slurped my McDonald’s coffee to even out what was left of my rough edges. This new chap is a nice man with decent public speaking chops who does not steal attention from the wrestlers like yours truly over here got accused of doing. But I must admit it’s difficult for me to make out what he’s saying a lot of the time, and that’s not at all his fault. You see, after I announced my first show a year ago, Fred Flintstone was all up in my business about what a bad job I’d done. It was clear to me, however, that at least 60% of his feedback was meant for the Best Buy bargain bin microphone provided by the venue. This is a mic the facility has on hand so indoor youth soccer coaches can get a gym full of anklebiters to gather and settle; it isn’t suitable for a theatrical production full of important announcements and dramatic monologues peppered by the hollering of a rowdy audience.
If I was going to do this ring announcing thing, I was going to do it right. My twin flame is a California shock jock with a microphone fetish, so right before I burned that bridge I followed his guidance and special ordered a certain supercardioid model from a guy named Frank in Indiana. My supercardioid mic resonates like heaven on earth; I call her Bella. Bella is specially designed in such a way that cuts the echo in a big roomy venue like the rec center gym. Bella made me and Pimp Yancy sound like gods, I tell you. Yancy and I were the only ones working the mic much back then. Now I will say, you’ve got to treat Bella with dignity—she was quite distressed at a WrestlePro Alaska show when Enzo Amore barked his jive talk too roughly into her sensitive polarities. Enzo was however quite gentlemanly later on when he said how you doin’ to me in passing, so Bella and I let bygones do their thing in regards to the too harsh “Certified G” debacle. Anyway, you’ve got to strain to understand this new ring announcer on what sounds to me like that old soccer coach mic, but he’s cheerful and bold, so props to him for stepping in on what I can confirm is not a job for the weak or the timid.
My cranky mood fell to the wayside as the opening match pitted pretty boy hoss Bryson Axl against that huge jerk from Kotzebue, Jet Lucas. I felt quite the catharsis as I made sure my entire side of the audience could hear how very strongly I feel that Jet Lucas sucks. Jet got the three count and I thought to myself, when is this cat going to quit holding back and bulldoze the entire roster? Guy is a brute and a hater with a very ugly chip on his shoulder. All that’s a compliment, by the way. It’s like he’s bottling up his rage in hopes that someday he’ll straight up explode. That’s another compliment, Jet. Jeez, touchy.
I got all caught up in the curiosity of the pairings in the tag team match that came next: a Reno 911 cop and a Viking time traveler faced off against a polar bear and a skater boy. I was so consumed with the implications of these four existing in the same space that I didn’t notice who won. Next up was Gunnar vs. Maurice ‘Kid Money’ Mitchell, who was of course accompanied to the ring by Mr. Y.T. Jones (that’s what Pimp Yancy prefers to go by for some reason). This was a nice little match because there was lots of satisfying kicking. Kid Money got the pin, as he is wont to do. Yancy also got into a heated back-and-forth with the old Vietnam vet in the front row, something about chopping down a tree? Audience trash talk has certainly mellowed since my grad school days in Vegas, when Leeann and I were so proud of ourselves for getting into it with a roided up fella in a Desert Storm gimmick who called us white trash whores and told us to go back to the trailer park. A Team Payne tag match rounded out the first half of the show. Team Payne’s Chad Dillon and PW3 have come such a long way from their days as a mismatched pairing of weird, wayward rich kids. I am especially proud of my old friend Chad Dillon these days, the way he commits to those synchronized pushups and posturing. All four young men in this match got so obstreperous that referee Lady Stripes DQ’d everybody and sent them on their way. Lady Stripes, I must say, was signaling quite strongly that she has had it up to here with punks trying to fuck around and find out.
After intermission that goofball from Kodiak Bobcat McDillon came out to talk about his new protégé, Muldoon’s finest, Rome Gibson. It was quite strange. Bobcat has apparently started a cult called BARG? I was out of town when this monkey business launched and its meaning quite frankly hovers just beyond where my post-COVID brain sees fit to stretch. Is this perhaps the narrative outcome of Bobcat’s success being directly linked to getting dropped on his head at the height of the pandemic?
And then finally—FINALLY!—it was time for the brawl I was there to witness: ‘The Giver’ Jerry Bishop vs. 907 Pro Wrestling champion AJ Radical.
