¡Lucha libre!

Get your game face on.

This is me with one of the luchadoras. Yeah, that's her in the photo behind us, holding her infant son.

Pro wrestling of any sort is not a natural interest of mine. When I was a freshman in high school, a guy started a WWF Club for his senior project, putting on several outrageously ridiculous spectacles of posing, jumping around and doing other staged tricks. Loved it. Then Jack Black did Nacho Libre and I was pretty much sold. So I’ve been meaning to get to the luchas since I got here, and started easing my way in last weekend by going to a lucha libre photo exhibition plus espectacular at the Auditorio Nacional.
Basically what we’re talking about here are a bunch of 250-pound men in lycra climbing the ropes and jumping on top of each other before a completely wigged-out audience. It’s great. Some say they don’t “get” lucha libre. There’s nothing to get. We’re not talking about edutainment here.
So I happily joined the throngs, many of them rocking their own shiny lucha libre masks, and cheered as two burly women from Mexico tore into a couple of Japanese girls in ruffled hot pants. ¡Eso es, Mexico!