Star Tribune from Minneapolis, Minnesota • Page 62

10E ThursdayMay 241990Star Tribune older, recollections of travel become a matter of taste As we get Erma Bombeck The young woman observed that about 75 percent of the conversation with older people is about food where it is, how much it cost, how it tasted. She wondered if it was because they grew up in the Great Depression, when food was scarce and they had to eat the same thing all the time. I think that's part of it. When I was attending college, my mother's letters read like a menu. She began with breakfast and outlined everything she had to eat for the entire I blamed the Depression years for having to "clean up" everything on my plate and eat up the black bananas before I could start on the yellow ones.

We were told the "heels" of bread made your hair curly and starving Armenians were waiting in line for those stinking Brussels sprouts. Mom would spend a fortune on glass jars and lids to can a bag of "free apples. My other theory is that after a certain age, food is one of the few vices left that you can enjoy. The kids are gone and have their own lives. Your job is a memory.

Physical activities are a real effort. A new car no longer gives you the kick it once did. Food is one of the few fantasies you can lust after and turn into reality. If you live long enough, food even replaces sex. Our young friend said the weird part of her findings was that a couple of weeks ago, a contemporary of hers went to a Paul McCartney concert, and when asked how she liked it, said, "Oh, it was great.

You should have seen all the food we had before the concert honey-baked ham, roast turkey, munchies WRESTLING: Gagne's unhappy about top draws are unusual. A typical WWF event at the Met Center draws 8,000 to 10,000, according to Planamenta.) Gagne is hopeful. "I see the cycle being repeated," he said. "Gorgeous George was a tremendous success, in his time. And I see it all happening again, with a swing back away from that," said the 64-year-old retired pro.

Though the business has changed radically in recent years, the fans remain the same, said Gagne. An enormous black-and-white framed photo in a hallway near his office shows the inside of a huge auditorium in Chicago in about 1950. A vast expanse of people, nearly all wearing dark business suits, surrounds the ring. "Suits!" said Gagne. "Suits! Suits! That's what kind of people came to see wrestling." And while today's fans dress casually, they're not crazed low-lifes, he said.

Whether there is a WWF stranglehold that's lessening or whether it's just an evolution towards a permanently more-lurid rasslin', the fans' love of the spectacle remains the key to the future of the business. Matt Potts said his pleasure is to go to matches with friends and root for the bad guys. Lately they've taken to cheering during the Soviet anthem and saluting the Iranian flag, which drives some other fans nuts. "One lady tried to punch me," Potts said. "It was great." A "thirtysomething" reader posed an interesting question.

"Why is it when speaking with an 'older' person about a trip or a vacation they've been on, I get an answer like this? "Me: 'You were at Yellowstone last summer. How was "Them: 'Oh, it was wonderful! We had the best spaghetti I've ever tasted just outside of Jackson Hole at a little restaurant ment," he said. Gagne now says that his is the purer form of the sport. "What we do is wrestling, he said. Not that he is averse to a little showbiz from time to time.

In 1986 he staged a WrestleRock event at the Metro-dome, bringing in Waylon Jennings to cap an afternoon in which 52 professional wrestlers, including 10 women, grunted and growled through 16 matches. Fan Matt Potts of Minneapolis, who at 25 has been watching pro wrestling for 20 years, doesn't care for the influence of the WWF on wrestling in general. "There's more gimmickry now because of the WWF," said Potts, who works at Music-land. WWF events are "more like a little-kid TV show." The AWA and NWA are roughly equal in providing what many local fans call traditional pro wrestling. The geographical divisions faded, said Bob Ryan, legal counsel for the AWA and a longtime fan, when promoters found they could sell commercial time on their increasingly popular shows.