I was personally invested in this match. I got a wild hair and went all cultural critic several weeks ago, laying out a feminist analysis of this feud’s archetypes and semiotics, which you can piece together here, here, and here. Look, what can I say—the Professional Wrestling Studies Association reading group this summer is focused on the post-feminist dynamics of Total Divas and the revisionist history approach WWE takes in the way they represent female wrestlers in their documentary retrospectives, and reading this article and this article left me very much concerned about the Miss Elizabethification of badass babe Lady Stripes, who last month got manhandled by creepy weirdo Jerry Bishop and had to be saved and comforted by her fiancé AJ Radical, whose hand she had recently held up as the new champion right before he proposed to her in the ring, in what was both a beautiful moment and a slow burning conflict of interest. My concern was not only about the degradation of her authority as 907’s senior referee (which would put a damper her ability to put these thugs in their place), but also about the strength of the only visible female representation left in this promotion after I peaced out in a blind rage, having been informed that I would no longer be allowed to wear stylish outfits, and that even if I did submit to the patriarchy and put on a burlap sack, I was likely getting demoted to some minimal and vaguely defined ‘Renee Young role’ anyway. I will have more to say in future posts about how based on my experience, the visibility of women (and their outfits!) in a local wrestling show does in fact matter.
So I’ve had my concerns, but I forgot all about that stuff as soon as AJ launched like a pit bull on Jerry, not even a second after the bell rang, because this was an I QUIT match! No DQ’s, no count-outs, no pins, no tapping out; only a vocalized “I quit” to concede the contest. In other words, this was going to be hardcore! And friends, if there’s one thing I love more than writing wrestling theory and criticism, it’s unmitigated violence involving miscellaneous items that happen to be tucked away and scattered about.
The ref for this match was not Lady Stripes, by the way—it was the more unassuming Ref Russ—so I could enjoy the carnage without worrying about its feminist implications. And hot damn, this grudge match brawling was primo product, c’est manifique! To my delight there were handcuffs, a chair, a kendo stick (!!!), a metal garbage can and its lid, a banana Officer Nick Mercury had earlier pulled from his pocket for reasons known only to him, and some kind of clampy tool thing that filled the room with abject horror when AJ took it to Jerry’s nose. This match really brought out the sadist in babyface AJ, who at one point clanged the ring bell right in Jerry’s ears, then set up to clock him in the head with it. Jerry blocked the ring bell with a cup of coffee to AJ’s face, which for me was the spot of the night. They spent a fair amount of time out of the ring and over by the stage, and in the midst of this mayhem Jerry got busted open. Friends, his bloody face was a thing of beauty to me. I supposed I shouldn’t vibrate with delight when someone I know is bleeding from the head, but let there be blood, I say!
When they brawled their way back to the ring, Jerry latched AJ’s wrist into the handcuffs he’d hung from the middle rope early on in the match. This was clearly the end, there was no way out for AJ now, but still kicked and chopped and even spit at Jerry (ooooo!). Nevertheless, Jerry’s dominance was unavoidable now. AJ still refused to quit as Jerry pummeled him, and suddenly Lady Stripes was out at ringside, dressed down from her ref gear but all business, no longer a damsel in distress about this whole hot mess but instead the senior official of an athletic event, stepping into her power and doing what needed to be done.
She went straight to AJ in his handcuffs and told him he had to quit. When he refused, she grabbed a towel from the commentary table and flung it into the ring. Ref Russ looked sheepish—his own narrative seems to be about these catch-22 conundrums that pop up in the matches he officiates—because he couldn’t really do anything about a towel thrown in, even by his supervisor, since the I QUIT stipulations were very clear.
And then Lady Stripes climbed into the ring and challenged Jerry herself!
She stood between her love and his nemesis, like come at me bro at this very tall and unhinged villain who was still itching to inflict more humiliation. There wasn’t a hint of fear in her stance, and she didn’t flinch when he took up the chair and came at her with it. And what a profound ironic moment, because Jerry wielding a chair against AJ’s badass fiancé was the thing that made AJ finally say “I quit.”
While that one mumbling voice in my head was urging me to stick around and say hello to my friends, I got out of there right quick once the I QUIT match was over. I had a feeling if I stayed I’d do that thing where I accidentally start speaking my mind and wind up making such a spectacle of myself I scare the straights. I filed out with the crowd and pretended to be ensconced in my phone so Fred Flintstone couldn’t fake friendly me again. As I emerged from the rec center into the balmy Alaska summer evening, I thought about how professional wrestling never fails to leave you with a paradox. While the raw ache in my heart from having been deemed too much woman to ring announce continues to haunt me daily, it has at the same time been deeply gratifying to have returned to my roots as a cantankerous smart mark, free to think for myself again.
Oh and by the way, Mr. Flintstone, I go by ‘Ms.’ Or sometimes ’Professor’, but it’s high time I educate you: addressing a woman of my stature and credentials as ‘Miss’ is seriously bad form north of the Mason-Dixon line. BOY.
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