With their unique pen and their own sensitivity, artists present to us, in turn, their vision of the world around us. This week, we are giving carte blanche to Mariana Mazza.
Posted yesterday at 9:00 a.m.
June 20. It is 4:30 p.m. The wrestlers have arrived. Comedians too. Rehearsals begin. I find it hard to believe that, tonight, I will become for a few moments what served as my guardian during my childhood.
The excited cries of the supporters and the euphoric commentators rocked my Friday evenings, when my mother returned in the early morning from her shift in the reception hall.
We are shooting a special project where wrestlers and comedians mix their talent for one evening.
I watch the wrestlers wrap around their wrists the type electric by fixing the ground. One brushes his arms with coconut oil before tying up his construction boots. His lumberjack character is only visual. Physically, he could play the role of the tree he cuts down, his body is so sculpted.
Wrestling is no joke. It is serious. Shots. The costumes. Everything is true.
My mom would leave us $20 on the kitchen counter so my brother and I could order whatever we wanted from the convenience store while we waited for the evening’s main menu. At the time, it was often Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Undertaker or Shawn Michaels who were waiting. At midnight, when the fight started, my brother nudged me to wake me up…
Before today, I had never attended a wrestling match in the ring. To see the muscles contract, the faces tense and the actors wobble 2 inches from my face made me jubilant.
Being what I expected in the early morning in our three and a half block of apartments in Montreal North thrilled me. Feeling the painful ropes in the small of my back, the ring moving to the rhythm of our steps and being guided by the wrestlers like in a violent waltz, I had never imagined it.
By the end of the evening, once the adrenaline wore off, I had difficulty walking. I had a headache. I felt my heartbeat in my shoulder blades. Yet I had made the minimum effort to look spectacular. The more my pulse beat with pain, the more I felt admiration for these humans who entertain the public with their bodies and their cries.
And yet, almost none of them make a living out of wrestling.
“I would like to make a living with it, but you have to pay the bills. It doesn’t pay in Quebec to squeal at the volleys. »
I am stunned by the physical and mental load that the wrestlers imposed on themselves for one evening. The next day, however, some of them are up at 5 am to spread tar on the asphalt. As if the day before had only been illusory.
“But why don’t you go to the United States to fight? »
“We need work permits, we get turned around. There’s a gang that could have made it there, but when you get banned for five years, it hurts to start all over again. »
You have to learn to fall, get up, act and dance with the public.
The struggle is true. Like life.