- [Announcer] Funding for "Off 90" is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

(gentle music) (upbeat music) - Cruising your way next Off 90.

A pro wrestler from Albert Lea, a fluid artist from Rochester, a mom who plays soccer, and a young man who has a way with words.

It's all coming up on your next stop Off 90.

(upbeat music continues) (upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) Hi, I'm Barbara Keith, thanks for joining me on this trip Off 90.

Did you know you can go to school to become a professional wrestler?

That's what Aaron Corbin McVicker did.

He's a wrestler from Albert Lea.

(gentle music) - First memory of wrestling is there was a movie rental house close to where I lived and I used to go there and I would always see these VHSs at the time and you'd have your Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant Ultimate Warrior on the cover.

And I'm like "I'm gonna check this out.

So with my allowance, right to the movie house, rent the video and I would just have an eight hour just love fest watching wrestling.

My name is Aaron Corbin McVicker and I'm a professional wrestler and a car salesman.

I wrestled in high school, played soccer and baseball.

Those were kind of my three sports.

Graduated in 2000 from Lamar Community High School.

And then I heard rumblings around school about these guys that were doing what's called backyard wrestling.

And about a year after that we all pooled our money together and bought a wrestling ring.

I heard about some guys up in Minnesota that wrestled.

So the Minnesota guys actually came to one of our shows.

A couple of us came up to a show up in Albert Lea.

So I moved up here and then we went to a show in Faribault, Minnesota.

There was a difference.

We're like these are professional wrestlers.

What we're doing is not professional.

One of the guys had a business card for wrestling school.

Four of us went and checked it out and all four of us enrolled that day in wrestling school.

And on an average weekend you'd be in Milwaukee Thursday, the cities Friday, Green Bay Saturday, back to the cities on Sunday.

I've got two plates and 10 screws in my right ankle.

I've got a broken toe on my right foot that never heals.

Every time it's close to healing, I re-injure it.

I've got a torn rotator cuff and torn labrum in my right shoulder.

And the worst has by far been concussions.

Can remember I've had six of them and the most major one I had, we did a retirement show for a guy named Jerry Lynn.

We're in the match.

And my second time I was in the ring, I got in there, and that is the last thing I remember from that night.

I remember I'm backstage and I remember I'm looking for the restroom and a guy goes "what are you looking for?"

I go "the restroom".

Anytime I've ever been here at First Avenue you walk this way, you go down the stairs, and the restroom is right there and they're like "Aaron, you're at the Civic Center in Minneapolis".

The biggest best show I've ever been on and I don't have any memories of it, so that's kind of a bummer, but no lasting concussion effects though.

Not even close I've been the bad guy more than the good guy.

I've been the good guy sometimes and that's all right and that's fun.

It's cool to do the, you know, slap the hands and kiss the babies like you're running for president or something.

But there is nothing better to me in this world.

It is the most addictive feeling to walk out in front of a few hundred people and have them just boo you out of the building.

Just hate your guts.

It is the best.

That's right.

You gotta have that bad guy.

The best Marvel movies in the world had Thanos, right?

And then you got Captain America and Iron Man trying to get to Thanos.

So I love being Thanos and I love all the Captain Americas coming after me.

Top accomplishment, I've got a couple.

There's a promotion called Steel Domain Wrestling in Minnesota.

Winning their heavyweight championship was a big deal for me.

They're called Paradise City Wrestling, and I was their first champion and the guy who owns the company and runs it is Mitch Paradise.

So I gotta beat the hometown boy in front of his hometown crowd for his belt, was super cool.

My best friend Cody O'Neill, we won the tag team titles from the North Star Express who was my brother, Darin Corbin, and his partner Ryan Cruz in a TLC match.

So tables, ladders, and chairs.

I was on the first six Wrestlepalooza shows.

Wrestlepalooza is the biggest deal in wrestling in Minnesota.

That company, F1rst Wrestling, just ran a show at the Mall of America.

Little Easter Egg hidden fact, I was the first person that ever got to tell Eric Cannon that a Wrestlepalooze sold out.

You nip up, I'll see you, I'll feed up, you line me.

I had always known I'd be involved in other aspects of wrestling.

I've always had a very creative mind for wrestling.

I've helped plenty of promoters book and promote their shows and put their shows together in a way that I think crowds would really react to it.

And then an opportunity came up at the, it's called the 1029 Bar in Northeast Minneapolis.

I run shows there once a year and they've gradually grown the shows over the years.

