FRIDAY MAY 19
5 ½ Yards: The History and Heritage of the Indian Saree @ Milton Rhodes Center for the Arts (W-S) 5 p.m.
Join artist Namrata Mitra and Arts Council of Winston-Salem & Forsyth County for an opening reception for 5 ½ Yards, Mitra’s exploration of applying the work of Indian artists and weavers to fabric through the traditional saree and keepsake “potli” bags. More information at intothearts.org
SATURDAY MAY 20
Greensboro Bound Literary Festival @ Downtown (GSO) Times Vary by Event
The 2023 Greensboro Bound Literary Festival is a three-day event for authors, book lovers, scholars and more to bond over literature. Enjoy discussion panels and other events hosted by more than 50 authors representing a variety of topics such as the LGBTQ+ experience, social justice, romance and more. Learn more at greensborobound.com/ festival
Greek Festival @ Annunciation Greek Orthodox Church (W-S) 10 a.m.
The Greek Festival is a celebration of heritage
by MICHAELA RATLIFFwith dancing, food and fun. Enjoy the Agora Greek marketplace, a church tour and Greek-style dishes like moussaka, chicken souvlaki and baklava. Visit wsgreekfestival.com for more information.
The 37th annual Carolina Blues Festival is a twoday celebration with a versatile lineup of blues artists representing the theme of origination. Grammy Award-winning headliner Charlie Musselwhite will celebrate the release of his Grammy-nominated album Mississippi Son. Doors open at 1:30. Visit piedmontblues.org/ncbluesweek to purchase tickets.
SUNDAY MAY 21
Sidewalk Chalk Art & Craft Show @ Oak View Recreation Center (HP) 10 a.m.
View sidewalk chalk creations by local artists or create one of your own! This family-friendly gathering features food trucks, games and crafts for all to enjoy. Call 336.883.3508 for more information.
37th Annual Carolina Blues Festival: Origination @ LeBauer Park (GSO) 2 p.m.
Parks Concert Series @ Tanglewood Park (Clemmons) 2 p.m.
Forsyth County Government and Arts Council of Winston-Salem & Forsyth County are hosting a series of free, family-friendly concerts once a month until October. On this day, nine-piece band West End Mambo rock the stage with a fusion of Central American and Caribbean inspired sounds. More info at intothearts.org/parks
Find more events and add your own to our calendar at triad-city-beat.com/local-events/.
I’m not ready to have kids.
the fact that the FDA allows medication abortions to be prescribed via telehealth
BUSINESS
PUBLISHER/EXECUTIVE EDITOR
Brian Clarey brian@triad-city-beat.com
PUBLISHER EMERITUS
Allen Broach allen@triad-city-beat.com
OF COUNSEL
Jonathan Jones
EDITORIAL
MANAGING EDITOR
Sayaka Matsuoka sayaka@triad-city-beat.com
CITYBEAT REPORTER
Gale Melcher gale@triad-city-beat.com
SALES
KEY ACCOUNTS
Chris Rudd chris@triad-city-beat.com
AD MANAGER
Noah Kirby noah@triad-city-beat.com
CONTRIBUTORS
Carolyn de Berry, John Cole, Owens Daniels, James Douglas, Michelle Everette, Luis H. Garay, Destiniee Jaram, Kaitlynn
Havens, Jordan Howse, Matt Jones, Autumn Karen, Michaela Ratliff, Jen Sorensen, Todd Turner
TCB IN A FLASH @ triad-city-beat.com
WEBMASTER
Sam LeBlanc
ART
ART DIRECTOR
Aiden Siobhan aiden@triad-city-beat.com
COVER:
Crop of the cover of Abraham Josephine Riesman’s book, Ringmaster Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America
Design by Aiden Siobhan
by Sayaka MatsuokaSure, I’m about to turn 31 and by the time my mom was my age, she had already had both me and my sister. But I’m just not ready.
I’m focused on my career. I worry about what it will do to us financially. We would have to move (our house is definitely too small for another human). I worry about passing down some of my not-so-great traits to future kids. I want to travel more.
And all of that is okay, because I’m choosing to live without kids for now.
But on Tuesday evening, Republican lawmakers in the NC legislature just took that choice away for thousands more people after overriding Gov. Cooper’s veto of SB 20, or the anti-abortion bill, now law, that makes abortions illegal after 12 weeks.
Formerly, NC allowed abortions up to 20 weeks. With the passage of SB 20, that timeline is cut short by two months, making that decision window for parents even smaller.
