Hi guys - we'll be posting ITVR up a bit later tonight for your listening ... pleasure? But I wanted to share a fun read about something we'll be discussing on the show this evening. Chris Shore from http://prowrestling.net (Jason Powell's site) wrote a really interesting article yesterday in regards to the involvement of Kurt and Karen Angle's, and Jeff Jarrett's, kids in their somewhat-shoot love triangle storyline on TNA this week. Please CLICK HERE to read the article.

This expressed so well what I've been feeling about this angle that I felt the need to write to Chris: my response is below. What do you think? Are Shore and I giving kids too little credit to be able to absorb the 'worked-shoot' environment of wrestling? Or are our concerns well-founded?

Hi Chris,

I wanted to thank you for writing the article about the Angle-Jarrett kids; unfortunately wrestling is such a complex mix of work and shoot, that I tend to, as a general rule, believe kids who don't quite get that should be left out of it except in purely celebratory and clear moments (ie, I had no problem when He Who Shall Not Be Named won the world title and brought his son into the ring to celebrate at WM 20, but in fact found it sweet; all the more reason that video is so hard to watch so many years later). While I have no problem with this real-life love triangle playing out on TV - the parallel you made to the mostly entertaining Edge-Lita-Matt Hardy angle is an apt one - involving the children makes me wildly uncomfortable, especially when it involves all but having them take sides with one of their parents. Especially so young - as you mentioned Angle's 5 year old son, can he possibly understand why his mother and step-father are being so stern with him and his siblings/step-siblings? Or that it's 'pretend'? For what it's worth, I was equally uncomfortable with the Eddie Guerrero-Rey Mysterio storyline a few years back involving Rey's son Dominic, and the kayfabe 'reveal' that Dominic was Eddie's son and not Rey's. To this day I wonder if that young boy could really process and understand that that was completely 100% 'pretend'.

Speaking, not only like yourself, as the child of divorce and mother of adopted kids, thus sensitive to the concept of complex extended families of 'steps' and 'halves', but also as a child who was incredibly sensitive and not always the quickest to grasp the concept of 'make believe' (Diesel's initial heel turn against Bret Hart, Survivor Series 1995? Yeah - I cried ... I was 13), all I can hope is that these kids are truly comfortable with and trusting of the adults they're working with - and even then ... it still strikes me as causing unnecessary confusion for the sake of a quick, cheap pop that could be accomplished any other number of ways. Keep kids out of wrestling - all too often, it's going to become an all-too-real part of their life that catches up with them all-too-soon anyway.

Thanks again,

Sarah Daigen