We've done a great job, and during that, an opportunity came up in Faribault, Minnesota, a place called the Trinity Lutheran Church has a fundraiser for their Trinity Radio Club and this radio club, they're teaching the youth at the church how to run radio, program radio, talk on the radio, do all the behind the scenes stuff for radio and I believe they do some TV producing too and they're like "we want to raise money for this in a wrestling show".

And a wrestling show in a church can be tough because there is a line, you're in a church, and there's a line you have to be very careful of.

I'm like "I think I can pull this off".

So I've run that for, I think we're on our fifth or sixth one now.

Grown the crowds every year.

Every year we've made the radio club more money.

My wife, my friends, my kids, my kids love coming to the show.

So it hasn't always been the smoothest, I haven't always been the best at the mix between family life, work life, and wrestling.

So being able to mesh those three has been, that's probably been my biggest accomplishment so far is meshing those three together and to all three being pretty successful at.

But wrestling has really taught me to really, you take the best parts of yourself and accentuate them, and the stuff you're not so good at, you put over here and you kind of downplay those as much as humanly possible.

So when I'm being a bad guy, I just take the absolute worst parts of myself and turn them up to 10 and I just amp them up.

And if you think every day of your life you're out there, you're having a bad day, imagine being able to turn that up on the weekends.

It's great but it's for sure.

I'm better at reading people now for sales because I can read a crowd.

I've learned how to read people, you learn when to take that step back and just that character part of you that you can kind of separate from maybe the real you sometimes for sure helps with sales, everyday life.

It's just you become really good at reading people in situations which I all got from wrestling.

Wrestling to me is the best parts of any movie you've ever watched.

It's the best parts of drama.

It's the best parts of standup comedy, improv theater, a stunt show all wrapped into one.

And if you can do that and make that combo of all of those things into one, that's when wrestling works as good as it can work.

- Yeah!

- [Aaron] And when wrestling works, it is pure art and for me it's the best pure form of entertainment on planet earth.

I will stand on a hill 'til I can't stand anymore and say wrestling is the best pure form of entertainment you will ever see in your life if you give it a chance.

- Two, three!

(upbeat music) - Kay Fox is a fluid artist who uses a variety of tools to move paint on the canvas.

She finds the technique perfect for her paintings of trees, feathers, leaves, and other nature scenes.

(gentle music) - I'm Kay Fox and I'm a fluid artist here at Gallery 24.

I work with acrylic paint and mix them to make paint flow over the canvas, and by doing that, I can move the fluid in a way that creates trees and feathers and butterflies and other things that that are found in nature.

Just turning 60 when I chose to start this medium in my life.

I had drawn in pencil before.

Here at the gallery, I have a piece that I did in my 20s so I have always been an artist in some form.

My son gifted me some paint, then I started painting.

So I started watching what I was doing in terms of what made the paint flow best for me, what made the results turn out like I had planned them to be.

I can control what I do by the intensity of the color, by the viscosity of the paint, and really what kind of an area or flow one paint is versus another.

There's a chemical reaction between metallic paints and standard acrylic paints, and that creates something we call cells.

And we always are excited about things called cells if you're looking for some interesting depth in your piece.

I can make the birch trees happen with a little help of a string and layering the paint so that it moves all at one time.

If you're frustrated with whatever you're doing, use it as the learning experience rather than the quitting point.

So I try again and usually it works out better.

I can see what happened and what what can be improved.

It's a lot of waiting in between, but I have a couple of nice shelves that are set up so that I can put in a slot of the next day's painting and the next day's painting and the next day's paintings.

My medium does take a long time to dry.

It has to actually dry and then cure.

So because I'm adding paint conditioner which actually levels out the paint on my paintings, it needs about three to four weeks to dry fully to cure.

The paint has to cure before you seal it, and then you seal it so that it doesn't run should it come across moisture again, and the backs are left open.

They shouldn't be framed, they shouldn't be behind glass so that they can breathe.

Then once I can finally get it out, so I've waited a month from the time I was happy with my painting to the time that now it's ready to go.

And recently I was asked to paint a dragonfly, and it brought to mind the son that they lost.

So whenever she sees the dragonfly, that's a good memory for her and she wants to remember her son.

Created some for my mom who is blind, which is interesting because she can feel but she can't see it.

I can make paintings out of the dried paint skins as well.

So I can basically adhere those paint skins to a canvas and she can feel the flowers that I made for her the garden.

That was one of her favorite memories, and so she can actually feel the garden on the canvas.

The ring pours are more meditative.

I look at those and I imagine myself in the center of that ring, where am I going?

What kind of land am I exploring at that point?