Wrestling got very popular that much is obvious from the 20 or so hours of weekly programming. So what caused the popularity? Fans, promoters and wrestlers are full of vague generalities about why, but the consensus is that the WWF led the way with an intensification of good-guybad-guy hype and by extending the age of fans downward with unblinking appeals to children, with Hulk Hogan dolls and the Hulk-ster himself encouraging all his "little Hulkomaniacs" to say their prayers and eat their vitamins. There is no consensus beyond that. The WWF carried the good-guy-bad-guy imagery either to new lows or new highs, depending on whom you talk to. Gagne says that the gimmickry has gotten out of hand, and Potts described with scorn "a guy running around calling himself the Barber and bringing hedge clippers into the The changes are not a problem for Eddie Sharkey of Minneapolis, longtime wrestler and manager who left a 10-year career with WWA to join the WWF.

Sharkey is very happy in his lot. "The WWF also treated people like human beings," he said. Sharkey said he had problems with Gagne and had gone to the WWF and found a home there that he never intends to leave. Continued from page 1E Hogan and the Ultimate Warrior, and appears on about 300 TV stations, with USA cable as its national putlet. And the WWF regularly appears right here in the Twin Cities it put on a show at Met Center in Bloomington just last weekend.

The third big organization is the National Wrestling Alliance (NWA), based in Atlanta, with about 100 stations nationally, including Turner Broadcasting cable outlets. According to Gagne and other local wrestlers, fans and promoters we talked to, the WWF has taken the sport to unprecedented heights of cartoonery. Gagne is unhappy about losing some of his best draws, including Hulk Hogan and Jesse (The Body) Ventura, to the WWF. The AWA still puts on matches from Mexico to Canada and appears on about 75 TV stations, including the cable network of ESPN, but it's no longer the only, or even the largest, entity in wrestling west Of Chicago. All three leagues now compete almost everywhere in North America.

How did it happen? In most of the decades after Gorgeous George, but before the '80s, wrestling wasn't much of a TV phenomenon, just a couple of hours on local TV of a Sunday morning, a show used by promoters as a way to plug their upcoming matches, which drew 15,000 people or more. And any commercial spots that got sold were incidental. The 1980s boom, according to fans, wrestlers and promoters, happened because the promotional methods of the WWF's Vince Mc-Mahon Jr. took the sport nationwide. The promoter dreamed up Wrestlemania shows and sold them to TV, convinced NBC to run a monthly "Saturday Night Main Event" in the "Saturday Night Live" time slot, and produced profitable pay-per-view wrestling deals.

Mc-Mahon also sought to broaden the sport's appeal with calculated publicity stunts, such as bringing in Cyndi Lauper as a manager and William (The Refrigerator) Perry as a wrestler. Today the WWF denies it's even in the business of pro wrestling. "It's total apples and oranges," said Steve Planamenta of the WWF. "We're something new and unique. Other people are in pro wrestling.

We've knocked down the barriers and evolved into sports entertain WALK AWAY FROM FOOT PROBLEMS Are Corns and Callouses Slowing You Down? week. Our phone conversations were always about the same thing: food. "What are you having for dinner? I'm heating up the leftover ham and frying some potatoes and having a little corn on the cob." A few years ago, she and my dad took a cruise to Alaska. They took 125 slides; only six had people in them. (Two of them were pastry chefs.) The other pictures were carved bits of ice, cheese displays, baskets of bread and flaming desserts.

losing some Garage D'or record shop in Minneapolis, offered the perspective of a wrestling purist. Katzman, 35 and a fan since he was 8, said he views six or seven hours on a weekend, but only watches WWF programming "if I'm hard up to watch wrestling. Vince McMahon has brought in a more flamboyant style. The wrestling takos a back seat." And maybe that hasn't been all bad, said AWA's Bob Ryan. As a direct result of the WWF's excesses, "the characters became more interesting.

They really got into costumes. Instead of appealing to an older demographic, they began to reach down to children." Change upon change. Wrestlers used to agree to work for one league or another exclusively with no contract, just on the strength of a handshake, Gagne said. Not any more. Not since the WWF grabbed up Hulk Hogan away from Gagne.

