pretty girls, live music, cold beer

finally, after days of cajoling and trying to induce all the different factions to proceed with their obvious mayhem, we finally got our brawl last night.

no, we didn’t get the bikers to beat up the hackers, nor did we get the pride paraders to spray paint every harley pink.

we just went to the roller derby.

the texas rollergirls are an honest-to-god all-women ass-kicking roller derby league. there are four teams that rumble six times a year and then they have a championship game. like they say:

the match we saw involved the catholic school dropout hell marys against the girl gang hot rod honeys, and the 70’s divas hustlers against the rodeo sweetheart honkey tonk heartbreakers. all you really need to know is that these girls are really hot, really dangerous, and they skate really fast.

seriously, they kicked ass. this is no slow ride in the park. they’re whipping around that little track, dodging the other team’s blockers, knocking each other down and just doing some amazing things on skates. some girls were incredibly fast, dodging attempts to block them, and other girls you just couldn’t knock down, no matter how hard you tried. there were fights and brawls, and since it’s all flat track, sometimes when girls wiped each other out, they would go careening off the track and into the crowds, spilling beer everywhere.

fucking awesome. i love texas.

the other cool thing about this league is that it’s all skater owned: they split off from the other league in austin because they didn’t like how it was being run. this one is run as a democratic collective, so it’s totally power to the people. plus they also donate some of the proceeds from each bout to a local charity.

there was an article in the sfweekly last week about roller derby in the bay area, but it’s a whole lot of nothing. they’ve only got like 25 girls and they’re just practicing, not even having any matches. yet they’ve still managed to lose some teeth, which is either impressive or sad.

if you’re in austin on the fourth sunday of the month, do yourself a favor and go see this! they could have easily kicked the ass of the hackers, the bikers, and the pride parade combined. and even the ice bats, to boot!