On Showing Girls My Voice

Three teenage girls ran up to me while a match was going one time when I was the ring announcer for the local wrestling promotion. They asked if they could take a picture with me.

It was only my third show as ring announcer, and I was still figuring out all the dynamics of my role. If you’re doing it right it’s a very busy job, announcing for a professional wrestling show. My voice was the thing that coordinated the twenty plus people putting on a noisy, boisterous production that was planned but not scripted, full of important spots and dangerous moments. There was a possibility that things could change at a moment’s notice and I would have to quickly figure out what words I needed to say about it. My voice was an key element in the flow of the production, which also involved other key players: the referee, the bell ringer, the person working the music, and the camera crew.

I kept meticulous notecards full of details I needed to get right and important announcements to make at various intervals between matches. But I also had to be prepared to scribble all over my notes or sometimes even wing it completely because the card is, of course, subject to change at any time. And of course I had to make sure I was focused, clear, and well timed when I performed the most important part of my role: introducing the wrestlers at the start of their matches. By the time the politics got so stupid I had to bail on the whole project, I had the flow of all this stuff down and was really having fun. 

But back when these girls approached me I was intensely focused on the match, watching for the pin. They caught me off guard. It hadn’t yet occurred to me there could be girls in the audience thinking of me as a minor celebrity, someone worth taking a picture with. 

It’s a thing you can totally do in wrestling—reach across the veil of kayfabe and talk to the people who exist in this alternate reality. It’s encouraged, in fact. Still, I could tell they had to get a little bold to approach me like that. They giggled like we were sharing a secret as we took a quick picture. Then they hurried back to their seats and I got my eyes back on the match.  It was in that brief moment with those teenage girls that I realized there was more importance in my ring announcer gig that I had thought.

I think I left an even bigger impression on another teenage girl during the last show I announced. That was the show when Dani Daydream—one of several women who were for a time training to wrestle with this outfit—worked her magic and put my hair in a ‘do I never thought I’d have the opportunity to rock:

In retrospect, I’m pretty sure this look was the fashion crime that brought the jackboot of the patriarchy down on my cute little gimmick. I did look fly that day, though. Haters gonna hate, as the old adage goes. 

But I digress. It was with my hair in this sassy assemblage that I crossed paths with one of my students, who I knew to be secretly a wrestling fan, in the lobby during intermission at the rec center. She was on site for a Samoan bingo night going on elsewhere in the facility. 

Here’s the back story:

I’ve been teaching writing classes part time at the university for quite a while, but during my time as a ring announcer for the local wrestling promotion, I was also a new teacher at a middle school. I was teaching eighth grade social studies—mainly a survey of early American history—and this was Not My Subject in a big way. It was, however, the job I got offered when I really needed one. I was still getting the hang of teaching history when an email came from my department chair that September 17 was Constitution Day, and that it was a federal mandate for all public school social studies teachers to teach about the Constitution on that day.

This really cramped my already stressed out style. We weren’t even to the exploration and conquest unit yet, and the Constitution wasn’t due to come up in the curriculum until the civics unit in February or March. I hadn’t thought much yet about how to teach the Constitution, and I didn’t know what I was going to do with it, without any context, on a random day in September, just because the feds said so. My department chair sent some links to online lessons and activities I could use, but they all felt gimmicky and forced. I eventually decided to just teach a close reading of the preamble, because this is the kind of topic on which I whip up a last minute teacherly stand-up comedy act of sorts, my favorite approach to filling time in a classroom when I’ve got nothing more substantial lined up. 

In case you’ve forgotten, the preamble to the Constitution is that thing that starts with the phrase We the People. Here it is in full:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

I walked each period through the preamble phrase by phrase, urging them to think about the meaning of domestic Tranquility and general Welfare, and by the way, why were all these random nouns capitalized? Furthermore, what do you make of the fact that it’s one big long sentence? Not a run-on per se, but something you get underlined if you wrote one like it on a language arts assignment. Essentially, I used Constitution Day as an opportunity for reading comprehension work.

But before we got into the sentence-level chicanery of the preamble, I wanted them to think about how We the People has developed into a kind of pop culture motto. Has anybody ever heard this phrase before? I asked each period. Sometimes some of them had heard it before, sometimes they couldn’t remember where. Somebody in second period thought they heard it in a song; one guy in fifth period had a We the People brand bike.

