Anita Tension (Nichole Nelson, B.A. ’02). To see more before and after photos, click the image above. (All photographs by Sara Rubinstein)

Two women in braids, miniskirts, fishnets, and striped over-the-knee socks pull pink suitcases emblazoned with a star and skull logo into a south Minneapolis warehouse. Inside, a city lot-sized area has been cleared and an oval track marked on the floor with blue tape.

Upended mattresses, all having enjoyed previous careers, hold back industrial machinery and form a wall of crash pads. The air is filled with the smell of turpentine, the click and growl of roller skates on concrete, the shouts and laughter of 80 women, and the whistle someone is abusing.

This is affectionately known as the Roller Hole, where the North Star Roller Girls (NSRG), one of two women’s flat-track roller derby leagues in the Twin Cities, practices three times a week. The league’s office is a metal shelving unit bursting with organizers, papers, found clothing, and a 1,000-count box of sport tampons. Visitors must sign a liability waiver and indeed are at risk, confronted with challenging ideas, clumsy preconceptions, and a haunch with an apple-sized bruise—Naughty Kitty showing off her latest battle scar.

The North Star Roller Girls, formed in 2006, is a skater-owned-and-operated enterprise that empowers women, promotes athleticism, benefits local charities and artists, and promises a rocking good time. That’s mostly its mission statement. But can an organization of fishnet-wearing, ribald women who take no offense at being called

Medusa (Melissa Arnold, B.A. ’06)

“girls” achieve all that—and on wheels?

The average North Star Roller Girl—and that is an oxymoron—is a 30-year-old professional, though the age range is 21 to 47 years. The league attracts free-thinking, independent, sassy, educated women. In fact, 12 of the 80 NSRG members are University of Minnesota alumnae or current staff or students. To name a few: Ida Kildher (Nicole Rubis, B.A. ’99) is a high school band director; Rage-edy Ann (Tonya Trapp Custis M.A. ’01, M.S. ’03, Ph.D. ’04), probably the most degreed person to throw a body block, develops linguistics software; and Medusa (Melissa Arnold, B.A. ’06) works for the University’s Clinical Neuroscience Administrative Center. Most of the roller girls would rather eat glass than do yoga, and what they lack in plastic surgery they make up for in tattoos and piercings.

Once inside the Roller Hole, the name on one’s driver’s license means nothing. The contact’s name is Lynn. “I only know people’s derby names,” replies Dawny Darko, who ironically, has a sunny smile and a halo of blonde curls. “I think you mean Stripe Tease” (Lynn Zecca, B.S. ’87).

Derby names are part of the camp and burlesque wit that fans love. Double entendres, an aim to intimidate, and celebrity takeoffs with a provocative twist produce true gems like Katarina Hit, Olive U Dye, Tickle Me Elbow, and SockHer Mom. All names must be unique and registered with the international master roster TwoEvils.org. But beyond clever, these

Medusa practices in a mattress-lined warehouse.

names frame an alter ego that lets women inhabit a different persona for a while.

“Giggles is my alter ego,” explains Giggle Byte (Joline Zepcevski, one of the U’s first Ph.D. candidates in the history of science and technology). “I’m shy, so I sometimes introduce myself as Giggles because it’s easier being her than me. An alter ego can say and do things I find difficult, like talk to people,” Giggles says, fiddling with her helmet and keeping her gaze on the swirling skaters on the track.
Anita Tension (Nichole Nelson, B.A. ’02), who writes training materials for Target, concurs. “You have to choose your derby name carefully because the persona gets to be part of you. I used to be shy too, but Anita Tension hits people and gets attention!” she says gleefully.

Spitting out her mouth guard, Rage-edy Ann explains that her PG-rated name had to be something her kids could say at school. “Although my son has a T-shirt that says, ‘My mom is hell on wheels,’?” she says with a grin.

Geared up in knee, elbow, hip, and wrist pads, plus helmets and mouth guards, skaters swoop around the track, weaving, crossing over, hitching rides, talking trash, and hooting with laughter. Occasionally, one peels off from the streaming group, sliding to a flashy but functional kneepad-assisted stop.

Roller derby’s pro-wrestling style and no-holds-barred camp is one of the hallmarks of the sport, but it didn’t start out that way. Co-ed skating marathons

Mickey Dismantle, who says, in derby, it’s OK to be a girl.

in the 1930s eclipsed shuffling dance marathons because the action was faster and more exciting. Audiences loved the mass pileups that happened when skaters tried to lap each other, so organizers tweaked the rules to up the likelihood of collisions. With teams cruising and bruising around the track, roller derby picked up momentum and fans; it was one of the first sports to be covered by the fledgling television industry, as early as 1949. Women with outrageous personalities, sexy getups, and full-contact action ratcheted up the entertainment value for TV audiences, reaching a peak in the early 1970s. After that, professional baseball, basketball, and football shouldered in on prime-time advertising dollars and derby faded to an occasional curiosity.

In the beginning, derby owners, operators, and promoters were all men. The North Star Roller Girls is part of the derby revival and is an all-women enterprise with a heaping helping of do-it-yourself attitude. While the women took over the show, they kept the good-girls-gone-bad personalities—but this time they’re in on the joke. They own their sexuality, wearing fishnets and garters if they want to, or not. “It’s my right to express myself however I want, not as someone’s prescribed vision of a feminist,” says referee Stripe Tease.

Strawberry Snatchcake (Danielle Nelson, B.A. ’98) takes feminism by the horns with her persona. “I could give the coy answer that my mother likes: ‘I come from a long line of

Strawberry Snatchcake, who says derby is the one things she does just for herself.

pastry larcenists. I don’t know what you’re thinking!’?” she says when asked why she chose that moniker. “I’ll admit—I love the look I get when I tell people my derby name: surprise, followed by, most often, pleasure at being given permission to use a ‘dirty’ word. But I’ll tell you the real reason I call myself Strawberry Snatchcake. Derby is the one thing I do just for myself. When I lace up my skates, I’m not Danielle the mom, or Danielle the wife, or daughter, or proofreading trainer. I’m Strawberry Snatchcake—tough, athletic, and, hell yes, sexual. I can’t imagine anything more feminist than being who I am without reservation, without apology.”

“Most of the injuries are with new skaters,” says Lil Red Ridingcrop (Elizabeth Mork, B.A. ’96), a bench coach, responsible for monitoring the number of skaters on the track at any given time. “A lot of practice is about gaining strength and stability and learning how to fall.” That said, a tight group of skaters gets tangled up and collapses with a sickening smack. The merely dazed scramble up. Refs and skaters huddle over a supine figure, then tenderly help a limping Madge-O-Matic to the side. Despite a tooth-jarring meeting with the floor, Madge is back in action before practice ends.

Broken bones do happen—the league had four in the 2007–08 season. Hennepin County Medical Center EMTs stand by at bouts (competitive matches) and referees take care of the wounded at practices. Skaters on the rebound wear

Rhea Lentless, who took art classes at the U.

a yellow T-shirt during practice to indicate they’re not up for full-contact bouting.
“I’d never seen women actually be outwardly violent and aggressive, and I liked that,” confesses quiet Giggle Byte.

But Stripe Tease, a holdover disco skater and freelance Web designer, is quick to differentiate the physicality of roller derby from the brawling that is intrinsic to sports like men’s professional hockey. Like the sexuality, the violence in roller derby is mostly theater. (Fans looking for graphic sex and violence can simply turn on the TV.) The blocks thrown in roller derby are governed by rules and facilitate scoring. Roller derby is like tough love with emphasis on the love. It’s lessons in how to be strong given by the nicest people ever to bust a shoulder block.

“It’s a great way to work out aggression,” says Ida Kildher. As director of the Columbia Heights High School band, she has perfected a “death stare” that takes no prisoners, even from the percussion section.

“In derby, it’s OK to be a girl,” says Mickey Dismantle (Amanda Ward, B.S. ’02), who spends her days in a male-dominated field, as a research scientist with Medtronic. “It’s this aggressive, contact sport for women. These women have families and jobs and are competitive. I love this sport.”