Here are some of the facts about the law which will mostly go into effect on July 1:
• Medication abortion access will be cut after 10 weeks of pregnancy (formerly 11 weeks)
• Patients will have to have at least two, and potentially three, in-person visits for a medication abortion despite
• The new law imposes new, medically unnecessary rules on clinics
• It forces patients to listen to state-mandated, non-scientific, anti-abortion counseling prior to access
• Requires physicians to perform an ultrasound on the patient and describe the image to the patient
All of these measures, in addition to the restriction of the timeframe, decreases choice for so many people in the state. As has been heavily reported since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, North Carolina was one of the last havens in the South for abortion access. Our status is quickly eroding.
According to a report released in December 2022 by the research foundation Commonwealth Fund, states that have restricted access to abortion services saw maternal death rates in 2020 rise 62 percent higher than in states that preserved access. Between 2018 and 2020, the maternal death rate increased twice as fast in states that now have abortion restrictions.
If I were to accidentally get pregnant now, I would have the means to travel out of state if I needed to access an abortion; that’s a privilege. But many people do not. And that’s going to lead to unnecessary deaths — deaths that will be on the hands of these legislators who care not for the lives of people who will be directly impacted by their careless, heartless actions.
SB 20 decreases choice for so many people in the state.
Having a child
always be a choice
If you are a wrestling fan, you probably have a better understanding of politics in America than the average non-wrestling fan, at least today.
Abraham Josephine Riesman, pg. ??
n May 2, TCB published an article about mails sent last year between Greensboro Mayor Nancy Vaughan, Guilford County Board of Commissioners Chair Skip Alston, Greensboro Coliseum Director Matt Brown, city councilmembers Nancy Hoffman and Zack Matheny, and other power players in Greensboro revealing their interest in enacting a 1-percent county-wide prepared food tax without input from voters.
But after the May 2 city council meeting, it seemed like the idea had come to a standstill. Vaughan told TCB in an interview that “at this point, there is no movement” on the idea of a prepared food tax.
Matheny also said that he “attended some meetings and was copied on emails” but that he “hadn’t heard of anything in a while.”
But the idea was resurrected during a May 9 work session when councilmember Marikay Abuzuaiter suggested it could increase revenue for city programs and amenities during a discussion about the city’s aquatic facility needs. According to the report, the cost for renovations of swimming pools, sprayground upgrades, and addition of facilities adds up to nearly $82 million.
Abuzuaiter mentioned that she is a council liaison to the Greensboro Sports Foundation, whose President and CEO Richard Beard was included in emails discussing the prepared food tax.
On Sept. 16, 2022, Brown wrote to Vaughan, Beard, City Attorney Chuck
Watts, City Manager Taiwo Jaiyeoba and councilmembers Hoffmann and Matheny, saying that he and Beard were “leading the effort to kick off a Public/Private campaign to implement this initiative successfully through to State Legislative approval ASAP.”
Abuzuaiter said during the May 9 work session, “We have been discussing quite extensively — other cities are way ahead of us…. Greensboro has the opportunity to become a youth sports town, which we basically are but all of the other cities are so far ahead of us building all these new facilities.
“They are seeking other avenues to collect revenues for people that are passing through on a… food sales tax,” she said, adding that people who pass through those cities for tourist attractions like tournaments “are paying that.”
Abuzuaiter acknowledged that residents who frequent local restaurants would not be exempt from the tax, saying, “Yes, if I go, I’m gonna have to pay that penny as well.”
If a county-wide prepared food tax is enacted, an additional 1-percent tax would be tacked on to checks at local restaurants. This includes take-out orders. The combined state and county sales tax rate is currently at 6.75 percent. According to the Tax Foundation, “these high prepared-food taxes are sometimes justified as a luxury tax intended to target higher-income individuals, although the wide diversity of takeout dining options suggests that such a tax is poorly targeted to achieve that goal,” and data collected by the US Bureau of Labor showed that 44 percent of food spending was food away from home in 2018.
While it’s true that people who eat out tend to be younger and wealthier according to the CDC, “one could say that it is a tax on individuals with less flexible schedules or who do not like to cook – rich or poor,” the Tax Foundation argues.
“Just kinda putting that out there,” Abuzuaiter said, adding a comment about Cary, a town moving forward with plans to build a $193 million sports complex that is “surpassing us by leaps and bounds,” according to Abuzuaiter.
The prepared food tax “could be for a lot of the things we’re talking about,” Abuzuaiter added.
“It is something that we have been looking at. Not saying we’re ready to propose and bring it but it’s something that we all need to think about,” Abuzuaiter concluded.
Vaughan acknowledged Abuzuaiter’s suggestion, saying that she has been looking at the tax burdens of other large cities and added that Greensboro compared to others, is “missing out on so much” because the other cities are “looking at different income streams or they get different support from their county.”
It is something that we have been looking at.
