Live events are starting to run in cities across America again, but forget going to a concert on the lawn or an outdoor movie for your family’s first social outing. Professional wrestling? Now that is the perfect reintroduction back into polite society. While we hemmed and hawed for a year and half about mask wearing, many of these athletes simply consider it to be part of the job. Take a year of pent up frustration, and go watch some of the strongest, hottest, weirdest people you’ve ever met beat each other up while wearing gorgeous costumes. As a wrestling promoter, I was a fan first, and I’m more than happy to walk you through why independent, professional wrestling is the perfect art form for reentry in our post pandemic society. Rage! Dress up clothing! Bodily fluids! These are some of the largest components of the apocalypse, parenting and professional wrestling.

If you’re wondering what professional wrestling even is, you don’t have to go any further than your television. Live, indie wrestling events have a similar vibe to what you’d see in the WWE (or WWF if you’re old enough), with the stunts, the sparkles, and the in-your-face personalities. There’s no singlets or true rules here, and on the off chance there is, well, it’s likely bedazzled. Independent pro wrestling takes all the best parts of what we see in the wrestling mainstream, and distills it into its most (Monday night?) raw presentation. The best part? Once you’ve gone to enough shows, there will indeed come a day when you sit down to watch All Elite Wrestling on a Wednesday night, and you’ll see someone that makes you go, “Hey, we saw that wrestler before she was famous!” 

Fine, we’ll go. Do I tell my kid it’s real, or fake?

Here’s a tip that will keep the wrestling veterans from clapping your ears on live television: go into the experience just like you would at your child’s age. Everything is larger than life when you’re 9-years-old, and wrestlers are gargantuan. You’ll enjoy the bouts way more if you allow yourself to wholly invest in the experience and leave your cynicism behind. As for whether or not it’s “real?” It’s about as real as the injuries and blood you might see when the bell rings, so decide for yourself. If you need some extra convincing, look up wrestling vet named David Schultz and reconsider your position. 

Speaking of hyper-aggressive jerks, heels are the big baddies we all love to hate, and yes, you’re supposed to boo. I know that we teach kids not to heckle and to always respect their elders, but professional wrestling is all about unlearning social niceties and giving in to the temptations of yelling insults to someone whose job it is to be insulted. “You’re tacky and I hate you!” is a good place to start. Avoid talk about moms, sexy things, gender, and the obvious stuff. You’ll have plenty of time to disappoint your kids later on down the line, so be cool.

Faces are the obvious good guys. The scientific term for these workers is “babyface,” and if you attend enough matches in the future, you’ll pick up on the irony of that. One can tell if someone’s a face based on how much they smile and high five old ladies and kiddos when they come out. They preach hard work and a can-do attitude, believing in yourself, and other virtues that we gave up on as adults, so think of this adventure as a little bit of Sunday mass.

You may find that heels are way more fun to cheer for instead of against, and you get the added bonus of having a new fictional character to pull out of your pocket whenever junior starts acting up. Who needs “Santa isn’t coming!” when you could be using, “O’Shay Edwards is going to come over and break your Nintendo Switch!”? In fact, I know a few guys on the indies who will HAPPILY destroy a child’s electronics if you cough up the money for their working fee. Being an effective heel, in the opinion of many, is to have perfected a wrestling personality. Throwing out indiscriminate cruelty is one way to make a crowd hate a wrestler, but it looks and sounds lazy. The best kind of heel is someone who will fill you up with rage, yet doesn’t depend on cheap shots (which convert into “cheap heat”) to get a reaction from the crowd. 

Something that holds a lot of people back from attending live wrestling shows is the assumption that it’s going to be a room full of drunk bros, and while you’ll find a few of those gems in any social situation, the world of indie wrestling is quickly turning into a scene centered around inclusivity and the leadership of marginalized people. The debut show of D.C.-based promotion F1ght Club featured Trish Adora taking home the Pan Afrikan World Diaspora Championship after winning a tournament in which she was the only woman. Other inclusive pioneers emerging in the indie scene include Pittsburgh’s own Enjoy Wrestling, Paradigm Pro in the Midwest, and on the West Coast, the incomparable Hoodslam. While you might want to hire a babysitter for the latter, all of these companies are enjoying massive success under LGBTQ+ leadership.  The important lesson for kids here is an obvious one, and it’s that no matter who you are, your gender, your sexuality, your race, you too can one day grow up to make a career around tossing glitter and beating people up.

On the topic of masks, masking up ourselves and loved ones was a brand-new experience in 2020. You thought it was hard keeping fabric on your face during summertime in Chicago or D.C.? Try performing with your entire face covered, plenty of indie wrestlers in the American indie scene have adopted Mexico’s Lucha Libre long standing tradition of remaining masked at all times, before, during, and after their matches have ended. Despite the repeated line that masks kept us from using our faces to communicate, these performances prove to us that a story can be told using one’s entire body, no smiles needed.

Enough talk of your daily reality and the last fifteen months. Wrestling is the only kind of performance art that blends reality and fiction in such a fluid and seamless way, and it’s not hard to picture how many of today’s top stars saw their first live shows as children, with superfan parents looking to bond over, well, what amounts to a shimmering soap opera. For a few precious hours, your family can enter a universe where everything feels new again, and more real than you can imagine.

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