Ophidian the Cobra even wore his mask in his wedding photos.

"I make a living off of dressing up and acting like an anthropomorphic snake," he told students in a beginners class, warning them that their new hobby might be difficult to explain to outsiders. "It doesn't get more ridiculous than that."

Then he made sure all had signed an injury waiver and told them to take turns jumping over another student crouched in the center of the ring.

"I'm sorry if I squish you," one woman said.

There were 13 students in this class, including a Drexel University professor, a truck driver from Bensalem, an office manager from New Jersey, and a group of women who work together on a food truck and have decided to start their own all-female pro wrestling league. (First, they figured, they should probably learn how to wrestle.)

The truck driver, 21-year-old Devin Nitsche, was on his third beginner class: He broke his collarbone in a flip bump the first time, and failed the second. But he has a character already picked out — Danny Hax, a kind of fighting computer hacker — whom he is desperate to get into the ring.

"It's the dream," he said. "The dream."

DAVID SWANSON / Staff Photographer Ophidian the Cobra demonstrates a backward handstand.

That's not an uncommon sentiment at the Wrestle Factory — some who train here are just out to have a good time with a singular hobby, but others attend class as if it's a church where suplexes are sacraments. At 15, Bente persuaded his mother, herself a rabid wrestling fan, to drive him to Philadelphia to meet Quackenbush.

"He and his mother were legitimately considering pulling him out of school to wrestle," Quackenbush said. He told the kid to finish high school.

A week after graduation, Bente showed up at the garage. He's delivering pizzas by day now and wrestling by night. He hasn't seen his mother in a year. At class on a recent Monday, Quackenbush put him and about a dozen others through pinning drills and tumbling exercises late into the night.

"Smother 'em!" Quackenbush yelled as Bente dropped to his belly in the ring to let another student leap over him.

Later, Ophidian and Quackenbush led the students in an exercise that, at first, seemed purely physical: they had to learn how to get thrown out of a wrestling ring convincingly. Quackenbush demonstrated the move, flipping himself over the ropes and onto the floor. Then it was the students' turn.