GSO Councilperson Marikay Abuzuaiter
Renovations for the apartments at Willie Davis Drive and Cleveland Avenue in Winston-Salem were approved by city council on Monday evening.
The city will spend up to $750,000 to renovate both buildings, “based upon the bidding process and subsequent contract approval by city council.”
In February, residents of two city-owned, affordable-housing buildings — 1200 Willie Davis Drive and 1635 N. Cleveland Ave. in Winston-Salem’s Northeast Ward — received letters from the city stating that they must move out by May 31 in order for the city to perform an “assessment” and renovate both buildings. Following pushback from residents and community activists, the city allowed the residents to stay in their homes while the assessments were conducted. The city has not charged the residents rent since March 1. Currently, residents pay $420-$475 per month.
Residents also worried about whether rent for the refurbished apartments would increase. The resolution adds that there will be an option to evaluate the leases before the lease expiration date for “possible increases of an incremental nature.”
Assistant City Manager Patrice Toney told TCB in mid-March that building repairs were “not likely to raise the rent.”
In addition to the $750,000 spending budget authorized at Monday’s council meeting, 1-year leases were also approved for the tenants, who would continue to be charged their current rental rate. The new leases begin on June 1 and end on May 31, 2024. Additionally, the contract with the current property management company, Majestic Premier Property Management, will be extended.
ortheast Ward representative Barbara Hanes Burke said that the goal will be to “rehab the properties completely, not make minor repairs,” so that they are consistent with other properties that are part of the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative in that area. In 2020, the city received a $30 million grant from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the investment will be used to construct and renovate hundreds of housing units in the Cleveland Avenue area. The groundbreaking ceremony for the project was held in December. Burke added that the same appliances and flooring as those other properties that are part of the Choice Neighborhoods Initiative will be used to rehabilitate 1200 Willie Davis Drive and 1635 Cleveland Ave.
“The beautification efforts will be consistent up and down Cleveland Avenue,” Burke said.
Northwest Ward representative Jeff MacIntosh said that while he’s grateful that the residents’ leases have been extended, he’s not comfortable with the city’s plan for the residents “long-term.”
MacIntosh added that he would like to have an ongoing discussion about whether it’s in “both the tenants’ best interest and the city’s best interest to keep these properties owned by the city of Winston-Salem.”
If the city sells the property, future lease terms and rent rate could be redefined by the new owner. Regarding concerns that the property could be sold, Assistant City Manager Patrice Toney told TCB on Monday that there’s a difference of opinions, noting that “some of the councilmembers do not want to be in the property management business…. Do we keep it and manage it, or do we sell it?” Toney added that something city officials could agree upon “is at least some stability for the residents, at least for a year.”
MacIntosh and Robert Clark voted against the resolution.
Willie Davis Drive resident Cynthia Herson spoke during the meeting’s public comment period, voicing concerns over the decision-making process and future of the residents.
“We’ve got senior citizens that live in my building,” Herson said, adding that the majority of the people who live at the properties are on fixed-income.
Residents and social activists had previously come to a city council meeting in February to ask city officials to freeze the rate of their rent.
Herson said that residents were not included in the decision-making process. “That’s where the problem lies,” Herson said on Monday.
In a press release from the city, Burke said that “communications have occurred with the tenants through their attorney” out of respect for the attorney-client relationship and she wants current residents to be able to stay in the properties for as many years as they desire.
Dan Rose, organizer of Winston-Salem based housing rights advocacy group Housing Justice Now, echoed Herson’s concerns.
“The biggest problem of all is that you’re not talking to the residents,” Rose said.
Residents of Willie Davis Drive and Cleveland Avenue in Greensboro have been embroiled in back and forth conversations with the city about moving out of their homes. PHOTO BY GALE MELCHER
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springhousenc.com
As its name portends, Spring House Restaurant, Kitchen & Bar shines during those months when the flowers bloom and the warm air is alive with birdsong. This year’s Spring Menu reflects those currents of the season with dishes heavy on local ingredients and custom.
Many will opt to start a night at Spring House with a cocktail, either in the Library Bar or any of the appointed indoor and outdoor dining spaces. Perhaps a Cucumber, Thyme and Lime Cooler to cut the heat? Or a Berry-Hibiscus Bourbon Smash to ease the transition from work to play? Tiki drinks with fresh citrus, house classics and seasonal specials round out the menu, with a curated beer menu and healthy slate of non-alcoholic offerings on the list.
Starters and small plates can lean towards the decadent. A house-made Fois Gras Mousse needs little more than a drop of jam atop a crostini for a small, savory bite. Lobster Bisque, a perennial favorite, becomes accented with shrimp dumplings. But don’t miss the Crispy Pork Belly “Burnt Ends,” which may be blasphemy to barbecue purists, but they stand out among a list of exceptional dishes.
