Festivus (8 page)

Feats of Strength

As the Festivus evening progresses, human beings who have been groused at by other humans grow ornery. Orneriness begs discharge. Wrestling and other Feats of Strength deliver it.

This is natural. In olden tymes, human beings gathered nightly in public places and spent the evening talking and griping about the state of affairs until, say, a fistfight would break out. Usually no one would be seriously hurt and eventually, energy spent, everyone would go home and feel a little better about everything. These moments, which modern society has rendered scarce, are made available to humans once again through the raw expression of the collective unconscious that is Festivus.

Because fistfighting is viewed by many twenty-first-century folk as so seventh grade, Festivus devotees have tweaked the Feats of Strength in a jillion ways. There are no reported real-world cases yet of office equipment bench-pressing as an FOS variation, but, judging from the other bizarre FOS, it can’t be long until Dylan from HR is on his back in the kitchenette lifting the laser printer with four reams of 20-lb., 92-bright 8.5-by-11 paper stacked on top toward the fluorescents while the entire cubicle farm stands around cheering him on and/or hoping he loses his grip and takes a nasty blow to his solar plexus.

Feats of Strength at the office Festivus Party

WRESTLING

Under the
Seinfeld
orthodoxy, Festivus is not over until the head of the household is pinned to the floor. There is an undeniable classic elegance to this, especially if the wrestling match is between a father and a son. Jerry Stiller, who as Frank Costanza on
Seinfeld
wrestled his son, George Costanza (played, of course, by Jason Alexander), on the Festivus episode, notes the Shakespearean connotations in that struggle. “We were dealing with the paternalistic connection and the need to survive,” he recalls. “George was the son who had gone nowhere with his life and I had to make him aware at the moment that he still had a ways to go.

“It was another kind of way with dealing with something else that was going on at the time: the rebelliousness of the son against the father and the father trying to prove he was still stronger than the son,” Stiller continues. “It was like
King Lear
in Queens.”

Setting the struggle in Queens changed the outcome. In the original play, the son wins. In the New York City borough, the father triumphs.

Wrestling can injure. In Tucson, Arizona, Trevor and Janet Hare threw their first annual Festivus party in December 1997 just a few days after the first-ever airing of the
Seinfeld
Festivus episode. “I wound up wrestling all my nephews,” Trevor, a conservation biologist, says. “Until 1999, when I threw my back out doing it.” Things at the Hare Festivus are less lumbar-intensive now. “We have impromptu arm wrestling and leg wrestling.”

Less likely to cause injury—at first—is the practice of Alex Watson of Sheffield, England, whose friends square off using the
WWE Smackdown
video game. “We divide into two teams, often based on the football teams we support,” he says.

Be careful when wrestling Dad—he’s crafty

In the end, though, beating the hell out of one’s friends onscreen is just no substitute for leaping into actual pile drivers, body slams, eye-socket gouges, and Siberian death-locks. “It soon breaks down into a real brawl,” Alex admits, “where we try and pin the members of the opposite team.”

JULIANNE’S UNORTHODOX FEATS OF STRENGTH

More civilized forms of cathartic aggression have been devised. Julianne Donovan’s Festivus party in Kansas City, Missouri, flaunts a fricassee of fantastic Feats of Strength.

Most popular is the thumb-wrestling tournament, held in a leopard-spotted, red-pillared, pizza-box-sized ring. Contestants slip thumbs into tiny wrestling masks and work their hands up into the ring from underneath. Once inside the ropes, they battle until one thumb is pinned. The winner is awarded the victor’s outfit, a red-and-black felt cape with a bow tie and rhinestones that fits snugly over the opposable digit that sets man apart from the beasts.

Another body-part-testing FOS at Julianne’s party is the head-dunking-in-ice challenge. Whoever can keep his or her face held underwater in ice water the longest wins a pair of handcuffs. The 2004 champion made it to three minutes. “We thought he was going to pass out and die,” says Julianne, a graphic designer. “It’s probably good that if you try this at home, you should have someone who can resuscitate people.”

It is okay to smoke cigarettes while participating in the outdoor hula-hoop contest. Not so for the indoor activity of weight-holding. Contestants hold a hand weight with one arm extended straight out. The winner is the person who holds the weight in the air longest without buckling.

The activities add spark—and cull creeps. “If you’re around boring people or some obnoxious man,” Julianne says, “you can say, ‘Oh, there’s thumb wrestling in the other room. Bye!’”

Not that hookups are frowned upon. A somewhat suggestive Big Ball competition requires contestants to blow up balloon punch-balls and punch them for as long as possible without losing control.

And then later, perhaps as a result of releasing all this aggression, comes spin-the-bottle. This, Julianne says of the 2004 party, resulted in an impressive feat.

“Everyone was making out with each other.”

BULL RIDING

Speaking of looking for love, the hit 1980 movie
Urban Cowboy,
which featured the song “Looking for Love (In All the Wrong Places),” ushered in a trend of bars installing mechanical bulls. If the way they celebrate Festivus in Springfield, Illinois, catches on, mechanical bulls could ride high again.

In addition to the Pontani sisters’ “clean burlesque” act and ample beer, the Winter Festivus Pageant held in 2004 in a Hilton ballroom featured, as its FOS challenge, a mechanical bull. (There was also, appropriately, a band called Los Straitjackets, who performed surf music wearing Mexican wrestling masks—but there was no actual wrestling, Mexican or any other kind.)

This unusual Feat of Strength helped host Wade Ebert talk a friend out of attending an office holiday party and into forking out $15 to join hundreds of others at the Festivus pageant. “I told him,” Ebert recalls, “’Christ, I got a band, I got two bands, I got four Mexican wrestling masks, I got three go-go dancers, I got a mechanical bull. Why don’t you bring some people from your lame Christmas party?’ Guy skipped the Christmas party, came to Festivus instead.”

A Feat of Strength in Spingfield, Illinois

What killed the bull fad in the 1980s was a grisly toll of broken arms and concussions. But at Ebert’s Festivus, promisingly, there were no injuries.

An Unusual Distraction from the Feats of Strength: Cat with a Lion Cut

Ata Festivus party in Louisville, Kentucky, guests were stunned when the host family’s cat sprang into the living room with a “lion cut,” its torso shorn nearly bald but the mane left full around the head and the fur long at the feet and tip of the tail. The hosts claimed they had shorn the feline in an effort to prevent dreadlocks, but guests suspected the awful primping was merely an effort to startle Festivus guests so profoundly that they’d falter during the Feats of Strength. “I found it distracting,” said Lisa, a guest who asked that her last name not appear in print. “Every time the cat would come in, my friend and I would scream and point and laugh. Eventually the cat stopped coming in.”

Lisa and the other guests were unlikely to do well at the Feats of Strength in any case because they were spending so much time around a four-foot-high, water-filled tobacco-smoking devise. “It was our pole,” Lisa recalled. The sweet-smelling pole and the weird cat were just about all she recalled. “There might have been wrestling. I can’t remember,” she said. Then she started talking about the cat again. “That poor animal looked really pissed off.”

Despite repeated calls, the hosts who gave the lion cut to their cat refused comment. The following photos of a different cat with a lion cut were found while researching this book, were taken long before work began on this book, and were not set up or done for this book. The author likes cats and would never lion cut one.