Thirsty Thursday: 'My life changed... I went to the wrestling'

"Yelling weird and oddly specific things out at people is my favourite thing to do, and this time I was not alone."

Sarah McCarthy, the author of the Thirsty Thursday column.

• Entertaining wordsmith Sarah McCarthy writes a weekly column for The Southland Tribune called Thirsty Thursday.

THIRSTY THURSDAY 4

(Making the kids watch movies with subtitles on counts as educational)

After all my chat about loving being at home, I had a frighteningly active and public time of it this past week.

I went to The Mall to be part of the fabulous Night of the Arts late Friday afternoon.

The plan was for some good old-fashioned street performance where a friend and I would be mean old women with a knitting stall who would cause mayhem. I got there first and managed to garner a complaint to management within about 25 minutes for yelling out at people who obviously thought I was actually a mean old lady and not an artist making a wider, incredibly complex point about the silencing of older women by telling girls they would get a chill in their kidneys and leering at older men.

Then I had a thing to be MC for on the same night, which is one of my actual jobs, and so I had to transform from mean old lady to mean middle-aged lady with brushed hair, mascara and a bra on, and so I bravely made architects laugh by telling them I was going home to set my ugly house on fire and then scuttled home, apologised to the front door for my slander, drank wine and fell asleep on the couch.

Then on Saturday night my life changed. I went to the wrestling.

I can’t remember the last time I was at the Workingmen’s Club because I’m always worried I’ll be caught up in some kind of grim Groundswell meeting and end up on the news. But it was a chance to rip the boys’ eyeballs away from screens for an evening and we were going with two other couples and their kids, so I dressed up in my second-best Canadian tuxedo and away we went.

It was buzzing at the Workies, and on the way in we met some people we knew who were in fancy dress and they asked if I was also going to the same party they were going to, so perhaps I’d leaned a bit hard into the theme.

And the wrestling was amazing. Amazing. Yelling weird and oddly specific things out at people is my favourite thing to do, and this time I was not alone. We booed and cheered for the goodies and baddies and gasped and shrieked and laughed at the action in the ring.

There were outrageous costumes and the wrestlers ran the gamut from ridiculous to a bit sexy and I yelled at one wrestler to soak his jocks in Napisan. Amazing.

By half-time we were all giddy and the tribe of kids we’d brought with us had decamped to the far side of the room with a bunch of other kids and were merrily clotheslining each other and honestly it was the best thing I’ve done in a million years.

Afterwards we walked out into the cold, cold night and the kids, who are sheltered, were thrilled at being out at night-time in town. We drove home in our warm car while the night went on without us and the kids loudly recounted the (frankly horrific) things they’d been yelling out to the wrestlers while the stars guided us home to our whare, where we’d left the lights on and it was a beacon in the bush and there was a frantically happy little dog poking his head through the cat door and yelping welcome.

And then this week I had to message the friends we went with to tell them that yes, as I had fearfully suspected before we even left the house on Saturday, one of us definitely has nits.