Spring entrées include a grilled pork chop treated with braised red cabbage and a mustard cream sauce. Yellow curry balances a cut of grilled salmon, with sweet potatoes and beet-orange relish. A rosemary pan-reduction sauce graces a Filet Mignon tender enough to be cut with a butter knife, also served with a wild-mushroom flan. Lamb, trout, catfish and crepes also make appearances in the Big Plates section of the dinner menu.
But nothing encompasses the springtime like dessert, that sweet reward at the end of the journey. Spring House anchors its dessert menu with the Salted Caramel Banana Pudding, a fine example of the form with a dollop of sweet cream to bring it together. The Ooey Gooey Butter Cake, a St. Louis staple, lives up to its name, while the Spring House Bread Pudding is purely Southern in its execution, with toasted pecans and
Everyone in North Carolina is talking about the abortion bill, which Gov. Roy Cooper very publicly vetoed last week and which survived through a veto override by the House on Tuesday evening. Sure, there’s some drama in these proceedings, but anyone who hoped for a defector from the GOP orthodoxy was living in an alternate reality. The die for this one, we’re afraid, had long been cast.
Meanwhile no one is talking about Giglio, wandering cops and how the NC Legislature is undoing one of the small victories of 2020’s Black Lives Matter movement.
“Giglio” is a legal term applied to a police officer who cannot be called to testify in court due to, in official language, “untrustworthiness.” Prosecutors across the state have Giglio lists of cops they cannot or will not call to the stand. Until 2021, those letters remained private, but a criminal justice reform bill passed that year made Giglio letters public record. In its first full year of tallying untrustworthy cops, the state DOJ and NC Sheriff’s standards and training division reported that 15 cops were officially deemed untrustworthy in 2022. Five of them are still working in law enforcement.
But a new bill aims to stop this transparency just as it’s getting going.
HB704 exists solely to repeal just that one provision of the reform act of 2021, and to destroy any records already compiled by the law enforcement groups. Proponents say that it gives offending officers access to due process after they have been besmirched.
But that’s not what the law says.
The law as it’s written simply repeals the reporting requirement from both the police and sheriff’s associations to make Giglio letters public.
It’s already passed the House, with bipartisan support from Triad reps Ashton Clemmons (D-Guilford), Jeff Zenger (R-Guilford) and House Whip Jon Hardister (R-Guilford). It’s already passed its first reading in the Senate and will probably make its way to the governor’s desk, where the former prosecutor will likely affix his signature rather than get into another prolonged veto battle that he will surely lose.
Like the abortion bill, this one is surely going to be another loss for the people of North Carolina, whose wishes become more irrelevant to our elected officials by the day.
by Joe Scott, illustrations by Madison Ketcham
It was, as announcer Brad Stutts said, “Main event time” in Winston-Salem.
Standing in front of a camera that beamed his face to monitors, tablets and smartphone screens across the internet, Stutts was holding court inside the Benton Convention Center.
Microphone in hand, the announcer gestured at a 24-foot scaffold placed beside the ring, the centerpiece for the championship match between grapplers Brad Greene, aka Brad Attitude, and his opponent Mike White at last February’s Rise to the Top, an online pay-per-view event hosted by Triad-based AML Wrestling.
Pummeling each other relentlessly with a range of weapons that included a garbage can, a metal folding chair, a kendo stick, a computer monitor, their own bodies via stage dives and yes, a toilet brush, Greene and White took many precautions to ensure they didn’t actually harm their “opponents.” Even then, Greene slashed his stomach on a screw that jutted outward from the joists of the scaffold.
“I was gushing blood there,” Greene says. “The accidental things, the stuff you can’t control are the ones that actually get you.”
Greene’s statement represents the ultimate truth of pro wrestling. Even if the action which transpires during the matches is staged, the pain these performers inflict upon their bodies is very real. And monetarily speaking, no person has ever benefited more from the bodily harm that pro wrestlers endure over the span of their careers more than World Wrestling Entertainment owner — and North Carolina native — Vince McMahon.
According to biographer Abraham Josephine Riesman, McMahon’s WWE — which now flexes a chokehold over its industry in ways few businesses could ever hope to achieve — was built upon a disregard for human safety and bodily autonomy.
“It just churns out dead wrestlers,” Riesman says. “It’s not as bad as it used to be in a lot of ways, but it’s still a place without employer-provided health insurance and where people do drugs in order to bulk up or deal with pain.
“It’s a place where workers really have no power and are completely at the whim of the promoter,” Riesman says.
