Well I took a Jessica’s last post to heart and we decided that we are going to make a conscious effort to go out more and try new things. It’s much too easy to get complacent and spend months at a time never going anywhere together because we feel tired and would rather go to bed early like old people. We are going to do a date night once a week, trying out different things (with other people if possible), and we are going to rotate every other week on who gets to pick what to do. I started it off by choosing to go see roller derby. Now neither of us had ever gone to see roller derby before, the only thing that I had ever seen about it was old footage from the early 80’s of a bunch of women with feathered hair slinging each other around a sweet banked track. I imagine that my mom would have had a good time doing it since she was really into skating back then (if I remember right she even taught a Rollerobics class for a while). After eating at a sub par authentic Mexican restaurant we headed down to the Pershing Center and bought some general admission tickets. There was a lot more people there than I thought there would be, I think they said that it was a record attendance. I would guess that the majority of the people there were first timers like us because like us they had no idea what the hell was going on and had no idea what the rules were. We were so confused we couldn’t even tell who was the opposing team and who was the home team. I’m still convinced that the whole thing that we watched was just the practice squad from the home team playing themselves but Jessica disagrees. It was a little bit anticlimactic actually. There was no banked track so they could get a lot of speed and fly over the side, it was just a flat track, and it seemed like the rules are specifically set up to limit ANY excitement that might happen that would really get you into it.
I thought it would be more like hockey where there were a lot more hard checks to take people out and I thought it would be a little more fast paced and hard hitting overall. The few times there were some brutal hits that really got the crowd into it they stopped play and penalized those players. They stopped play way too much overall. I liked when the announcer would yell out LEEEEEEEEEEEEEEAAAD JAAAAAM! mostly because I would yell it too to annoy Jessica and things would get moving out there but 80% of the time directly after that the “lead jammer” would “call off the jam” and everything would stop and start over again. We ended up leaving after the first match and before the main event because neither of us could really get into it. Plus, Jessica had to go to work in the morning anyway and daylight savings time was costing an hour of sleep that night. It was fun to get out and try something new but I’m not all that interested in going back to see any more roller derby, Jessica says maybe in a really big city with the banked track and more pro type players. I guess I would go see that. Overall, I give roller derby a… C-
Oh what a good son you are! You remembered that I taught a Rollarobics class at the old skating rink…I wish I would have remembered my camera when you had your birthday party there, because shortly after that they closed down, and then there was a car lot there. Yeah, I did watch roller derby on tv in the early 70’s when it was good…they were pretty lenient on the violence back then…people were flying over the rail all the time. Anyway, have fun going out once a week…after the baby comes, I don’t think that will happen as often as that…ok, bye for now, love ya!