I’m a sports fan, and a sports-writer –trained by four or five publications, plus the 100 or so sports-themed posts here in Plasticlandia — so I do recall hearing of the two Palo Altans winning medals at the Olympics in wrestling. If I knew the rest of the story — some weird old rich guy murdering one of them – it resonated less so. Less than David Losee, the Terman student body president who shot himself playing with his father’s pistol. Less than the fact that Broussard the murderous star of the too-real “River’s Edge” played football and 
banged heads and pads with good buds of mine, for Milpitas versus Gunn, Jacques Broussard, who killed Marcy Conrad. Less than Kenny Brewer Paly ’81 who speared a guy on the first play of Paly CCS football and if he’s still alive is in a wheel chair. More than his nephew or cousin who died of a rare disease more recently, someone broke it down for me. Comedy and tragedy and farce, no holds barred.
Steve Carrell probably deserves the academy award for best actor and does his rhinologist. Mark Ruffalo, who Anthony Lane in The New Yorker, calls the credible hulk — he was also in “Avengers” about comic characters come to life or such — was very good and I did not recognize him. He was equally good in “Twice” the sequel to “Once” about street musicians and their ambivalent couplings with the industry.
I am going to strip in here the exact wording of a lost Mayoral Proclamation I ghost-wrote for Yiaway Yeh, and maybe Nancy Shepherd will waive her magic scepter and make it “real”? Real compared to what, you might ask?
There’s a slo a photo of Michael D’Esposito and I mock-wrestling, at Joe Zirker’s 90th birthday party, at the Palo Alto Cultural Center, in August, 2014 in front of a Zirker take on a Muybridge wrestling scene.
And I swear to Moondog Mayne I (zwounds!) I am going to set myself down and read Anthony Lane word by word and say something in reaction. I also flashed to Chris Strausser as he was playing in or coaching in his first Apple Cup rasslin’ or rausslin’ with Greg Zlotnick on Z’s lawn circa 1981. I recall doing likewise with Rob Waller in his living room same era. I wrestled a spell at Coach Hanna’s Bellarmine sports camp back around 1974, and I recall joining the other kids in teasing “Baldy” and “Baldy” (not his real name) grabbed my hand and bent back my fingers until I apologized for my young cruelty. Are you still with us, not-Baldy?
This is the only building left from the Bellarmine I knew circa 1974 sports camp and wrestling
Plastic Alto with Mark Weiss 