Riesman connects America’s current, post-Trump political landscape to both McMahon and pro-wrestling’s hyper masculine culture while also chronicling the many broken bodies, ruined lives, sexual assaults, deaths and cover-ups left in the wake of McMahon’s rise to power in her New York Times bestseller, Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America.
On May 20, as part of the Greensboro Bound Literary Festival, Riesman will be talking about her book on the The Unmaking of America and the Future of North Carolina panel with Gene Nichol.
The first of what is ostensibly a two-part epic, Riesman’s book chronicles the life of this highly consequential North Carolinian from his humble, and at times traumatic, childhood in Southern Pines, to a gruesome accident at the Over the Edge pay-per-view event in 1999. That is where pro wrestler Owen Hart plummeted 78 feet from the rafters of Kemper Arena in Kansas City, Mo. onto the ring in front of a live audience.
Moments later, Hart would be declared dead of blunt force trauma at the age of 34.
McMahon, who would later accept legal responsibility for the wrestler’s death, compounded this tragedy in the moment when he continued the event as if nothing happened after Hart’s body was carried out of the arena.
Riesman believes Hart’s death was the culmination of McMahon’s career-long libertarian war against health and safety regulations as well as labor unions, which he saw as threats to WWE’s bottom line.
And in the current moment, as conservatives target transgender people and the political left as scapegoats for everything they deem wrong with this country, Riesman argues that McMahon’s career transcends the ring, presenting dire implications on American culture writ large.
“If you are a wrestling fan, you probably have a better understanding of politics in America than the average non-wrestling fan, at least today,” Riesman says. “The ‘cheat codes’ for the political universe were discovered in wrestling before they were implemented in politics.”
There might have been a moment in US history when the idea that a bunch of oiled-up grapplers throwing fake punches on TV could impact our politics would be laughable.
That time is now past as McMahon’s occasional business partner, sometimes employee, close friend and former President Donald Trump ramps for yet another run at the White House — all the while, riling up crowds with speeches that sound an awful lot like promos.
For those alien to the world of entertainment sports, a promo is often a monologue presented in the form of trash talk pro wrestlers spew on TV to get audiences pumped for an event.
“[Trump] can take you for a ride, whether you are completely against what he’s saying or you’re completely for him; he knows how to talk, especially compared to other presidents,” says Greene, who like Trump, was a former WWE employee. “He can either rile you up when he wants to, which he did, or he can get you behind him. “He’s 100 percent a pro wrestler,” he says.
According to Riesman, Trump is such a close friend and admirer of McMahon’s that the former president would take the businessman’s phone calls to the White House privately so the two could speak candidly.
“Trump figured it out, much as Vince had decades prior, that you can profit off of people hating you,” Riesman says, noting McMahon’s willingness to take on a lewd, unscrupulous villain persona inside the ring during WWE programming.
She adds: “You can play to the crowd that loves you and the crowd that hates you and make money off of both of them.”
Though leaders have done almost nothing to commemorate this fact, no state has left a greater mark on the history of professional wrestling than North Carolina.
The Tarheel State would be the chosen home and final resting place of French expat turned global superstar Andre Roussimoff, aka Andre the Giant.
It also served as the homebase for countless champions and industry hall-of-famers loved by millions of fans around the world, including Ric Flair, Sergeant Slaughter, Ricky Steamboat, Junkyard Dog, brothers Jeff and Matt Hardy and Cody Rhodes among many others.
The Greensboro Coliseum has a place in the annals of pro wrestling history. That is where once-venerable pro wrestling promoter Jim Crocket launched Starcade in 1993, the entertainment sport’s first “super card” — a mega-event boasting a roster of popular grapplers from across the country at the event venue.
Nationally broadcast via closed-circuit television, Starcade would go down as pro wrestling’s very first pay-per-view event, a business model that would
gross billions of dollars from pro wrestling fans (or their cajoled parents) for decades.
A Boone native who claims he first attended a Starcade event while wearing diapers, Greene says the importance pro wrestling has on his home state — and vice versa — is undeniable.
“It was very big into molding what is now a global phenomenon,” Greene says. “And it probably wouldn’t have happened if a lot of stuff in North Carolina didn’t happen.”
He points to Madison Square Garden, the famed arena in New York City that proudly touts its connection to WWE and its annual main event Wrestlemania, which McMahon launched there in 1985.
“If you go to Madison Square Garden, they’ve at least got stuff hanging out, memorabilia,” Greene says.
Noting the importance of NC cities like Greensboro and Charlotte in pro wrestling history, Greene finds it odd that neither place commemorates this fact, opting to host museum sites, respectively, for ACC college basketball and NASCAR instead.
“I guess it’s like the stepchild that nobody wants to talk about,” Greene says.
