Editor Ira is here this week to guide us through the vast and varied talents of Rosalyn Drexler.

History is peppered with fascinating polymaths — people who just seem to be good at everything to which they put their minds. Most of us count ourselves fortunate to be okay at one or two things. It’s hard to imagine what it’s like inside the brain of, say, a Leonardo da Vinci, or Benjamin Franklin, or Ada Lovelace, or Donald Glover, or the woman who wrote the novelization of “Rocky.”

As regular Friday Knowers-of-It-All might have guessed, it’s that last one who’ll be our topic of discussion today. And what a topic Rosalyn Drexler is!

Born into an artistically inclined family in the Bronx in 1926, Rosalyn Bronznick seems to have been on an artsy path right from the start. Her parents regularly took her to gallery shows and vaudeville performances, and eventually enrolled her in New York’s prestigious (and public) High School of Music & Art.

She was an early adopter of the “tune in, turn on, drop out” philosophy, quitting college after a single semester and moving into an apartment with her new husband, artist Sherman Drexler. The pair did the whole starving artist thing, raising two young children and working a variety of jobs while immersing themselves in a burgeoning New York City art scene that would spawn any number of historic movements over the next several decades.

But first, wrestling!

Around 1950, a friend who frequented a local gym in her Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood suggested that Rosalyn might be a good fit for a women’s professional wrestling troupe that trained there. Thus was Rosalyn Drexler, young Jewish mother from the Bronx, reinvented as “Rosa Carlo, the Mexican Spitfire.” (Obviously not a character that would come anywhere close to flying today, but very much par for 1950.)

Despite a lack of wrestling experience, Drexler embraced the performance aspect of the job. She quickly learned the tricks of landing fake blows and getting the crowd wired up. (“The hardest thing to do was to reinforce the straps of my bathing suit so it wouldn’t tear in battle,” she later told an interviewer.)

She carved out a two-year career wrestling with the traveling show, but hung up her leotard after a tour of the South gave her a first-hand look at the ugliness of segregation. “I had never been to the South,” Drexler said. “Water fountains and bathrooms would say ‘whites only.’ At one of the venues where I wrestled, there was a sign that said ‘special section for colored fans.’ I thought I was in a foreign land.” Unable to justify performing in venues that supported racial separation, she went back to New York and her artwork.

Over the back half of the 1950s, Drexler established a reputation as an original and witty sculptor amongst NYC critics and art patrons. Her profile grew further when she began shifting her focus to the then-swelling Pop Art movement. Drexler’s eye for social commentary perfectly complemented her sense of humor as she recontextualized imagery from magazines and movie posters. Her paintings and collages garnered praise for their stark, often darkly comic depictions of violence and inequality. As one of the few women visual artists allowed to enter the inner circle of Pop Art, she also stood out as an overtly social and political artist in a genre better known for being too cool to care. She impressed Andy Warhol enough that he produced silkscreens of her in her Rosa Carlo persona.

OK, so you’ve been a traveling wrestler and a pioneer of a generation-defining art movement. What’s your next move? If you said “become one of your era’s most acclaimed playwrights,” I’m guessing this isn’t the first Rosalyn Drexler bio you’ve read.

Drexler had her first play produced in 1964, an experimental piece titled “Home Movies” that a New York Times critic deemed “too far out to grasp” but earned her the first of three career Obie Awards. She penned dozens of other plays and experimental theater pieces over the next several decades, at least one of them involving puppets. As with her artwork, her plays are renowned for their high energy, wicked humor, and on-point observations. She’s won multiple high-profile playwriting grants and fellowships and had works produced across the U.S.

That seems like more than enough for a single resume, right? Well, too bad, ‘cause Rosalyn Drexler is a celebrated fiction writer too. Her first novel, 1965’s “I Am the Beautiful Stranger,” is a coming-of-age satire that was faintly praised as “bright, inventive, but undisciplined writing” by a Kirkus reviewer who’d I’d wager missed at least some of the point. Her 1966 short story “Dear” earned her the Paris Review’s Humor Prize. She’s published nine novels to date, boasting provocative titles such as “The Cosmopolitan Girl,” “Vulgar Lives,” and “Unwed Widow.”

Drexler’s most notable original novel is probably 1972’s “To Smithereens,” a fictionalized account of her time on the women’s wrestling circuit two decades prior. The New York Times was effusive about this one, saying, “‘To Smithereens’ is an extraordinarily good book, but then so is everything Rosalyn Drexler ever wrote.” It was adapted into a film called “Below the Belt” that was shot in 1974 but sat on the shelf until 1980, when it was finally released to an indifferent reception. (Drexler says that she pointed out that “below the belt” is a boxing term, not a wrestling one, and was told by the producers that it was sexier this way. That seems to sum up the overall vibe of the film.)

And hey, speaking of movie adaptations and boxing, we’ve got one more chapter of Rosalyn Drexler to explore before I let you get back to your Friday. Notice how I called “To Smithereens” her most notable original novel? That’s because Drexler also dabbled in crafting novelizations of movies, a very 1970s literary pursuit. You’ve never heard of most of the movies she adapted, with one major exception.

In 1976, Rosalyn Drexler somehow landed the gig of turning Sylvester Stallone’s much-vaunted screenplay for “Rocky” into a paperback novel one might pick up at the drugstore. Writing under her frequently used pseudonym of Julia Sorel, Drexler cranked out 118 pages that TotalRocky.com says provide “some cool insights into scenes that ultimately did not make the final cut.” Stallone reportedly disliked the adaptation, largely because of a new scene added by Drexler in which his titular boxer suffers erectile dysfunction.“His character would never have a problem in bed!” Stallone supposedly whined, and honestly Rosalyn Drexler would be a legend just for facilitating that reaction.

At the time of this writing, Rosalyn Drexler is still living in New York City at the age of 99, Sherman having passed on in 2014. After decades as something of a cult favorite, she’s enjoyed a swell in interest in her multifaceted body of work in recent years. She deserves all of the acclaim and then some as an artist who tried on every hat she came across and found they all fit just fine.

And that’s all there is to…

Oh yeah, and she won an Emmy as one of the writers on Lily Tomlin’s first TV comedy special.

And THAT’S all there is to know this week.