TamaLama Slamma (Tamara Srock, B.A. ’99), hot pink and blue extensions in her red hair, is a behavioral therapist and mother. “I never had many girl friends, partly because,

Rage-edy Ann, who has three graduate degrees from the U.

outside of roller derby, girls are competitive in a different way—kind of catty and passive aggressive,” she says. “In derby, girls are openly competitive. Now I have 80 girl friends.”

Most NSRG skaters did not have a skating history but came to a bout and knew immediately this was something they wanted to do. “It’s the only sport where I can sweat buckets and not realize it because it’s so much fun!” says the athletic Medusa before sprinting back onto the track.

Not all NSRG skaters have a stereotypical athletic physique, however, but that’s not what the league seeks in the women who try out every year. “One of the things about roller derby is that there’s room for every body,” says Stripe Tease. “Athletes come in all shapes and sizes. Every woman on the NSRG is beautiful, strong, and trying to reach an athletic goal, and I think the fans see that as well.”
“They look like regular people,” says fan Paul Wilkens (B.S. ’96), a recent roller derby convert. “They aren’t impossibly muscled. If roller derby was a bunch of super-athletic guys, it wouldn’t be fun.”

NSRG does look for women who believe in the mission, including volunteering with the community project of the month. April found the roller girls making a meal for the women at Simpson Housing Services, and in May they walked for Multiple Sclerosis. The league has also supported the Special Olympics, Boys and Girls Clubs, American Red Cross, St. Anne’s Place, Toys for Tots, and ARC’s

The roller girls choose their derby names carefully, since the personas become part of them.

Value Village. “We say we empower women. This is how we put our money where our mouth is,” says Stripe Tease.

“Women in derby have inner strength, and I think it’s because there are no stand-ins,” says self-described raging extrovert Maggie McFaceStomp (Kelly Russell, B.A. ’05). “If we want to get something done, we do it ourselves, and that confidence carries over into other parts of your life. Even the sexuality part. If you’re confident, you can be sassy and wear a skirt the size of a belt.”

As fans trickle into Hall D of the Minneapolis Convention Center, they make a circuit of booths ringing the track. NSRG sells cheeky T-shirts, posters, and buttons. An illustrated exhibit tells the history of roller derby. The audience is strikingly average: blue-jeaned families, 20-somethings sipping beers and talking on cell phones, middle-aged men in a button-down shirts and loafers, empty nesters in wolf-adorned fleece.

The NSRG league is comprised of four teams—the Banger Sisters, the Kilmore Girls, the Violent Femmes, and Delta Delta Di—that bout against each other seven times during the season. The traveling team, made up of skaters from all four teams, competes with leagues from other cities. Blood, sweat, and tears weld close bonds during practice, but come competition night—when training partners become opponents—all bets are off. The women talk about being “frenemies.”

Each team has a jammer who scores points when she weaves her way

Stripe Tease says that roller derby has room for every body, athletic or not.

through the pack, passing the opposing team’s pivots and blockers. Blocking is done from shoulder to hip with the arms close to the body. Using arms to push from behind or punch to the side is a foul, as is tripping. Seven refs work bouts, watching for fouls and keeping score. The bench coach monitors penalties and substitutions.

Three blockers and one pivot on each team are simultaneously blocking the other team’s jammer from passing through the pack (defense) and helping propel their own jammer through the crowd (offense), sometimes by pulling her train-like, sometimes by slinging her forward crack-the-whip fashion.

Adrenaline junkies line the edge of the track, occasionally getting a lapful of flying sister. The crowd of nearly a thousand ooohs at spectacular wipeouts, whistling and applauding as Sawsquash squashes Stalker Channing’s move to the outside. If there is uncertainty about how points mount up on the scoreboard, it’s quickly forgotten in the dizzying action. The announcers start the audience in a wave that follows the skaters around the track.

The dreadlocked and camo-skirted Tin Lizzy swoops around a block by Mickey Dismantle, cuts sharply to the inside, hangs on behind teammate Rhea Lentless, then nips through when she sees daylight. The crowd hoots its approval and a frail-looking elderly woman shouts, “Go, Strawberry Snatchcake!” 

Image Gallery: Roller Girls

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