Sylvia's Journal

I am still on Tanzanian time and thus wake up early. The weather is bad; again, no flying today.

Yesterday I was supposed to have flown to Concord and Laconia with my flying buddy Bill but the weather was too bad; three weather systems are colliding over New England. Instead I met with the other three co-owners of my plane and we discussed upcoming repair needs and how we are going to pay for them.

Late in the afternoon I picked up my nephew Pieter with his friend Huib, both medical students in Leuven (Belgium), who had bussed in from New York for Spring Break. In a pouring rain we drove straight to the Shriner’s Hall in Wilmington to watch a Roller Derby. In my 26 years in the USA I had not seen such an event in real life. It is very American and seemed like the appropriate way to celebrate International Women’s Day. After all, the sport is about assertive women racing on wheels to break through logjams and get ahead. I loved the way all the women, as well as the referees, some of which were male and one a canine, used the concept of a uniform loosely: there was lots of room for individual expression and creativity around the theme of sexy shorts and net stockings. What better way to way to celebrate women’s liberation and empowerment!

Sita and Jim’s friend Fred is dating one of the stars (‘Maura Buse’) from the Boston Massacre, the team that won from Maine’s Port Authority team and the more fearsome Bronx Gridlocks (dressed in cute yellow and black/white checkered outfits). Pieter and Huib got their picture taken with another one of the stars (‘Clare D. Way’) after the prizes were awarded.

I had always assumed that Roller Derbies were somewhat gothic and dark, with people full of tattoos, wearing leather, spikes and black or fluorescent hair. The name of the Boston team suggested so much. How wrong I was. It was a joyful, noisy and irreverent family event. The sport itself suggested strong women hitting each other off the track, brute force with a sexy feminine veneer (‘this is a contact sport’). Again I was wrong, although there was a lot of jostling, pushing and shoving and some bad falls, all followed by the most amazing recoveries. Axel and I shuddered at the sight of some of those falls.

The sport requires finesse, good balance, strategy and endurance. It was fascinating and exciting. We watched three ‘bouts’ of half an hour each. The Boston team won each hands down. Basically there are two teams of five women who circle around on old fashioned four-wheel roller skates, at high speed on a concrete floor in a rink marked by pink fluorescent tape. Two of them are ‘jammers,’ one from each team. Their helmets are marked with a star. They have to brake through a wall of four fast skating opponents, in which they are helped by four of their own team members. There are as many referees as there are skaters because there is an elaborate set of rules and everything moves very fast. The referees communicate with hand signals to the public and to a whole battalion of people, most sitting on the side of the rink in front of laptops and a gigantic scoring board, and some inside the rink writing check marks after people’s names with blue markers on a small white board that sits on an easel. There are also people with clipboards, some sort of way station between rink and laptops, maybe. One of them, to my great surprise, was a colleague from MSH who left in the great clean up back in May (Alex).