“Does anybody watch wrestling?” I asked at this point in the lesson. This was the first time I had ever mentioned wrestling to them. I was testing the water. Every period, this question cast an awkward moment across the room. I couldn’t get a read on who among them were wrestling fans. 

Nobody admitted to watching wrestling in response to my question for most of the day, but I could always see a few eyes tune in with recognition. 

I went on to talk about WWE’s Jack Swagger character from a few years back. I even googled “Jack Swagger” on the overhead, so they could see who I was talking about. I told them Swagger’s whole motto was We, the People!, and that he would yell it just like that, with a pause after “we” and an audible explanation point at the end. I said the audience would yell it with him, and also that his T-shirt had an outline of a hand across the front, as though to indicate where you should place your hand on your heart during the Pledge of Allegiance, in case you forgot.

“It was all kinda stupid,” I admitted to each class period. When I said this, I would always get a few nods in agreement. We would then move on from Jack Swagger to discuss what it mean to form a more perfect Union.

Something different happened in seventh period, though. At the point in the lesson when I asked, “Does anybody watch wrestling?” two Pacific Islander girls in two different rows, both of whom had been doodling, jerked up in their seats and locked eyes with me. 

“Yesss,” they both said softly, but with urgency. I didn’t press the issue further with these two. They sure did pay attention for the rest of my We the People song and dance, though. 

It was one of these girls that I would cross paths with during wrestling show intermission at the rec center months later.

This girl is smart, athletic, built like a linebacker, and also a stunning beauty. She’d make an excellent wrestler, just saying. As all eighth graders are, she was still figuring herself out: bursting with confidence some days, timid and unsure the next. When I saw her at the rec center, I said hi with a big smile but blazed past her in a hurry. I had to pee and I only had about five minutes before I needed to get in the ring and start up the wrestling show again. I could tell she was perplexed by what I was doing at a place that she knew of as the venue for Samoan bingo night, but I didn’t really know how to explain what I was doing there, and with my hair all up like that. 

After intermission, I was in the ring at the start of the next match. I had just introduced Erik Brynjar, the Viking time traveler, and was waiting for his music to subside so I could announce his opponent. I glanced up from my index cards at the glass doors of the gym, and there was my student, staring in, eyes wide, having discovered a secret world in which her social studies teacher was taking part in something outlandish and amazing. For a moment I was aware of how this girl, who I knew to be quietly a wrestling fan, saw me standing there confidently with a mic in my hand, a growling Viking on one side of me and referee in a black and white striped shirt on the other. 

Here’s that match:

I left my hair in its buns all weekend and went to school like that on Monday, because Dani Daydream’s mad hair skills had those buns full of hairpins and shellacked with spray. It was going to be a project to take them down and I loved them, so I kept them up as long as possible. My wrestling fan student and I passed each other in the hallway Monday morning. She looked at my hair and smiled knowingly, but she didn’t blow my cover. After that we never talked about it. I knew I had, at the very least, planted a seed. 

There’s another important girl who got something out of watching me announce: my own little goth daughter, who is just now twelve. You can see her in the folding chairs on the YouTube clip above: she’s the blonde in the foreground with a pink and grey fleece on. She came to most of the shows for which I was the announcer. I was surprised she liked coming—she’s too cool to watch wrestling on TV with me and was too shy to talk to anybody at the shows.

But after the first time she saw me announce, she told me why she liked coming to watch. She said: 

It must feel good to just get up there and really yell it out like that.

This is why a female ring announcer is powerful representation. Girls learn early on to muffle themselves. To pipe down, dial it back, make their impact smaller: with their literal voices, and with the essence of themselves that they put into the world. Becoming a wrestler was never in the cards for me—though I’m in kickass shape with all this hot yoga, I’ll have you know—but I’m glad the girls in the audience of the local wrestling show got to watch me climb into the ring with confidence and dressed in my own unique style. I’m glad they heard me speak boldly and skillfully into the mic. I’m glad they got to witness me “really yell it out.”

I planted a seed for them: a woman in their town can be loud and admired. A woman’s voice can grip a room.