At the risk of flashing my virtual birth certificate, I am going to wax poetic momentarily about sports in the seventies.   They were scrappy, sloppy, sponsored by spark plug and hair product companies, and had stars that literally looked like you and me.  And believe me, you and me (…I)  weren’t all that hot.  (I’m not including Joe Namath in this list.  He was hot even without the pantyhose.  If you don’t know what I mean, I know how old you are.)  I remember roller derby.  Not Raquel Welch and James Caan roller Derby, but locally televised regional derby with banked tracks and tough people.  I also remember dirt track racing.  (The track of my youth was paved, and was only recently sold and turned into a…strip mall.  Our local track is dirt – and thriving, thank you very much.) 

I am so excited to tell you that I witnessed first hand the opening night of our very own local Santa Cruz Roller Girls’ victory match over the Silicon Valley Roller Girls last night inside our Civic Auditorium, a flat former basketball court, where our county symphony currently performs.  I screamed, I yelled, I boo-ed.  I took part in a pitiful crowd wave (we live by the beach, people, get it together).  I was happy happy happy.

Here is a working list of roller derby names I have started, and will add to at will:

Bessie Mae Mucho
Bi Furious
The Mad Cow
Ida Throttleya
Gina Lola-Midget-a
Alexis of Evil
DeDe Dementia
The Sick Shiksa
Vickie Vortex

and the current favorite (drum roll…..)

Corpus Christie (with a skulls over the i’s)

If this is creativity, I’ll take scotch…

I
have ideas. I have kids. I love my kids. I love my ideas. I have very
little patience. My ideas don’t make noise unless I create it. My kids
make noise even when I ask, at varying levels of civility, to hush,
wait, play quietly or shut the hell up while mommy is functioning
artistically. Then again, my kids are creative and I have blatantly
ripped off my daughter as she plays piano, recording her secretly so I
can steal her idea for one of my songs later. She’s nine, she’ll never
know. Well, she will, but her concept of intellectual property is not
as developed as mine yet. I need peace and quiet. A lot. My kids hate
peace and quiet. A lot. They consider it a punishment. I’m not certain
that we would each share 29 points of compatibility. For instance, I
have been married and they have not. I can enjoy eating, saying and
spelling cous cous. They only enjoy one of these. Today I’m thinking
that not only am I pro-choice, but maybe choice should be retro-active,
perhaps to age 25, according to my mom. I think maybe Bill Cosby even
said something along the lines of “Look kid, I brought you into this
world, I can take you out.” Well, it doesn’t sound like Bill Cosby,
does it. Maybe he was trying to function artistically at the time and
his kids were trying to play Kerplunk.

Kim

one loud child, cleverly disguised as a charming gentleman.  do not be deceived.  he will not buy you a glass of wine nor will he discuss literature, drama or “old Paris” with you.  he will only yell “poop” and run away.

funny thing about this one, adopting the collective history of approximately 70% of his classmates, he now tells me he was born in Chicago and then moved here (to the central coast of California) where he had to learn English, since he only spoke Spanish as a baby.