Once upon a time, there was a really fun bedtime story routine.
A young friend of mine, name of Alexander, reminded me of this earlier today. Ah, Alexander: he’s great.
The routine went something like this. A young child, maybe Alexander, maybe his twin sister, would be all tucked into their bed. Then they would call out to their father “do it; do Skandor Akbar”. And, he would oblige like this: “Ladies and Gentlemen: Skandor Akbar is climbing up the turnbuckle. He’s bouncing on the top rope. What’s he gonna do next? He’s not! He’s not! (He is). It’s the spinning, flying, leap of death!”. It was at this moment that the children’s father would pounce upon the bed like a crazed man.
Jimmy Saied Wehba (1934 – 2010) was a professional wrestler better known by his ring name Skandor Akbar, which, BTW, translates as “Alexander the Great”. (coincidence? Perhaps not.). I became familiar with “Akbar”, along with Kerry Von Erich, The Junkyard Dog/Stagger Lee, and other wrestlers while watching MidSouth Wrestling on Saturday mornings in Shreveport, Louisiana and laughing about it with my friends in school the next week.
Back to our original story. Time passed. The children grew. The father grew tired. Bedtime routines changed. The children began to play out the Akbar routine on their own, this time doing the pouncing themselves. They even added to it. “Young Skandor” added the phrase “with the shoe helicopter” to the end of the routine each time he performed it upstairs in Hacienda Bing. Who knows why? Even he can’t explain it.
May I suggest that “Young Skandor” may have been possessed by the Ghost of Fetishes Yet to Come?
You see, the years have passed. We don’t really do this as a bedtime routine anymore, but it looks like a helicopter flew thru “Young Skandor’s” room, and rained down shoes…