Bad News Beaters vs. The Brawlarinas

Friday night, Saori, my roommate Sal, and some of Saori's Japanese friends all met at a sushi restaurant called Crazy Fish right off of the 101. One of Saori's friends who is in the 3+ architecture program actually works there as a sushi chef so we got to watch him preparing sushi and he served up a few rolls and nigiri sushi with some sake.

Saturday, I spent the day sleeping in and working on an addendum to my sketchbook for the sketching class. This was a book I have to print of all the work I've done on the photocopy-collage-model-sketch project. It turned out pretty well. I like where it ended up graphically. I got a call in the afternoon from Chase who was in town for Easter, and we decided to meet up. Chase had heard about a roller derby championship going on and so I said, "why not?" I'd read, a few months ago, about how Roller Derby was making a big comeback as a real competitive sport, all organized and run by women, with definate rules and regulations. Instead of the scripted battles and balls of the roller derby I'd seen on TV, this seemed to have a completely different attitude shift.

Chase and Mike Chu (another friend from high school) picked me up and we drove out to Casey at Bat, a batting cage/minigolf place which had a field hockey court that had been converted to a Roller Derby rink. We were all dressed very prepily, with nice shirts, slim jeans, and nice shoes. The first guy we see there is in a cut-off white undershirt. The patrons of the event (which also had a Budweiser beer garden) seemed to be the typical NASCAR croud, with cutoffs and sandals the norm with a bunch of people wearing their favorite team's tee shirt. It was weird.

The whole air of the event was half-ironic, half bad-ass-girls, with lots of black and pink. The event could easily have been sponsored by Industrial, and in fact, they blared lots of female indie rock like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. It was a mix of the surreal, ironic, white trash, and funny. There's a certain point where the kitsch becomes cool, and real roller derby really straddles that line, rolling back and forth over it. Edgy lowbrow.

Anyway, the two teams that night were the Bad News Beaters and the Brawlarinas. The Beaters were dressed in white and blue vertical striped hotpants, with blue baseball jerseys with the team name and the roller name of each girl. The roller names were fun, with names like "Babe Ruthless," "Jessie Dahmer," and "Knockout Kniko." The Brawlarinas were dressed in black short leotards with pink tutus. They had names like "French Lyck," "Chase Enyu," and "Holly Would." They also had a sign in their team area which announced that for a $1, they would take off the tutu.

The game was confusing at first, as it appeared they were all just skating around the ring, but its actually pretty easy to understand. Body checks are still legal, although fist fighting is out of bounds (which didn't prevent several fights from breaking out.) And the girls do really get banged up out there. One of them crashed off the rink after a particularly hard blow, and she was gasping and throwing up. The announcer said, I'm not making this up, " Hey waterboy, turn around, she's not breathing." But she was ok.

The best parts of the game were the penalty wheel spins. One girl from each team would spin the wheel to land on a penalty. I saw a Radio Flyer, where the girls raced around the rink twice with a spectator riding in the wagon they pulled. There was also a Pillow Fight, an Arm Wrestle (where a spectator was picked to arm wrestle the girl), and the crowd favorite, the Pink Cheek Alley. In this penalty, all the spectators run into the inside edge of the rink, and one of the refs pull the girl around slowly so everyone can spank her.

I'm not going to become a regular, but it was a fun and interesting outing. Chase commented that blogs are really good because they encourage you to go out and do strange and interesting things instead of sitting at home watching TV.

Anyway, afterwards, we drove back to Tempe and grabbed dinner at My Big Fat Greek Restaurant, and then caught the 1100 showing of Grindhouse. If you liked the really gory parts of Kill Bill Vol. 1. Then this movie is for you. It's a double feature, with two complete movies from Tarintino and Rodriguez, plus absolutely hysterical previews from a couple of other directors. Both movies had plenty of gore tempered with humor, although Rodriguez was more action packed and bloody, while Tarintino had his trademark dialog and Kurt Russel as a crazy driver. Good times. The whole package ends up running over three hours long, so it was 2 AM before I got home.

Today, Easter Sunday, I got up at 9 and went to Sally and Jonathans for Easter Brunch, with some of Sally's family. They made my mother's egg cassarole with homemade salsa, which was delicious, and they sent me home with a big bag of jelly beans.

Happy Easter, reader.