When I was a kid my brother used to hog the TV in our den all the time so he could watch WWF wrestling. I hated it. I found the theatrics transparent, the “fighting” ridiculous and the machismo and obviously fake beefs nauseating.
So when I showed up at the Blue Cat Boxing Club for the final event of this year’s Edgy Women Festival and realized that the show I had been sent to cover would be a female version of the same thing, I died a little inside. That is, until the action started. With a hot dog clenched in one fist and a coke slushie chilling the other, I found myself sitting on the edge of my seat, cheering, booing, gasping and moaning along with the rest of the crowd.
I don’t know if it was because the fighters were women, or because the action was live instead of on a TV screen, or because of the creamy cleavage and bouncy booty encased in sparkly outfits, but when fighters Angie Skye and Mary Lee Rose started throwing each other around the ring, all of my reservations went right out the window.
As the ladies fought, commentators Morgan Sea and Robby Hoffman kept the crowd in stitches while sign girl Dayna MacLeod walked around the ring in varying degrees of undress. In between matches announcer Guizo la Nuit introduced the next fighters.
The second match was between the only two male fighters of the evening, La Momia and The Wonderful Jesse Champagne. La Momia’s costume was awesome and I could tell that these two had some experience in the ring. Also, I find mummies incredibly creepy, so watching one in the ring was thrilling.
For the halftime show Mia Van Leeuwen and sidekick Laura Beeston kept the crowd entertained with a pretty disturbing burlesque-cum-weird theatre piece. In her kind-of-boxing-outfit and kind-of-dead-geisha-girl make-up, Van Leeuwen danced around the front of the ring licking a lollipop, stuffing her face with intestine-looking licorice and then drooling what I suspect was raspberry jam out of her mouth. Apparently it was supposed to “explore the tension between good-girl behaviour and the fierce, feral antics of a woman wanting to fight”, but I really didn’t get that at all. I thought it was ok…and kind of creepy.
The second half of the show sported some pretty heavy hitters with a match between Kalamity and Kira and then Sweet Cherrie and Lufisto. These ladies really beat the crap out of each other and it was SO GREAT! People were thrown out of the ring, someone beat someone with an old VCR and I think one of the ladies even defeated the other with her vagina.
The show ended with a kind of royal rumble where all the fighters got into the ring and beat each other, and the goalie, up.
I can’t remember who was crowned the winner of the night, but I will always remember how much fun I had that night. I can’t wait for the next match. Move over burlesque, there’s a new show in town and it wants to kick your sexy butt.
Photos by Chris Zacchia. For our complete photo set check out the Edgy Lucha Photo album.
