Throwback Thursday

Shit… it’s incredible to think back to this day. I’m surprised that I have the brain cells left to stroll down memory lane.

Some 15 years ago or so my husband at the time and I decided to move our family from Leclaire Iowa to Chicago Illinois. It was such an exciting time, everything was so fresh and new. I was working for Lancome cosmetics and have been offered a job in Chicago as the color director for the Chicago market. I jumped on the opportunity and fortunately my husband agreed that we could move the family to Chicago and he became the general manager of Panera bread on State and Congress. He had been working with Panera bread for quite some time in the Quad cities and was excited about the opportunity to head up such a big flagship store.

We both loved Chicago, loved Burlesque, loved nightlife and also loved quiet times at home with our family in a nice residential neighborhood. We both soon realized that Chicago would bring us so much more than just our dreams. Chicago would bring us all kinds of opportunities that we would have to sniff out and understand in a different way because we were from such a small town. There are so many incredible memories of this time in my life when my kids were very small and my understanding of the world was too. My daughter memphis was very young, four or five years old when we moved to Chicago, my son Miles was just a few years older than her, he was about seven or eight when we made that big move. There’s so much I can say about that time in my life but I’m gonna stick to one story. Here we were in Chicago doing our best to make our dreams come true and build a future for our family. I did not have many friends as I am not really socially competent at times and never really developed the understanding of what it means to have a strong social circle. So here it is, Easter Sunday, I never celebrated Easter so I didn’t really care about it. I had grown up with the understanding that involving my children in holidays like Easter would only further divide them from my family of Jehovah’s Witnesses. So I had no plans for Easter, we were probably going to make some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and go to the park or something like that. Which is a beautiful thing.

I walked out to the backyard of our apartment building to check on the kids who are outside playing and I could see from across the alley that the apartment building right next to us was having a big Easter party. One of the residents from the building, a tall confident naturally beautiful dark haired Chicago native hollered at us from across the alley. I heard her say “what are you doing over there? You got kids over there? You like lamb? Come on over, the foods just about to be served and we have a bunch of friends. Come on over, you’re welcome to join us!”

That one invitation with the spark a friendship that would not only change my life but it would change all of our lives. I came to know her as “Juana Rumble”, A fierce personality and one of the incredible femmes who brought roller derby to Chicago. This woman exploded into my life with her beautiful children and changed everything I knew. She turned my whole world upside down and I’m sure she had no idea what she had done. We went up to the party and the apartment was packed with derby girls, refs, skaters, jammers, blockers, coaches, everybody had a job including the kids.

It just so happened that her boyfriend Mike Sulo was a well-known food critic in the Chicago area so as you can imagine the food that day, stuffed 30 people deep in a hot Chicago apartment was impeccable! As it turned out we lived directly across the alley on the same floor as us so we could just open up our windows in the morning and talk to each other, toss each other spices from across the alley, see if we could throw stuff into each others windows, gossip from window to window with no telephone required. I don’t even know if I had a cell phone back then, wait, no I did not. No cell phone not for many years later.

This chance interaction with these incredible women, Bonita Apple bomb, Juana rumble, Electra Fire and many more amazing women that I met that night showed me what a social circle looks like. Socialization was never a thing when I was a child unless it was within the church so this was something that was quite new and different for me, having a group of grown women that I could talk to about anything. I didn’t have to keep it to strictly church stuff, I didn’t have to hide parts of my personality, I was able to truly be myself for better or for worse. I assumed that that was just a characteristic of roller derby in general and I fell in love with the sport. Sometime later I moved back to the Quad cities and there was a fledgling roller derby team that was accepting members called the Quad city rollers, I joined up with that team for a short time, learned as much as I could and opted to start my own team because I lived too far out of town to make the practices regularly so I started a team with both of my sisters in Clinton Iowa. We were River rats, we were gnarly, we did not follow the rules, we were aggressive loudmouths with a lot to prove and very little to back it up but we continued on for five years and in the course of the five year stint I had my ass handed to me more times than I can remember and I really enjoyed handing some other bitches their ass as often as I could.

I’ve never shied away from a fight, I never will, now I just approach them differently. Where as I used to skate full speed into aggression I know think it out and try to find a calm and peaceful end result. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t but I haven’t bloodied my knuckles in years and that feels good.

I learned a lot in the process of those five years doing roller derby and the years with water rumble leading up to my roller derby career.