Perhaps that is why so few people are aware of NC’s greatest impact on the history of pro wrestling: the birth of native son, and stepchild, McMahon.
“He spent the first 25 years in North Carolina,” Riesman says. “And aside from like one or two stray mentions over the history of WWE programming, he has never acknowledged North Carolina.”
Within the scant interviews where McMahon acknowledges his NC roots, he portrays himself as a rowdy tough guy, a rebel and even a criminal, who fought dirty during regular scraps with US Marines stationed in the eastern part of the state. To pierce this facade, Riesman and her spouse and editor SI Rosenbaum, visited McMahon’s NC during the pandemic.
Meeting with Riesman at a Bojangles, former classmates of McMahon countered much of the WWE exec’s tough-guy anecdotes with the portrait of an unremarkable, albeit extraverted young man. The furthest thing from the jailbound adolescent brawler the man himself concocted.
“His North Carolina years were so spottily reported,” Riesman says. “It was basically just everyone taking his account of his childhood at face value.” Searching for birth records, Riesman discovered that even McMahon’s name was fake, another trait he shares with most pro wrestlers. The illegitimate son of late former WWE owner (then known as the World Wide Wrestling Federation, or WWWF) Vincent J. McMahon, Sr., Vince McMahon, Jr’s birth name is Vinnie Lupton, his surname belonging to stepfather Leo Lupton, Jr.
This obfuscation of McMahon’s Southern roots extends all the way to how he speaks.
Except in rare instances when he was yelling at on-screen opponents like Stone Cold Steve Austin, McMahon completely masks his Southern drawl, adopting a patois Riesman believes the executive lifted from sportscaster Howard Cosell.
Noting that McMahon had only rekindled a relationship with his biological father during late adolescence, Riesman speculates the reason McMahon, Jr. went to extreme lengths to bury his Southern roots might have been to fit in
with his rediscovered family.
“Here’s Senior, this New York and DC guy through and through, Northeastern his entire life, and all of the sudden his son shows up with some weird, shitkicking Southern accent,” Riesman says. “I’m sure that made [McMahon, Jr.] an object of mockery.”
During his stint wrestling for McMahon as part of a developmental farm league WWE ran in Florida, Greene learned the hard way that his boss’ disdain for the South extended to his employees.
“He equated that to being less than cultured as New Yorkers would be,” Greene says.
He notes that any time he cut a promo with a bit of a Southern twang in his voice, word came down from McMahon’s offices to ‘fix it.’
‘That’s how wrestlers die’
Beyond McMahon’s NC past, Riesman explored the recurring themes and ideology of McMahon — inarguably the greatest controller of American pro wrestling careers and storylines — with the same lens a critic would use for a director or auteur. In doing so, she creates the portrait of a man who saw money as a means to becoming the ultimate power, destroying smaller, regional pro wrestling companies by poaching top talent with lucrative contracts.
Even worse, once these globally beloved performers were in McMahon’s stable, he would strip them of all value via a business culture that pushed steroids, cocaine and other drugs on employees to maintain their boss’ grueling work schedules. Then, when they were of no value to McMahon, as was the case with late Canadian-born star Roderick George Toombs, aka Rowdy Roddy Piper, Riesman says they were discarded like trash.
“Roddy didn’t live to collect his Canadian pension,” Riesman says. “You think of him as dying old because he looked like shit when he died, but that’s how wrestlers die. Even if they’re young, they look like they’re a million years old.”
In addition to the grueling work schedules, pro wrestlers are among the only people to appear on our TV screens without union protections, despite the many physical dangers they face as part of their jobs.
“It’s so messed up that in this country, wrestling, which is a beloved, wonderful, intrinsically American old art form, doesn’t have a fucking union,” Riesman says.”You could just have them all be in SAG-AFTRA, because they’re performing on television every week, but they fought for loopholes that kept that from happening.”
These loopholes that McMahon fought for, which could very well be his biggest contribution to the art, involved admitting that pro wrestling was not a real competitive sport — or that it was “fake” — coining the hybrid term “entertainment sports.” This distinction bars McMahon’s employees from the regulations or industry protections afforded to both professional athletes and actors.
During his time working for WWE, Greene remembers entire months of his life with non-stop traveling and performances where he had one off-day per week, if that.
“It’s a world that nobody understands because even Major League Baseball, where people have
tough schedules, they at least have an off season,” Greene says. “They at least get pampered by a corporate jet or by limos and free hotels and different stuff like that. [WWE] doesn’t do any of that, and what I just explained is the best company in wrestling.”
Baked into McMahon’s legacy was his talent for generating heat — a pro-wrestling term for harnessing negative reactions or real-life tensions as a way of promoting his events. No promoter excelled at this more than McMahon.