"That organization raided us," Gagne said. Karch said, "Most of the talent roster from the years that the AWA did so well, the early '80s, went over to the WWF," Karch said. That included Hogan, Jesse (the Body) Ventura and Andre the Giant. But Gagne countered the tightening WWF stranglehold with a few ideas of his own, ideas like WrestleRock and staging a football game in the ring, with lines drawn on the mat. And small ideas, too, like taking two major nonstars called "Sodbuster" and "Scrap Iron," and pitting them against each other in a match called "The Battle of the Losers." Among the three leagues, viewer-ship is at least 2 million households per week.

The WWF alone estimates 1 .2 million. The demand for wrestling has increased in past years but it hasn't kept up with the ever-increasing supply on TV. hasn't been good for us. It's come to the point where the oversaturation is killing us," Gagne said. One of the changes of the '80s TV revolution was a dramatic drop in ringside attendance: Gagne said his gate, which was often 19,000 at the start of the decade, lately has been about 5,000.

And that number is a recovery from gates that Karch estimated were as low as 1 ,500 a couple of years ago. A WWF WrestleMania event drew 7,000 in 1987 but those numbers popularity at couples as well as women. They often have the aura of romance novels. "My movies are not used for stag parties," she said. "It's a woman's sex fantasy as opposed to a man's." The latest trend in adult videotapes is the amateur production, perhaps reflecting the popularity of the television show "America's Funniest Home Videos." The tapes feature ordinary people sometimes working for a fee, sometimes free in poorly lighted, shakily photographed, often graphic depictions of their sexual exploits.

"People can relate much more to what they are seeing," said Howard Samuelson, 45, the president of Video in Orlando, which is one of several companies that sell the amateur tapes. "They say, 'Hey, that looks just like my Despite the consumer interest in adult tapes, video store owners say they are feeling legal and community pressure, particularly in the South, where fundamentalist groups such as the American Family Association of Tupelo, wield considerable power. "Retailers are sort of nervous because of the new moralists and zealous local prosecuting attorneys," said Frank K. Moldstad, the editor in chief of Video Store Magazine in Santa Ana, Calif. "The paranoia is fairly high." In a nationwide mail survey of 1 ,000 video stores in January, video Store Magazine found that 68 percent of the stores carried sexually explicit tapes, a figure that has remained relatively steady for several years in similar polls by the magazine.

Well, no need to suffer any longer. Corns and callouses are often caused from small bumps or spurs on the underlying bone. An in-offlce surgical procedure can often eliminate these common foot problems permanently. The patient is able to walk out of the office (Foot Clinic) with no cast and no hospital stay is necessary. I told my reader that her friend was older than she thinks.

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$4.99 Graduation Special All Party Paper Goods 25OFF 4m 4 i WWF-style "events" are fine with him. Change has been a constant for everyone. Minneapolis-based wrestler Sandy Partlow, 39, onetime holder of the U.S. women's championship title with the AWA (and a self-described "bad said, "There's been a complete change from 1969, when I started. The women are trying to sell their bodies.

Well, they they were when I started, too, but we were more into the holds and counterholds. "When I started, you had to take it or get out. A lot of the girls now, they break their fingernails and they're ready to leave." But now, she said, the fans are resuming an interest in the old-fashioned ways. "They're coming to see the professional side." Could this be the beginning of a return swing from WWF-radical to AWA-conservative? That's doubtful, according to longtime observer Mick Karch. Karch's "Saturday Night Ringside" TV show has been on local TV for two years (9 p.m.

Saturdays on KTMA, Ch. 23) featuring non-WWF wrestling and interviews that consist mainly of threats of death and dismemberment between various wrestlers. Karch said that "if the pendulum is swinging back towards the conventional in wrestling it's a slow swing. I don't see it yet. "The only thing I can point to is that a lot of the mail (He gets 200 letters a week.) is very negative on the WWF.