With the feathers, to me they're light and airy so it's a matter of countering up that kind of windblown softness.

So in my gift of the painting to others, in my production of that art, hopefully I'm giving something that provides them happiness and comfort and hopefully they're receiving and I'm receiving happiness because they're happy.

(upbeat music) - Shelby Packard of Rochester is not a soccer mom in the traditional sense.

Instead, she's a mom who plays soccer.

Her love of the sport continues even as she raises children.

(gentle music) - Hi, I'm Shelby Packard and I'm a mother of two, a wife, and a soccer player.

My sister was the one that started playing soccer.

She's a couple years older than me and she has asthma.

So I remember she was playing and I think she had an asthma attack and had to come out and they didn't have anymore players, so the parents on the sideline all found like random cleats that were too big and threw a big shirt on me and just kind of threw me into the game to fill in.

That was kind of my first time playing a real soccer game.

It seemed more challenging to me than other sports because it required feet-eye coordination as opposed to hand-eye coordination, your feet to be able to do dribbling and shooting and all of these things with your feet.

It seems like kind of unnatural, but I liked the challenge of it.

I think I've always enjoyed the the team effort and I don't love running, but I love running after something or chasing something.

The creativity aspect of soccer.

I got to the point where I'd practiced enough where it was just subconscious.

I do things and it was like I didn't even choose to do it, it's like my body automatically did it.

I was always kind of a more docile kid, so the physical aggression part of the game was always a weak point for me.

I was just nice.

My dad would always hope that I'd get hit early in the game because I'd get angry, and when I got angry is when I played my best is because that's what brought out the aggression in me.

But I played four years of varsity soccer and then I went to USF and did three years there on campus.

I did play like one season of intermural but it just wasn't good soccer, so it's not fun if it's not good soccer to me.

I moved to Utah and I tried finding a women's league, but it was like mom's learning how to play soccer and so I just kind of like gave up looking for soccer.

Then I got married, got pregnant with my first daughter, and then we ended up moving to Tennessee.

While I was in Knoxville I was getting back into soccer and I was looking, at you know, what is that next level that I can get to?

I knew about the WPSL, but right before we moved there there was a local team and then they disbanded before I moved there and so I was bummed about that so that was not an option.

So then when we found out we would be going to Minnesota, one of the first things I did was look up if they had a WPSL team, and once I found out there was, I got excited and then pretty much we moved up here in February and as soon as I was up here I had emailed Matthew, the team owner, and said "can you tell me anything more?

I'd love to come try out".

And they weren't hosting tryouts because of COVID, but then he told me there'd be a reserve team, and so that's where I ended up for that summer was the reserve team.

I've experienced not having the game in my life, and because of that I was able to fall back in love with the game like I did as a kid.

And so when I'm out there, I think I enjoy it maybe more and I don't worry so much about the outcome because I'm just really happy to be playing.

Growing up, everyone goes through an awkward phase, but middle school and high school, knowing that I was really good at something gives you so much confidence even if you don't feel like you're the prettiest girl or you don't feel like you're the smartest girl, when you have a talent or something that you're good at, it just is a really good foundation and keeps you grounded.

I feel most myself when I play soccer.

I can go out and I can turn my mind off.

I'm not worrying about things, I just get to have fun, move my body, kind of let my creative juices flow and just see what I can do.

Being a mother shouldn't stop you from doing the things that you love and you don't have to lose yourself when you have kids.

And my kids have actually enjoyed me doing something that I love, and my oldest daughter, Kayleigh, has said multiple times "mom, you can't not do soccer, you love soccer.

You have to do it if you love it".

And so she's picking up that it's important to do the things you love and I think that's a great example for children to see that.

(upbeat music) - If you love words, you might be spellbound by our next subject as we meet a spelling bee champion from Rochester.

(gentle music) - [Announcer] Your word is science.

Science.

Bobby's favorite branch of science is chemistry.

Science.

- Science.

S-C-I-E-N-C-E. Science.

I always really loved reading, so there was that seed there from the start but then I watched this one documentary, it was called "Spelling the Dream".

- Ready, set, spell.

- Choucroute.

- O-U-T-E, choucroute.

- [Announcer] Correct.

- Quatorzain.

- [Announcer] Correct.

- Inviscate.

- [Announcer] Correct.

- Ampongue.

- [Announcer] Correct.

- Ah, dang it.

- And that really got me excited about it and wanting to learn more about it and I was thinking I could do this, this could be something that I could get more into and be good at.

- I thought this was something that made sense for him.

