Smack down in Cinn. City

Served up on a waffle cone of hurt.

This past Saturday evening my faithful Derby Sidekick, Mad Max, and I took to the highways for our very first ever road trip to see our beloved Gem City Roller Girls participate in a double header match with the Bleeding Heartland Roller Girls and the Cincinnati Roller Girls. Yes, we were all decked out in our best Saturday night going to

the Derby regalia and listening to Ted Nugent’s, The Great White Buffalo all the way to the Cincinnati Gardens in Cincinnati, Ohio. Yeah, we were totally stoked...

These girls were hitting on us hard!

Well, no sooner had we parked the car, strolled inside and purchased our tickets did our evening start to get interesting. I can only presume the Cincinnati roller crowd were not used to seeing a couple of Jim Dandies so well dressed in quality team apparel because there were a number of people giving us what I can only describe as the hairy eyeball. When we reached the turnstiles and presented our tickets for admission, I couldn’t help but notice a couple of girls checking Max and I out. Then they started hitting on us pretty hard.
I mean really hard.

Now, I don’t think those girls knew very much about Roller Derby because they kept mistaking the Gem City Roller Girls for some sort of theater troupe. It was difficult to understand exactly what they were saying because of the gravely sound of their guttural grunts and growls but as close as I could translate it sounded something like this.

I wasn't feeling a lot of love here.

“H-m-m-m-m-ph, those Gem City Girls ain’t nuthin but a bovine herd of nappy headed thespians who wouldn’t know their coozies from a hole in the cement floor.”

Well, never one to let ignorance stand in the way of genuine truth I looked those girls right straight in the eye and said,”You are quite mistaken, ladies. I happen to have a team photo of the Gem City Girls right here and as you can plainly see there ain’t a single one of them with nappy hair.” (Yeah, that sure quieted them down in a hurry.)

Eric is a big fan of the sport and
an even bigger fan of Mandi Mayhem.

Once again Max and I were lucky enough to get seats on the floor and we couldn’t have been closer to the action. It wasn’t long before we made a new friend too. His name is Eric Specht and man- o-man does he have a crush on Mandi Mayhem. He kept going on and on about her until it was kinda hard to focus on Max’s favorite skater, Polly Rocket. Eric knew his Roller Derby stuff pretty well because he kept seeing the exact same errors in scoring that I did. Now, I don’t want to say the score keeper in Cincinnati was point shaving, but I’ve seen more left after a Brazilian if you know what I mean.

Uh, is any of this post gonna be about us?

The highlights of the evening for me came during the halftime activities. First off, I was selected to play the trivia game and I won a prize! It was cool enough but then the most exciting event of the entire evening occurred. One of the Cincinnati Roller girls was skating around the track tossing tee-shirts into the crowd when another one of her teammates came up and snatched one of the shirts from her hand and started rubbing it under her hairy arm pits. Then she sniffed it and waved it at the crowd. Man, it must have been covered with some pretty pungent pheromones because the Cincinnati fans started going wild. Not to be outdone the first roller girl grabbed a tee-shirt and rubbed it right in her, well I’m a good clean Christian boy so I’ll just say it was located somewhere in the fuzzy section of her Bermuda shorts triangle area. Oh yeah, the crowd went into a feeding frenzy.

Well, little Ms. Sweet Tart turned her back to the crowd and then tossed that musky scented souvenir up into the air. From the moment it left her hand I knew I had a shot at it and I was up on my feet and tracking its flight through the air before anyone else could think of making a move towards it. As the Cincinnati crowd began making their move the shirt started falling from the sky and I knew it was going to be close. At the last possible minute I leapt high (Max claims I did a fifteen inch vertical jump, but I’m sure it was more like nineteen or twenty inches of atmosphere between my feet and the floor.) above the pack of savages surrounding me and stretched out my arm as far as it would go and made the finger tip grab that robbed the Cincinnati animals of their prize. Oh yes, I turned to the crowd and rubbed it in their faces. (Well, not literally but I crowed pretty loud and made darn sure they knew a Gem City Fan had stolen their precious goodies.)

Yeah, the usual pounding...

Now, it was turning out to be just about the perfect night for me when I made my one and only mistake of the evening. It seems that I was in such a state of fan euphoria I’d forgotten just how covered in Cincinnati funk I was thanks to the tee-shirt I’d caught. Well, I now know from personal experience that there is one thing you just do not want to bring to the Gem City sideline during a bout if you value your hide and that is the rank stank of a Cincinnati Roller Girl. Sigh, once again I found myself on the wrong side of a Gem City Stomp Fest and the rest of the evening got a little blurry as the usual concussion throbbed inside my battered brain box. (When am I ever going to learn just how careful you have to be around these girls?) Just once I’d like to feel the love instead of hot neoprene wheels dancing on my skull.

One final note: I finally figured out the perfect use for the souvenir shirt I came home with. At least I thought it was the perfect use until I realized it probably would have proved softer if I had just put up a roll of sandpaper.

Well, it looked soft!
How was I supposed to know?