On this ride, Steve and Mal consider professional wrestling careers real and imaginary before examining the universal experience of feeling like The Other — source of pain, Gothic literature, and wonder.
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Show notes:
Rosalyn Drexler, Steve’s mother’s old friend, has not just been a professional wrestler but also an artist and a writer. See https://news.artnet.com/art-world/rosalyn-drexler-garth-greenan-1048784 and this memorable info about her from Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalyn_Drexler:
“[In the 1950s,] [a]fter a friend of Drexler’s suggested that she might enjoy trying wrestling, she began to work out at Botners [Gym in Hell’s Kitchen in NYC]. She soon learned how to wrestle without hurting anyone and how to make maximum noise while wrestling to exaggerate the impact of her performance. Drexler eventually travelled for wrestling matches, which allowed her to travel to the South and to Florida under the character of “Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire….
“Drexler’s experience as Rosa Carlo later formed the basis of her 1972 critically acclaimed novel To Smithereens. She wrote the novel because she hated the experience, but thought it should not be wasted, and she should ‘at least get a book out of it.’… When she was 54, she tried getting back into being an athlete and entered a power lifting contest, which she did not win.”
Details about Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment: It does not appear that Wilde was ever subjected to chemical castration of the type so tragically imposed on Alan Turing, as Mal suggested in this Ep. However, he was sentenced not only to two years of imprisonment, but to “hard labour” while he was in prison. At the first prison he was sent to, that meant he was forced to spend many hours “walking a treadmill and picking oakum (separating the fibres in scraps of old navy ropes)”; at the second prison, he was subjected to a “regimen of ‘hard labour, hard fare and a hard bed’, which wore harshly on [his] delicate health. In November he collapsed during chapel from illness and hunger. His right ear drum was ruptured in the fall, an injury that later contributed to his death. He spent two months in the infirmary.” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde#Imprisonment]
For P.G. Wodehouse’s scandal involving his becoming a broadcasting tool of the Nazis see https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/jun/17/humanities.books (Fact corrections: Steve was mistaken wherein he stated that Wodehouse was held by the Nazis on a trip to Germany. It was France Wodehouse had visited shortly before the Nazis took it over; he was moved to Germany later. Steve was also mistaken wherein he suggested that Wodehouse and Churchill were distantly related to each other. Though apparently Churchill was a 7th cousin of FDR. FWIW.)
For an interview with the real Gary Schwartz, Steve’s artistic cousin, read the article at https://canvasrebel.com/meet-gary-schwartz/.
Here’s the junior high school soccer team photo wherein Steve was trying hard to look handsome, with pitiful results:
