Nice Girls Finish Last

My discovery of the month . . . Rollergirls, the roller derby league for women.  A recent evening in Nashville convinced me that this sport offers its audience the perfect yin and yang, balancing athletics and attitude, competition and camp, muscle and moxie. 

I was hooked the minute I entered the Sports Arena at the Tennessee State Fairgrounds and saw the oval track laid out on the concrete floor, its boundaries marked by neon light ropes.  We headed for the bleachers, passing up the section labeled “Suicide Seats” on the floor at the track’s edge.  Those are appropriate for fans who are really alert or whose teeth aren’t going to be noticeably affected by taking a skate in the mouth.

We were there to see a bout between the Music City Brawl Stars and the Atlanta Rumble B’s.  (If you don't appreciate puns, you'd better stop reading right now.)  The teams took turns skating around the track to warm up and to show off their aggressive/suggestive Rollergirl names, emblazoned on the backs of their jerseys.  As we watched, Hildabeast, Suzy Ho’Maker, Bullie Jean King, Luscious Loosie, Jersey Jackhammer, Cherry Blox ‘Em and Quadratic Abrasion sped past. 

A troupe of "Jeerleaders" roamed the sidelines, dressed in shimmery, black outfits and carrying sparkly,navy blue  pompoms. (Was the black and blue color theme a coincidence?)  My favorites wove the Music City motif into their Rollergirl names – Johnny Crash, June Carver Crash and Tammy WhyNot. Notable among the referees were Pall Bearer and Jessticular Fortitude.  Even the announcers played for laughs – one looked like a cartoon character wearing an oversize sport coat in a huge block plaid with a combination toupee and nest on his head.

I watched roller derby as a kid, particularly the San Francisco Bay Bombers. Joanie Weston, aka the Blonde Bomber, was their star player. She made 19 All Star teams and was the highest paid female athlete in the 60’s and 70’s according to Wikipedia.  Her nemesis, Ann Calvello, was famous for outrageously dyed hair and wild make up, something people noticed in the pre-punk rock era. Calvello’s 12 nose breaks earned her the title of “Banana Nose.” Their style of roller derby was a close relative of Big Time Wrestling with lots of theatrics and staged fights punctuated with chair throwing and other audience participation by outraged fans.

The rules and the format of today’s roller derby are pretty much the same as I remember them. It’s an easy game for beginning fans or returning fans to follow.  The main difference I saw in today’s Rollergirls is that all the dramatics of the 60’s and 70’s have been replaced by true athleticism and plenty of genuine mix-it-up, “take no prisoners” action.  I saw jammers like Miss BoMangles and Lee Ann Crimes poke, prod, pummel and propel themselves through the pack into scoring position with amazing speed and skill.  I saw blockers like Naughty Nugget and Showstopper send hapless Rumble B’s sliding out of bounds on their knees, their backs and their butts and then keep on skating.  When she wasn't in the penalty box, Showstopper brought a lot of shows to a stop that night . . . a dead stop. 

The Brawl Stars racked up a big score beating the Rumble B’s 158 to 51 and this was just the “B” team bout.  We couldn’t stay for the “A” team match-up featuring the Music City All Stars, but their warm-up skating session was impressive.  As far as entertainment goes, roller derby is much more fun than the low scoring baseball games I’ve dozed through.  I read recently that the average Pro football game spends most of its time setting up plays, huddling and kicking with only about 12 minutes of real action.   With the Rollergirls, the action never stops – no wonder they get such an enthusiastic crowd.    I wasn’t surprised to learn there are teams all over the country including one here in Cincinnati.

I must say I’m glad roller derby wasn’t around when John and David were growing up.   They would have loved it but the moves and maneuvers they might have learned would have netted us a second home at Children’s Hospital’s Emergency Room. It sure looked like fun, though. I’d give it a try myself, if I was younger, more coordinated and less afraid of straining, tearing, cracking, herniating or otherwise damaging one or more body parts,.  I can just hear my physical therapist friend Sue saying, “You want to try what???  There isn’t enough Advil and BioFreeze on the planet.”  I guess I’ll have to be a Rollergirl in my dreams.

P.S.  I am very grateful to Nashville photographer Brian Murphee who generously agreed to let me use his photos in this blog.  See more of Brian's photos on the website www.nashvillerollergirls.com.

P.P.S. You can watch a video of Rollergirls action by clicking the link below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWl_WHzD8bo

You Can Get A Man With A Gun

Acquiring new skills keeps life interesting and is especially important, when you are in your fifties and sixties.  It’s an adventure to try something new; and you often get two bangs for the same buck - personal growth and gratification for yourself and a reminder to your kids that you’re not as boring and predictable as they thought you were.

With that in mind, we signed up to take a class in gun use and safety.  The idea was that, after about 12 hours of instruction, we would be qualified to get a concealed carry permit for a gun.  We’ve never cared about owning, much less carrying, a gun but somehow Paul convinced me this would be a good idea, especially since we were doing it with friends.  Over a Friday evening and a Saturday, we spent about 10 hours in a classroom learning about 2 hours worth of interesting stuff.  I think the state of Ohio sets the rules for all the material you have to go over and over, sort of like Driver’s Training. We did learn about the parts of a gun, and we practiced drawing a gun from a holster.  We didn’t learn cool stuff like how to twirl the gun before re-holstering it – maybe they thought we already had that down pat. 

The final step in passing the course was actually firing a gun on a shooting range.  That was the real adventure!  We drove out to an abandoned farmhouse where a shooting range was set up in a back field.  Paul never tires of telling people what a natural I was at shooting and what a “tight pattern” of bullets I put into the target that day.

Here’s what he fails to tell people. It was a muddy, cold, damp day – the kind of day where the cold penetrates right through to your bones and stays there until it can be rooted out by a long, steamy shower, several hot toddies and 5 or 6 layers of fleece.  They had targets set up which were the life-sized outlines of menacing intruders.  The instructor told us we had to get an acceptable number of shots in the center of our target’s chest to pass the course. That was the only path out of the cold and damp, back home to the showers, toddies and fleece. 

We each lined up across from a target, and then the instructor passed out guns and had us inspect and count our ammunition.  He worked with us individually, explaining how our particular gun worked and where the bullets went.  The next step was actually loading the gun.  By that time, my fingers were pretty cold and stiff.  I picked up my little cardboard box of bullets; but, because I had failed to close the lid completely after the inspection, the box spilled all over the ground.  (I grew up in a family where the refrigerator was one big booby trap because neither kids nor adults ever put the lids tightly back on anything. It still goes on today, and it drives the in-laws nuts.) Luckily no one saw me so I quickly scooped up the bullets, mud, grass and all, and jammed them back into my box. 

The gun they gave me to use wasn’t like the cowboy six-shooters I grew up with where you just popped play bullets into a rotating chamber.  With this gun, you loaded the bullets into a long skinny tray. The tray was on a very tight spring so it was hard to pull out and hard to hold out long enough to fill it with bullets.  I’ve never had a lot of strength in my hands.  What little hand power I do have is reserved for important stuff like uncorking wine bottles, stirring chocolate chips into really thick cookie dough and getting the cellophane off of candy boxes.   With what can only be described as a superhuman effort, I kept the tray open long enough to load that gun. 

Once loaded, my mission was clear.  I wanted every shot to hit the center of the target so that I could pass the course without having to load more bullets into the damn gun.  I shot to kill and didn’t waste time by putting bullets where they wouldn’t count for anything. It might surprise gun aficionados to learn bullets coated with mud and grass are just as accurate as clean ones.  I’m not sure if it was beginner’s luck or the power of positive thinking, but I had the best shot pattern in the class and was back in the car in record time.   And, simultaneously, I became a legend in my own time.  Bingo!

P.S. I passed the class but decided against getting a concealed carry permit and a gun.  No point in pressing my luck.
P.P.S. The gunslinger at the top of the page is retired and living in Florida.  The sharpshooter in the middle checks his gun at the door when he visits the honky tonks in Nashville while the marksman at the bottom of the page has been spotted bagging pigeons in Brooklyn's Prospect Park
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Wonder where this blog's title came from?  Click below
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Wy85eA-DV8

Food, Glorious Food

I have enjoyed cooking all of my adult life. Some of the credit goes to Paul – he is so much fun to cook for because he is such an adventurous and appreciative eater.  However most of the credit goes to my Mom – the undisputed Queen of the Kitchen and the Doyenne of Do-It-Ahead.  She started me out with basic rules like “Don’t clean up as you go along,” “Good food is more important to a party than good housekeeping,” and “Cooking barefoot is comfortable in the city and obligatory at the beach.”  The last rule has some interesting consequences when live crabs, that you plan to steam for dinner, escape from their cooler and skitter around the kitchen, snapping at toes and ankles.

Mom taught me creativity in food and meal planning.  She set a great example with our family Christmas celebrations, planning a Mexican Christmas one year, a Chinese dinner the next year and a Jewish Christmas after that.  She also thought it was okay for kids to eat pie for breakfast or even vegetable soup or hot dogs.  That was a relief to those of us who don’t like traditional breakfast foods although she did set some limits – the pie had to have fruit in it and the hot dogs couldn’t have chili or onions on them.

