Wrestling Drama

I don't know if this blog has any readers left. Life has been so busy of late that I haven't had time to post anything here. That is to say, "wrestling life" has had a more metaphorical meaning of late, and it has kept me on the defensive, trying to avoid a pin or a submission.

Today, however, with a lull in my "have to" work and some other future work not yet pressing, I decided to close my office door and try some writing. Oddly enough, I started looking at this one-act play I started some months back—maybe more than months. I've never written a play. I've seen several and I've read several, but I've never tried to write one. But over the years, the "scene" of to two strangers, known only to each other through the Internet, meeting in a motel room to wrestle has seemed to me one of the oddest things I've come across—and not only come across but participated in.

And in thinking back across the many such meetings I've had, I began remembering the conversations I've had with these men as much or more as the wrestling we've done. My friendly opponents and I have revealed some surprising things to each other over these years. At times I've believed that we experienced a greater intimacy with each other than I've been able to achieve with friends in the "real world." But my friend Mike (a friend and a friendly opponent) points out—and rightly so—that while I have experienced a certain level of intimacy with these men, the thoughts and secrets revealed create a broader sense of intimacy that is ultimately false. Sure, these men know things about me that nobody else knows, but the bottom line is that such intimate knowledge is, in reality, a very small part of what is to be known about me.

So, I thought I'd write a one-act play to recreate such a meeting and to play with some of the ideas generated by this tightly focused intimacy and what it might reveal about—and how it might affect—life outside that rented room. Being much more a writer of fiction, I could probably pull this off better in that genre. But I want to try writing this play simply because it's a play I'd love to see!