It always has been, because this is an AWA town, but it's more than it used to be." Karch said that subtler changes have taken place. The obvious ones, the emphasis on muscles and physique and cartoonlike characters, perhaps masked the less-noticeable ones. If you look closely, Karch said, "you rarely see Hulk or the Ultimate Warrior in a match where they last longer then 15 minutes. "It's not just show business; Ultimate has really had it after 15 minutes. Ric Flair (an NWA star) will consistently give you 30 minutes." And that may be the future of wrestling, he said.

If that's the future, Karch said, then we'll see a change to 15-minute matches between competitors whose telegenic physiques conceal a lack of stamina. Terry Katzman, co-owner of the high in U.S. One factor cited by industry officials for the increased popularity of adult videotapes is that more people are seeing them and discovering that they enjoy them in hotel rooms and on home televisions, via satellite dish antennas and on some cable channels. But most of the broadcast versions are less explicit than those available on videocassettes. In 1989 Adult Video News, a trade magazine edited and published by Paul Fishbein in Upper Darby, asked 500 stores who their adult-tape customers were.

The responses: 40 percent were individual men, 29 percent were men and women renting a tape together, 15 percent were individual women, 13 percent were two men renting a tape together, and 3 percent were two women together. "My husband and I rent them every once in a while," said Maria Vander Horn, 26, an accountant in Stamford. "Some are more tasteful than others. The ones that are really disgusting, I don't like." Subject matter generally considered taboo has just about disappeared from the market. Homosexual male themes have increased, and a new market has developed for tapes featuring men involved in bisexual activity.

Women engaging in bisexual acts have long been a feature of adult films. A development of the last four years is the tape that caters to women. Candida Royalle, a former actress in adult films, has produced four videos aimed at women. They have more fully realized stories and characters and less explicit sex than typical tapes. Royalle said her tapes were aimed Common Foot Problems Treated In Our Offico Includot Corns Calluses Painful Heels General Nail Care Bunions Warts.

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In some areas, particularly the Northeast and the West Coast, they are more popular than children's tapes and can comprise 20 percent of a store's rentals. In the Twin Cities area some outlets rent adult videos, some don't. And they both say business is good. Blockbuster Video, with four stores in the area, has never rented sex-ualy explicit films and never intends to, said Mark Hayden, the company's zone manager in Chicago. "It just doesn't fit our image," Hayden said.

"We are a family video store and it's a successful business with 1,100 stores around the country." Title Wave Stores, which rent adult films, do so to serve their customers, said Rich Gartmann, director of video operations. "We've always focused on serving the needs of our customers," he said, "and that happens to be one of the film categories they ask for. We treat it very professionally, and they respect us for it. It's a good business for us." Why adult tapes are so popular is not clear, though some industry representatives and sex therapists suggest that the increasing interest is prompted in part by a fear of AIDS and a desire for safer sex, or by the occasional need to add a sexual spark to monogamous relationships. "They are a form of foreplay," said Sandra S.

Cole, a sexologist at the University of Michigan Medical Center in Ann Arbor. "It's safer to be a voyeur with your mate than swinging," added Ron Sullivan, who uses the name Henri Pachard and has directed numerous adult films. "Pornography may or may not be contributing to monogamy among couples." The popularity of the tapes has grown despite pressure from community groups, fundamentalist Christians, feminists, law-enforcement organizations, federal commissions and others who object to what they view as a growth of immorality. But video store owners and civil-liberties advocates worry about the long-term effects of efforts to halt the rental of adult tapes by video stores. "It's reaching epidemic proportions," said H.

Louis Sirkin, a Cincinnati lawyer who is an expert in obscenity law. "The threats are going on in a lot of places where they have never happened before." In a nationwide poll of 1 ,000 people in March 1989 by Gale Research, a publishing and business research group in Detroit, the proportion of men who said they had seen an X-rated movie in the previous year was 31 percent, an increase from 20 percent in a similar poll in 1980. For women, the figure rose to 17 percent from 13 percent. I.