Farewell to the Queen.

We seem to have had quite the rash of celebrity deaths lately, and I'm not talking about people who were on reality TV or TikTok dingdongs who fall off bridges for clicks. I mean real celebs like Betty White, Bob Saget, Ronnie Spector,. and the great Sidney Poitier. But some people have careers that bring them just to the edge of celebrity, where certain people know them well but the bulk of humanity not at all, and yet they have some fame and distinction that makes their passing more notable than that of a miscellaneous schlub like me. I am thinking today of Queen Kong, alias Matilda the Hun, tremendous heel from the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling (GLOW), who left this world on January 7 at the age of 73. 

I know very little about Dee Booher, who made a career out of being big and looking mean. She was 6' 3" and said to be more than 300 pounds of fighting fury. When I was a yout, I sometimes saw the GLOW syndicated show on Saturdays; it ran on channel 9 in New York, the same station that ran the syndicated show for the World Wrestling Federation (now the WWE, of course). That was before the WWF became a cable sensation, when wrestling was followed by a handful of cheap magazines on newsstands, and even then WWF made GLOW look like a trailer park next to its tract housing. (Believe it or not, the WWF Championship Wrestling program came on after Dr. Who on WOR-TV channel 9 at the time.)

Like all pro wrestling circuits, the GLOW wrestlers were divided between faces (yay!) and heels (boo!), and Matilda the Hun was one of the most memorable of the latter. For the first two seasons she walloped her way through the cute little faces, losing the championship in the end, as a proper heel should. 

Booher left the GLOW show after the second season, but turned up in other places. She appears in a cameo, dancing with a well-dressed little person, in Aerosmith's 1989 video for "Love in an Elevator."  

It's hard to explain the 80's.

She also played a small part in a movie that perhaps suited her talents better than any other you could name: Andrew "Dice" Clay's 1993 thespian turn, Brainsmasher... A Love Story. She played Bertha, and was billed by her other wrestling appellation, Queen Kong. She also played a bearded lady in Mel Brooks's Spaceballs. 

In later life she suffered from lupus, peripheral neuropathy, and wrestling-related spinal degeneration. The matches may not be real, but the pain is. She did have her own Web site, which at this writing has not been updated with the news of her parting.

I devoted the space to Booher's passing today not because I was a fan, nor because I was impressed by her saintliness (I suspect that was not an adjective any ever used for her, or anyone else in wrestling), but because celebrity is fickle and mean, often doesn't translate to money, and despite no hope of ever getting rich doing what she did, she was one pro wrestler who always gave it her all. That's worthy of mention. R.I.P.