General (spoiler-free) thoughts on attending a Lucha Underground show

I went to a Lucha Underground triple taping on Sunday and thought I'd write a little bit on my experiences attending, from the perspective of a guy crazy enough to fly out to Mexico multiple weekends a year just to watch lucha. (This is probably the perspective of no one else.)

Someone asked me how I thought a LU taping differed a normal (i.e., Mexico) lucha show. The tl;dr/bottom-line/executive-summary version is that I don't think it really does. There are far more similarities than differences, and the differences are more in form rather than actual substance.

Yes, there are the well-known entrance logistics: you have to email in advance for tickets, and there is a strict dress code and an equally strict prohibition on using cell phones. But once the actual wrestling started, it felt like a normal lucha show in pretty much every way. I saw crazy spots that I couldn't dream up even in the ample time that I spent failing to fall asleep before my trip. We had to vacate our seats because spots were going to happen there. That happens all the time in Mexico. So, check.

As far as the crowd goes, the LU temple was hot all night. In Mexico, this isn't always the case, especially in the CMLL venues, but the more popular indie venues (Coliseo Coacalco, Arena San Juan Pantitlán) tend to have boisterous crowds most of the time. The LU faithful is very well aware of some of the more common vulgar chants that are thrown around in Mexico (though they avoided the ch word). There are also the chants that you would expect from an American crowd, but it seemed slightly weighted towards Spanish when I was there.

After the show, a lot of fans hung around in the parking lot to get autographs and photos with luchadors as they left. Just as in Mexico, some guys barely made a step every 30 seconds. But everyone that I could see was taking time for all fans.

As I said earlier, I'm one crazy fan who travels 2,000+ miles each way for one show. But I know guys who live in the Mexico City area and get to see as many crazy lucha matches as they care, and yet would love to see a LU taping. Perhaps Lucha Underground gets the live taping experience as authentic as it can, at least within the legal constraints of an actual TV program. I know I had a blast, just as I do in Mexico.

Thanksgiving reflections of a lucha fan

After picking up my fiancée from the airport for her first Thanksgiving with my family, I reflected on the last couple years of my life, and how different they've been from the previous 30.

Most of you reading this probably know that I'm engaged to @conjuarez, and that we met because of mutual interest in lucha. The crazy thing about this is that several years ago, neither of us had that interest. It's a rather convoluted way to meet. On top of that, both of us are generally happy people (even as snarky as I can be at times), and both of us were happily single. That changed in October 2013, when we moved beyond being just friends.

As much as I might deride certain promotions or people involved in lucha, my fandom has been -- and continues to be -- an unbelievable experience that has completely rewritten large parts of my life. And as perhaps melodramatic as the previous sentence might sound, I'm completely confident that I'm not overstating this.

I'm thankful for the way that lucha has been able to make me emotionally vested, to bring out the little kid in me that temporarily puts aside some unfortunate aspects of the business I've learned.

I'm thankful for our ever-expanding circle of great friends whom we've met by virtue of lucha and who have helped to make every trip to Mexico City special -- especially the first in September 2014, which was for me the trip of a lifetime.

But most of all, I'm thankful for the incredible way in which lucha managed to make fans out of @conjuarez and me and to bring us together based on an interest that neither of us had previously. To this day, we can't figure out how this happened; we're sure only that it was meant to happen, and that lucha libre was the vehicle.

November 7 CaraLucha

BTJr. likes it when I do these write-ups of my weekend trips. Hopefully some others of you do too.

I made an overnight trip to see CaraLucha's November 7 show in Arena San Juan Pantitlán. The show started and ended strong and was overall pretty solid throughout. You can't ask for much more.

Nominal start time was 6pm. Doors opened a little bit after that, and I have the first match entrances starting at about 6:33pm.

July 19 Chilanga Mask

Finishing up my series about the July 18-19 trip to Mexico, this post will cover the last of three shows that we attended, the Chilanga Mask show.

Chilanga Mask
July 19, 2015, 2pm, Coliseo Coacalco, Coacalco, Estado de México

The nominal start time was 2pm, but as BTJr. mentioned to me for planning purposes, the show always starts a about half-hour later, and this was indeed the case here; I have the first match starting at 2:37pm local time.

July 18-19 non-show trip notes

Continuing my series about the July 18-19 weekend trip to Mexico City, for which I've already written posts about the shows that we attended on Saturday (Lucha Mutante and Arena Coliseo), this post will cover our activities outside of the shows themselves. This is mostly a bunch of scattered notes that jump around in time.

July 18 Saturday Arena Coliseo

This is the second in a series of posts covering my last trip to Mexico City, on July 18-19. After the Lucha Mutante show, which I wrote about previously, one of Black Terry Jr.'s cousins very kindly gave us a ride to Arena Coliseo. We arrived in time for the fifth match (Tritón vs. Okumura), the last of the one-fall singles matches on the card.

July 18 Lucha Mutante show

So, as most of you reading this are likely aware, I did another of my crazy weekend trips to Mexico last weekend (July 18-19), to watch the Lucha Mutante (Saturday, 4pm), Arena Coliseo  (Saturday, 7:30pm), and Chilanga Mask (Sunday 2:30pm) shows with my fiancée, Cecilia. Black Terry Jr. (BTJr.) kindly asked if I could write up something about the trip, so here goes.

This post will be the first in a series of three or four, depending on how verbose I end up being.

Lucha Mutante Experimento I
July 18, 2015, 4pm, Deportivo 18 de Marzo, Mexico City

The first show that we attended was Lucha Mutante. Deportivo 18 de Marzo is essentially a park in the northern part of Mexico City. The show itself took place inside a large tent. The nominal start time of 4pm was, in reality, when they started letting people in; the first match didn't start until around 5:25pm local time.