Mayhem on Mills gets ready to [redacted] at Tuffy’s Music Box

Serpentico: real snake-man? What is the Handsome Man of Science working on in his basement laboratory? Have certain wrestlers joined a clandestine cult? How can you call yourself Mayhem on Mills when your event is held in Sanford?

These are just some of the questions and conspiracies that the fearless grapplers of Orlando's Mayhem on Mills indie-wrestling fed will wrestle with on their latest X-Files-referencing card, "The Truth Is Out There," this Sunday at Tuffy's.

But since truth is always stranger than fiction, one of the strangest parts of Mayhem lore is the transformation of local punk stalwart Todd Gerding from The Fatties and Tam Tam the Sandwich Man into the larger-than-life Howard Finkel-gone-wrong ring announcer that is Chuck Steak.

Wearing a loud, checkered coat and gift-shop shades, Steak often seems as surprised as the audience at the goings-on inside and outside the ring, but his promo clips posted on MOM social media channels are a thing of blustery wonder.

"I just did it because [Dan] Drennen said, 'Hey, you've got a big booming voice and charisma, you should be the ring announcer.' And I was like, 'OK, sure.' And I screwed up the first one,"remembers Gerding. "I didn't know what I was doing."

Mayhem on Mills as a whole works by taking chances on new things, deftly bridging the gap between serious athletics and absurdist winks at the audience — accidental or otherwise.

So you have Mayhem alums like world champion Sawyer Wreck (this writer and fellow OW scribe Ida V. Eskamani saw Wreck wrestle at a sold-out GCW event earlier this year and she captivated in the headlining spot), Serpentico and title-challenger KiLynn King all making their marks on the indies and bigger feds like AEW and Impact, but they keep coming back to the scrappy MOM family.

"Sawyer has been wrestling in Japan and has made a pretty big name for herself on the indie circuit, and KiLynn King was on AEW, and then just signed a contract with Impact," enthuses a proud Gerding.

What was originally just supposed to be a "one-off show" a few years back has now become a semi-regular going concern on the Central Florida indie wrestling scene. And even as Gerding posits that the overall vibe might be a "little less about punk rock music" nowadays (a band would always feature in the first year), following the departure of founding partner Rich Evans to Portland in 2020, Dan Drennen and Teddy Stigma are putting on quality wrestling. Particularly with Drennen, says Gerding, "it's all about telling a good story." So there will be ongoing angles and longer feuds that culminate in the ring in explosive fashion.

There's one more important difference, making it a wrestler-forward experience: "It's a lot more about the wrestlers and making the wrestlers have fun and feel comfortable, because we've got two wrestlers in charge now. They know how it feels to show up to an event and get $20 in gas and then have to drive six hours back."

Sounds like the best in punk ethos to us.