Racism, misogyny, Islamophobia, Satanic panic and xenophobia are just a few of the many cards in McMahon’s rolodex of bigotries played to drum up demand for his programming. Another he wielded often to great effect was queerphobia, which is ironic according to Riesman.
“The overt text of wrestling is almost always, at least in WWE, heteronormative,” says Riesman. “But what’s interesting is the subtext is very queer and very trans. On one hand, it’s teaching you that the right way to be a boy is to be a homophobe. But at the same time, it’s sending you this coded message that you often pick up on when you’re older that it’s beautiful to express yourself, and it’s beautiful to wear bright colors and to show off your body.”
It was at the end of Riesman’s exhaustive journey to discover McMahon’s true identity that she accomplished the same for herself.
Just as allegations surfaced that McMahon had paid $12 million in hush money to silence four female employees who accused him of sexual misconduct in summer 2022, Riesman had finished the first draft of her book. She was attending Rhode Island PrideFest and noticed a kiosk selling plus-sized rainbow-mesh bodystocking.
She tried the garment on in a portable bathroom, and realized she was transgender.
“Having this revelation at Pride was having spent, at that point, more than two years inside the head of the world’s most macho man, Vince McMahon,” Riesman says. “Around the end of finishing that first draft, part of me was like, If that’s what manhood is going to be, I’d rather not be part of it.
“If that’s what it means to be a man, I don’t need to be on that team right now.”
Even before she realized she was a transwoman, Riesman was fascinated by pro wrestling’s duality of being both militantly heteronormative while simultaneously influenced and empowered, by gay and BDSM culture.
“The essence of a wrestling match is that strength is weakness,” Riesman says. “Because you can have two people who have absolutely no physical skill. And if one of them can hold the other’s finger and pretend to be bending it back, as long as the other one can show weakness and pain in their face and body, you got a wrestling match, baby!”
This intersection of normative and queer cultures is part of the reason that, as a teenage pro-wrestling fan, Riesman could watch pro wrestling events in the homes of the very same kids who bullied her at school.
“It can be a real common language, or lingua franca, for people who otherwise have very little in common,” Riesman says. “You know, I’m a trans
lady anarchist, and yet this truly brought me into contact with so many people who are Trump supporters, or just simply Trump voters or who are otherwise conservative, and who might be in favor of policies that are bad for trans people.”
Despite the common ground pro wrestling gave her with bullies or ideological opponents, the overt text of its heteronormativity became impossible for Riesman to ignore at WrestleCon 2023, an annual fan convention that took place during the same weekend as WWE’s Wrestlemania 39 in Los Angeles in April.
Promoting the just-released Ringmaster, Riesman walked the autograph floor, searching for current or retired pro wrestlers to connect with her work. That’s when she noticed former WWE mega-heel Ted DiBiase, aka the Million Dollar Man, sitting at an autograph table.
“I walk over and think, That’s a guy who interacted with Vince a fair amount,” Riesman says. “I offered him the book, but he gave me a weird look and said, ‘No thank you.”
It was then that Riesman says she was accosted by another pro wrestling legend, Rick Steiner.
“Rick Steiner looks at me and asks, ‘Are you wearing a wig?,’ and I say ‘No, that’s my real hair.’”
She adds that she then leaned over, inviting Steiner to pull her hair, causing the WWE hall of famer and tag team champion to recoil in disgust.
That same day, Steiner would ultimately get banned from WrestleCon for shouting transphobic slurs across the convention floor at Gisele Shaw, a transwoman and star of the Impact Wrestling promotion based in Nashville.
“In both cases, neither of us was even interacting with him,” Riesman says. “It was super weird, but he was just proactively like, There’s a trans person, time to get angry! But who can explain the mind of a transphobe?”
And yet the minds of transphobes are becoming a major concern for Riesman.
Just as McMahon and the WWE once paraded androgynous or queer-coded “heels” (a wrestling term for villains) in arenas across America to sell payper-view buys, Republicans are using a similar ploy to attract voters.
As fiscal conservatives struggle to sell a majority of US citizens on a platform that ignores climate change, cuts welfare for hungry families and slashes Medicare and retirement benefits for the elderly, their current play is a desperate culture war against trans people via hateful legislation.
The legislation ranges from the asinine, such as bills that place prohibitions on drag performers — many of whom are not even trans — to openly fascistic. The latter includes laws that would restrict access to gender-affirming health treatments for trans people of any age and impose disbarment or prison sentences on medical professionals who provided them.
Even here in NC, where a 2016 “Bathroom Bill” damaged the state’s reputation and resulted in millions of dollars in lost business and national event revenues, Republicans are doubling down, introducing no less than seven anti-trans laws in 2023 alone.
