the last book I ever read (David Shoemaker's The Squared Circle, excerpt nine)

from The Squared Circle: Life, Death, and Professional Wrestling by David Shoemaker:

Albano’s career continued along this crowd-(dis)pleasing midcard path until an odd confluence of events landed him in an unlikely cultural spotlight. In 1983, Captain Lou Albano met pop star Cyndi Lauper on a flight to Puerto Rico. Perhaps seeing in Albano a kindred spirit—or maybe because her manager-cum-boyfriend Dave Wolff was a longtime wrestling fan—Lauper asked Albano to play her father in the video for “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.” As legendary rock writer Richard Meltzer puts it in his devastating WrestleMania I treatise “The Last Wrestling Piece”: “Granted you might not’ve had an actual concrete rock-wrestling Connection—so-called—at least not the official horror the thing is currently saddled with, had not Lou Albano made a guest appearance in one of Lauper’s videos (and History proceeded from there).” It’s unarguable that the video instigated a wildly commercially propitious period for wrestling—the first “mania,” if you will, that the sport had seen in decades. Due to both his notoriety from the Lauper video and his electric, eccentric personality—to say nothing of his shaggy, bloated accessibility—Captain Lou would serve as the mascot and ambassador of pro wrestling to the world at large.