Whip It, on a Saturday night

In 2001 a group of women started TXRD--Lonestar Rollergirls, a roller derby company owned by the skaters, themselves. It has been such a success that the movie Whip It was filmed by director Drew Barrymore to tell the story. Whip It was released in 2009.


On Saturday night we went to see two of the local teams at the Palmer Events Center in South Austin. This is a beautiful Texas limestone building, adorned by some unusual sculptures. They consist of various sea creatures, sculpted and attached to the building.

I really enjoyed these two.

Things to do were kind of few and far between out in the countryside where I grew up, so I used to watch the derby when I was younger. It was kind of natural to go see the action.


We were greeted outside by an interesting young woman. She was dressed very nicely, and was helping people into the right lines for tickets. She was our initial insight into the policy of the roller derby organization. Apparently they want the public to get to know their people and their skaters. All evening they made a point of introducing people and announcing free pictures with skaters who had the night off from skating.



During the intermission the skaters joined the crowd, skating through on their way to a break and conversing with the audience.


The skaters were generally quite young, though a few older women were on the teams. They seem to want to appeal to a variety of people. Their names were kind of risque (Dil Dozer, Rosy B. Hind, etc.) But they also seemed a bit like the girl next door gone off to a strange place. It made me wonder what trajectory they were following when they intersected with this group.


The crowd was really mixed. There were families. There were young people. There were street people. There were bikers. There were a TON of tattoos. There were flannel shirt women, a LOT of flannel shirt women.  It seemed like a huge amount of support (maybe oriented toward support of an entirely woman-owned and successful business, or maybe just toward hotties among the skaters?)


Some people were dressed to the nines. Others were pretty casual. On one subject they seemed to come together, though. They all really enjoyed themselves. There was yelling, whistling, applause, picture taking, and a good deal of fun.


Here the "away" team got ready for the first skate. They were clearly the underdogs, yet had a ton of support from the crowd.





Here the home team jammer cuts off the jam after scoring a few points.

This was a pretty strange night. It was pretty difficult to understand for someone from such a vanilla background as mine. It wasn't hard to enjoy. It just made me think about paths taken, and how success is defined. I also appreciated what a group of people with a common vision accomplished.