She outdid herself in devising the culinary coup de grace of our family Sunday night suppers.  We often ate picnic style, seated around a tablecloth on the floor in front of the fireplace.  On an ordinary Sunday, we might have hamburger spread on toast.  (Mom was the original “hamburger helper.”)  To crank it up a notch, we would have honey glazed Spam and baked beans or Dad’s famous spit barbequed whole baloney.   For a really special Sunday, Dad would fire up the hibachi and Mom would offer treats for us to grill like Vienna sausages, smoked oysters and water chestnuts wrapped in bacon.  As Dad used to say, “You can’t beat that with a stick,”

No tale of Mom’s culinary expertise would be complete without a recap of the dishes that made her reputation.  Her German potato salad has been known to reduce grown men to quivering pools of saliva.  My college friends still speak wistfully of the Tunnel of Fudge cakes she sent up to the sorority house.  Items like her ham salad provided both entertainment and nourishment.  It was great fun to shove ham chunks, whole hard boiled eggs and pickles into the metal jaws of her big meat grinder, turn the crank and watch while, magically, ham salad oozed out the other end.  All it needed was a few blops of the ubiquitous and mysterious 50’s creation, Miracle Whip, and “Voila!” –the best ham salad in the world. 

My recipe file is full of Mom’s wonderful and easy recipes.  They range from the sublime like chicken cheese buns, barbecued beef brisket, devilled clams, and pumpkin cake to the ridiculous like Hot Dog Soup and cracker pie.  Alas, the grandkids have never experienced her French toast, a recipe that could have created a veritable stampede to cardiologists’ offices across the country, had it been widely publicized.  She took triangles of soft, white bread (crusts cut off, of course), dipped them in an egg and milk mixture and fried them in about 2 inches of hot oil until they were brown and crisp on the outside.  We sprinkled them with sugar and crunched our way through breakfast, forever spoiled for limp, spongy, insipid restaurant French toast.  Those were the good old days before cholesterol and plaque had been invented.

Mom encouraged in me (and everyone in the family, kids, grandkids, in-laws and out-laws) a love of good food and the fun of enjoying it together.  We learned a lot from her and we keep on learning. However, my sister never can get Mom to answer one food question that’s been bothering her for years: “Who the hell was ‘Johnny Marzetti’ and why didn’t she call her hamburger and macaroni casserole ‘Dirt and Worms’ like all the other kids’ moms?”

P.S. My mom teaches Water Aerobics, edits her community newspaper, plays bridge, travels and cooks for her friends in Durham, North Carolina. She can still wrestle a Thanksgiving turkey to the ground.

Goodbye, Old Friend

Today they hauled away our loyal, hard working, reliable old freezer to be recycled.  A new, sleek, shiny, black, frost-free replacement stands proudly in the garage now.  Its exterior temperature gauge is a subtle reminder of its technological superiority. It looks like a true product of the modern age.

There is no way to tell how old our freezer was.  We didn't count its ice rings or carbon date any of its food residues.  My parents' neighbors passed it along to us, used, thirty years ago.  In its lifetime, it housed chili, barbeque and pea soup, untold half gallons of ice cream, each summer's harvest of pesto sauce, hops for brewing beer, caraway seeds for rye bread, winter food for the bees, suet cakes for the birds and as much as 28 quarts of minestrone soup at one time.  All the while it lived with us, it never complained, never faltered, never even hiccupped - it just plugged away, doing its duty.  You can't say that about most family members.

I feel ungrateful and guilty, being the instigator of the freezer's demise.  However, I grew afraid it was going to die on me, especially when we went out of town.  I had visions of coming home to a rotten smelly mess.  I no longer trusted it with our precious pesto sauce, which I had moved to the refrigerator's freezer - an insult which, I fear, the freezer never quite forgave.  I also got tired of always opening a freezer choked with heavy frost.   Yes,  I know that manually defrosting a freezer builds character.  However, I officially retired from character building of any sort when I turned sixty.  (The photo below is the aftermath of a blizzard and ice storm at Stokely Creek in Canada, but it looks exactly like the interior of the freezer at its worst.)

This morning, Paul gave the freezer a fond farewell as he left for work.  He has been its primary caregiver in recent years, eagerly anticipating and even reveling in the experience of defrosting it two or three times a year.  He loved going "mano a mano" with its thick frost and stubborn chunks of ice, emerging victorious after hours of chipping and emptying pans of water.  He'll have to find a new challenge.

After lunch, I emptied the freezer's contents into coolers, trying to be as discrete and respectful as possible.  Around 3:00, a genial, smiling, Best Buy delivery guy appeared and gently wheeled the freezer out to his waiting truck.  When its door unexpectedly swung open, he didn't make any insulting remarks about the substantial frost inside.  He also didn't notice the interior chocolate drippings from my Christmas Ice Cream Sundae Cake.  I thought the freezer was entitled to keep a reminder of the last in its long line of glorious holiday seasons when it was stuffed to capacity with goodies.

The new freezer is beautiful. It absolutely radiates confidence like those girls I used to envy in Seventeen magazine who never needed make-overs.  I've already been out to the garage several times to admire and marvel at it, both inside and out.  It is the same size as the old freezer, but it has bigger shelves and more interior space.  In addition, it is both clean and frost free.  The contents are uncharacteristically well organized - there won't be any mystery items of indeterminate age and origin emerging from this baby.  But, I also bet it won't be around 30 years from now.