Angela Stich Angela Stich

"If you haven't signed your waiver and you're on skates, PLEASE see Sister Sledgehammer IMMEDIATELY," blares a female voice from the deejay booth at the Liars Club. The dark, smoke-filled bar is flooded by now with a sea of tight aqua t-shirts, micro-miniskirts, hotpants and fishnet stockings. The fifty or so girls getting ready for the Windy City Rollers' fundraiser and public debut are in various states of preparation, fixing each others' hair and makeup, trimming the neckbands and sleeves off their team shirts and debating the ever-pressing dilemma any fashionable woman can relate to: roller skates or heels?

Roller derby is back, but in a more rowdy, raucous, rock 'n' roll form than the wholesome Depression-era craze or the disco-inspired 1970s revival. Co-founders Elizabeth "Juanna Rumble" Gomez and Kelly "Sister Sledgehammer" Simmons came up with the idea to start the Chicago league after meeting an Austin bartender who explained the "derby burns" she got as a member of the Texas Rollergirls. The duo were serious about starting the league, which they modeled after Austin's, but never expected the response they've gotten: more than a hundred girls showed up at their recruitment party. Derby's popularity isn't exclusive to Chicago and Austin; there are leagues already established in New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, Tucson, Raleigh and Madison.

Anita "Applebaum" Mechler describes the average derby girl as "fun, sexy and tough." But the badass alter-egos haven't scared away the normal, everyday woman from the all-inclusive league, Gomez, a mother of two, insists: "We have waitresses, people at office jobs... Val Capone is training to be a cop."

"Derby requires a lot of strength, stamina and skill," says Ivana Crushya, a certified personal trainer known by Jill during the day and, at 43, the team's most senior member. In each match, or bout, a team of five tries to outmuscle its opponents around an oval track while a lead skater, or jammer, tries to overcome her counterpart. But with their over-the-top Suicide Girls-meet-WWF personas, just how much sport can fans expect when the Rollers begin their bouts in May 2005?

"It's definitely a sport, but it has a taste of spectacle," Juanna Rumble assures me before we shuffle out to the club's second-floor bar, where spectators cheer on Lethal Leah as she defends her arm-wrestling title against a much larger young man in a plaid button-down shirt.

(2004-11-03)

Also by Angela Stich Angela Stich

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