Let's Get Ready to Bumble

In this age of overabundance of entertainment options, we’re constantly bombarded with “Are you watching this?” and “Are you caught up?” and “Put this on your list!” Netflix’s corporate strategy literally asks its employees to fight you for the time you spend sleeping – because every second of your attention makes them money.

Perhaps it’s just me waxing philosophic about the mid-90s when we’d leave the house in the morning, meet up with friends, and spend the day rollerblading, biking, walking, talking, and otherwise causing trouble. Why sit at home watching the second-best movie from Blockbuster when you could trespass in an apple orchard in the dead of night, drinking cheap vodka from a Tupperware container and smoking Marlboro Lights? … Just me? Figures.

This isn’t meant to be a blog about the good old days, or even some mid-life rant about modern teens. (Though, trust me, with 2 teen boys, I could easily write 500 words on how much you can love someone unconditionally and simultaneously want to lock them outside.) This is more about our entertainment options as a species and how, with so much at our fingertips, the sad truth is that the effort needed to find something fun to do has shrunk from the couch to the kitchen.

And Mad Russian Apothecary ain’t throwing stones from our glass house. We love us some destination TV. We plunge into new shows like Poker Face, Clarkson’s Farm, and Homestead Rescue; revisit full series like Sopranos, Psych, and Avatar: The Last Airbender every few years; and play with our phones while watching WWE Raw, AEW Dynamite, Battlebots, and Bruins hockey live every week. What’s a Friday night without a trip to Letterkenny? A Sunday morning not spent in Philadelphia with Sweet Dee?

It's the art of detaching that’s really at the heart of it. There was a time, way back, when TV was a fun distraction but a secondary driver of our entertainment options. The Muppet Show and Fraggle Rock? Classics! But only because they were consumed in moderation. We went to concerts, trekked to live events, met friends at the movies, and walked around looking for something to do. Not watch. DO.

And yeah, what we would’ve given back then to have a supercomputer in our pocket, or an entire series ready to be watched without any wait time. It would have been glorious – back then. But we’re not back then anymore. We’re neck deep – eyeball-deep – in entertainment options that do not require us to move more than a hand passing tortilla chips into our mouths. TV time has become the norm, not the exception. The art of going out and finding our own entertainment has been lost to time, technology, and stress. Ain’t nobody got time for a night out that’s not a sure thing when we know damn well that we’ll be satisfied revisiting the MCU in sweatpants.

Maybe this is why, when the opportunity came for Mad Russian Apothecary to sponsor a series of 7 local live wrestling events, we jumped. Here was a night out, watching large humans knock the (predetermined) crap out of each other while other like-minded individuals hooted and chanted ringside. It was a date night, an excuse to put on real clothes and (gasp) makeup, and a chance to introduce our line of products and honey to a new audience of people who needed a break from the TV just like us.

Atlantic Pro Wrestling is a local-to-New-Hampshire wrestling promotion run by a friend-of-a-friend’s ex-husband and headlined by Brian Milonas, a giant who, oddly enough, lives down the street from us.

Funny aside: The first year we had our bees, one hive swarmed and got away from us. This swarm, apparently, moved down the street directly onto the hood of Milonas’s wife’s car, scaring the absolutely crap out of her. Poor thing. Apparently we made the neighborhood news on Facebook and didn’t even know it. It wouldn’t be the first time.

The first of the planned 7 wrestling events was a success for us from every angle. We sold some honey, we started a chant making fun of a wrestler’s old school-style briefs, and we had the ground under us literally shaken with the force of a 6’8” 420-lb man falling flat onto his back from the top rope. The wrestlers backstage couldn’t have been a nicer group of people, and the event was standing room only. It was a small room, but it was completely sold out.

My point, if you’re with me til this end, is that we took a chance. It wasn’t a guarantee it would make us any money, and it wasn’t a cheap sponsorship to fund. But we took the chance and did something rather than plopping on the couch for another enjoyable night of flickering screens and brown sugar Pop Tarts. We went out and found something to do – something that reminded me of those good old days of shenanigans, trouble, and life without dependency on technology. And it was awesome.

Enjoy our pics of Ivan the Terribee and all the great wrestlers from APW!