When I first got into the biz wrestling + burlesque was popular for a hot minute. Have some ladies do a strip tease and have some comedy wrestling matches and couple things that are kinda both and everyone has a good time. At that time people loved to write articles about how comedy burlesque wrestling was wrestling for normal people, not disgusting wrestling fans.
That annoyed me even though I know first-hand wrestling fans are monsters. It’s like that thing siblings have where they can make fun of their sister or brother brutally but they get mad if anyone else says anything mean about them. I must have that for wrestling.
One of Bora and Kelly’s first gigs was doing magic at a burlesque hall. The pay was lousy but they loved it. They give a lot of credit to those burlesque ladies for teaching them the finer points of performing on stage. There’s a sub-section of stage magic, the quick-change act, that lends itself naturally to mixing with sexy ladies taking their clothes off.
Bora called me up because she decided it was time to do a show that combined magic and burlesque and wrestling. I told her that I would help her run the wrestling side of things, get the right kind of people to work the show, but I didn’t want to perform. There’s a role I can play at a comedy wrestling show, someone has to be the fool being punked and laughed at. Normally I have no problem doing that but I wasn’t in the mood at that moment.
When she first mentioned the idea, I thought about working the show and doing a barbed wire match or another gruesome gimmick match right after the silly silly sexy times. The kind of deathmatch shit I normally don’t like.
I squashed that instinct. That’s the part of me that likes to ruin people’s fun. I have this impulse when people have a good time watching fake violence that I want to go “Oh, you think that’s fun huh? Well check out what violence is really like you fuckers.”
It’s not a great quality. I should work on that.