What makes the situation feel especially dire for Riesman is the feeling that support for trans people among so-called ‘allies’ or progressives is receding — even within the LGBTQ+ community.
“That’s really scary when you get abandoned by the people who you once shared an acronym with,” says Riesman, citing strong or even vaguely anti-trans editorials or opinions by queer and/or “progressive” writers like Johnathan Chait, Jesse Singal, Andrew Sullivan or Katie Herzog.
“It really does feel like trans people are being offered up as an acceptable sacrifice,” Riesman says. “They just don’t care if we are dead and there are no trans people. Either they would prefer it or they wouldn’t shed a tear.”
Greene ultimately lost the championship scaffold match at the Rise to the Top event in Winston-Salem.
Acknowledging the crowds that attend his events now are much smaller than the ones who packed Greensboro Coliseum for Starcade 40 years ago — a result of McMahon’s legacy of driving regional pro wrestling promotions into the dirt — Greene says the thrill is still there.
It’s also something he can’t give up, even after being fired from McMahon’s company in 2008.
“It’s like being in the NFL and being a rock star at the same time,” Greene says.
He later adds: “I’ve tried to play golf competitively, but nothing gets me as pumped up, nothing satisfies my creative juices.”
For McMahon, now 78, the allure of his industry — which many veteran pro wrestlers describe half-pejoratively as a “sickness” — is difficult to shake as well.
After revelations he spent millions of his company’s dollars to silence sexual misconduct allegations, McMahon was pushed by his company’s board to step down and ultimately resign as CEO. Six months later, McMahon would strip control of the WWE from the same board that ousted him — including his own daughter Stephanie McMahon — and return as the company’s leader. Inside his ring, Vince McMahon faced a myriad of foes. Outside of it, he defeated something else: His own accountability.
This is a fight Riesman says McMahon has been winning his entire life. What makes this particular moment scary, Riesman says, is that many political leaders are looking at McMahon’s life lessons and personal business practices and applying them to the country as a whole.
“You can’t just throw virtue and truth at Mr. McMahon and expect to win,” Riesman says. “I don’t know what wins against Mr. McMahon, but it’s not that. You can fact check Mr. McMahon all you like, and it only makes him stronger.”
Joe Scott is the writer, editor and host of Downlow.d, a narrative podcast series that explores the shift in cinema culture when a bunch of angry nerds from the internet replaced print film critics during the ‘00s. For more information or to listen, visit downlowdpod.com.
BY CAROLYN DE BERRY
A scene from Saturday’s rally in downtown Greensboro to protest SB 20, a bill that reduces access to abortion in North Carolina. On Tuesday the North Carolina General Assembly voted to override a veto from the governor, imposing more abortion restrictions in the state.
by Matt Jones
16. U2’s guitarist, with “The”
Liberal Redneck”
44. “Harper Valley ___”
45. “Frozen” role
47. Wiz Khalifa’s genre
50. Sandy site
53. Totally get, slangily
54. Taj Mahal site
55. Undermining scheme by a blanket hog?
58. Numbered piece
59. “I Am Not My Hair” singer India.___
60. Damages
61. Directors Robbins and Burton
62. Planters products
63. Dental restoration
Down
1. “Table’s ready” signaler
2. It’s used to make tequila
3. Worked in court, perhaps
4. Al Gore’s state, for short
5. “OK”
6. “Futurama” character, maybe
7. Some poker bets
8. Fold up, like a flag
9. Harvard botanist Gray
10. “The Little Rascals” dog
11. “Thor” role for Anthony Hopkins
12. Four-award feat
13. ___ Wearhouse (suit retailer)
18. Single part
19. Get carried away at a concert?
24. Moonshine, by another name
25. “Big Yellow Taxi” singer Mitchell
27. Social wisdom
28. Overactors
29. “Mayday” Parker’s alter ego
30. “Bonne fete ___” (“Happy Birthday” line, in Canada)
34. “OK”
35. Up in the air, briefly
36. Annapolis inst.
38. Bartender’s mixer
43. “___ On Me” (A-ha song)
44. News coverage
45. Planetary path
46. Really enjoys
48. Tacoma ___ (local slang for a nearby industrial emanation)
49. Violet family flower
50. “Nae” sayer?
51. Arizona language
52. Cell in a Fallopian tube
53. All-knowing advisor
54. ___ alternative
56. ___ Rafael, Calif.
57. Letter after pi
LAST
41. Check follower?
42. Drink suffix
43. Comedian Crowder known as “The
31. Polliwog’s place
32. Site of the Kon-Tiki Museum
33. Bridge length
‘Sandwiched Between’ — some deep cuts here.
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