I mean after all, he loves reading and he's really good with words.

He is good with speaking, he's very outgoing, and he reads a lot.

I mean he reads books as fast as anyone that I know.

He can read a 300 page book in two days.

- Goal!

The first competition I ever had was last year when I was in fifth grade, and that year I got second to an eighth grader.

The toughest part about the spelling bee is the studying and keeping consistent.

Yeah, I take the list of words that I'm studying from and then somebody will quiz me, like my parents or my brother or one of my friends.

(upbeat music) - The way we prepare and help him is by quizzing him on the word list primarily.

- And they'll take the word list and quiz me and the ones that I get wrong I'll write down to make flashcards on later.

And then once I've gone through the whole word list eventually, then I'll start just practicing the flashcards.

- There's no schedule so we don't sit down with him and say "hey, where are your words?

Let's go do this".

He was completely driven by himself and there's no driving from the parents.

We just followed literally.

He would come to us and say "dad, can you help me with the word list?"

And then I'll go sit down with him and quiz him.

- My favorite thing about the spelling bee is definitely the competitions.

There's no doubt about it.

It's kind of just all up to the work I've done.

Roberto Villasboas, number eight.

- [Announcer] Your word is trefoil.

- And I just give it my all and if I get beat there's nothing I can do about it because I did my best.

Trefoil, T-R-E-F-O-I-L, trefoil.

- [Announcer] That's correct.

- It started out the rounds and like nobody was getting out.

- M-E-R. - [Announcer] That's correct.

- S-T-F-U-L, wistful.

- [Announcer] That is correct.

- E-R, blooper.

- [Announcer] Correct.

- And it went to like fourth and fifth round and then people were kind of getting out by a steady amount of about three people per round I would say.

- U-W-E-R. - [Announcer] That is not correct.

- P-E-R-E-T, spirit.

- [Announcer] That is not correct.

- I was at work, my wife was there with him.

I was on the phone and getting almost real-time updates about the words that he was going through and whether he had passed to the next level, how many were left in the competition.

- There are quite a few that I haven't seen on the study list and it's kind of just down to you have to figure out the roots and that's where the language of origin helps and the definition helps and all that stuff.

There's definitely one that stands out when I think of tough words, I think it was around 13.

- Your word is evodevo.

- Evo-devo was the word and I asked for everything, and then when I asked for the language of origin.

Could I have a language of origin please?

- [Announcer] There is no origin for this word.

- Of course.

There is no language of origin.

So I'm like, what the heck?

So I kind of just went for it.

Evodevo, E-V-O-D-E-V-O, evodevo.

- [Announcer] Correct.

- And I got it right somehow.

Round 10 or round 12 when it started getting to the top six, the top four.

- [Announcer] Your word is sacrosanct.

- Because I did not expect to go into this and win it.

Sacrosanct.

S-A-C-R-O-S-A-N-C-T, sacrosanct.

- [Announcer] That is correct.

- When I got to top four I was like, oh my gosh, I could have a chance of winning this.

Digirati, D-I-G-I-R-A-T-T-I, digirati.

- [Announcer] That is not correct.

- It's down to two of us.

It was me and Ezra.

It was a solid I think seven or so rounds that we one of us would mess up and then the other would mess up on their championship word and then get the other back in.

- Jealousy, J-A-L-L-A-C-Y, jealousy.

- Cenotaph, C-E-N-O-T-A-P-H. - [Announcer] That's not correct.

- It went like that for for a while and then I got chaperonage as my championship word.

- [Announcer] Your potentially winning word is chaperonage.

- And I kind of couldn't believe it because for me that's kind of a relatively easy one, so I just couldn't believe it.

Chaperonage, C-H-A-P-E-R-O-N-A-G-E, chaperonage.

- [Announcer] Congratulations.

- Oh my God.

- I think the most important benefit that he has gained from participating in the spelling bee is perhaps his first real experience about competing and practicing and how that preparation can allow you to perhaps become more confident on your skills.

- I learned that you have to have a lot of determination and you have to practice a lot to get as far as you want to be.

- Yeah, I think it's a great example for his siblings about the power of putting the effort and how that pays off towards the goal.

So I think it's a great example for his siblings and most importantly for himself.

- We've reached the end of this trip.

Thanks for riding along.

See you next time Off 90.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) (crowd chatting) - Oh yeah, your arm, your arm.

(crowd chatting) (referee yelling) - Yeah!

(crowd cheering) (crowd cheering continues) (gentle music) - [Announcer] Funding for "Off 90" is provided in part by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund and the citizens of Minnesota.