I know all about roller derby. I saw that one epsiode of the original “Charlie's Angels” with Farrah Fawcett when she went undercover as a roller derby queen. How much more did I need to know? That should cover it.

I walked into the Liar's Club on little more than an anonymous tip, knowing little more than a group called the Windy City Rollers were single-handedly bringing roller derby back to Chicago , the place where it was invented 69 years ago. I walked out ready to preach the gospel of girls on skates who kick each other's asses. The front bar area, transformed into a green room for the evening, smelled heavily of hairspray and nail polish. I could see that I might have been in over my head.

The first order of business was to locate a friendly face.

“Hi, I'm Nick from sixosix magazine,” I said to the first person I saw, hopefully in an editorial-sounding voice.

The reply was terse. “OK, but all press inquiries were supposed to come through me,” a woman in a turquoise t-shirt replied. “Who are you again?”

This wasn't getting off to a stellar beginning. “Well, I'm from sixosix magazine, and we were going to run a feature on the Windy City Rollers,” I managed. “Who would be the best person to speak with about getting a quick interview with some of the girls and possibly setting up an impromptu photo shoot?”

This is the point, I've learned, where business cards work wonders. While making you look legitimate, they also buy you time to come up with your next plausible-sounding, freestyled truth. I handed her one. She studied it, looked up, and her demeanor changed. Yes – we had an interview on our hands. We found a spot in the back and we were rolling.

She went by the derby name Juanna Rumbel (say it slowly and phonetically – it takes a few times), and was a co-founder of the Windy City Rollers. This was a break. Of all the people to meet, I hit the jackpot. When I asked how she came up with the idea of organizing a roller derby league in Chicago , and she was point-blank and honest.

“I was looking for things on the Web about adventure cycling,” she said, “and I got bored.”

When normal people are bored, they watch another rerun of “Everybody Loves Raymond” or send instant messages to friends which are peppered with inane statements, as in, “man, i'm so bored what are you doing are we drinking tonight?” But Juanna, a 30-year-old mother of two who goes by Elizabeth to everyone outside the roller derby world, apparently doesn't adhere to convention. She was advised to take matters into her own hands and start a league.

“I said I didn't know anything about roller derby,” she said, describing her conversations with members of the Texas Rollergirls, a team most roller squads model themselves on. “Their response was, ‘so fucking what? Why don't you just do it?'” Thus the Windy City Rollers squad was born.

Juanna was soon called away, having to deal with the ins and outs of putting on a major fundraiser, but I managed to snag her partner in crime and the other co-founder of the Rollers, Sister Sledgehammer – also known as Kelly, a 35-year-old who works in sales.

“When Juanna said, 'I want to start a roller derby league,'” Sister said, “and she showed me a video, I said, ‘Oh, hell no. This isn't Fight Club. I don't want to show up to work with a black eye.'”

Talking to the Windy City Rollers for the first time was like walking into a meeting of your standard, run-of-the-mill punk-rock sorority. When I walked in to the Liar's Club in the midst of the Rollers' first fundraiser, which was complete with an arm-wrestling tournament and a silent auction, I had no idea what I was getting into. I even had the option, as did everyone else in the bar, of bidding on a date with not one, but two, derby girls. That didn't do much for my previously-held stereotype of what roller derby girls are like. I couldn't figure out if this was some strange way of manifesting female empowerment while supporting the night's two charitable beneficiaries, Planned Parenthood and the Chicago Abused Women Coalition.

Sister continued. “We're really about empowering women,” she said. “Our motto is strong, smart and sexy. These girls come up to me regularly and say ‘thank you. I've never done anything athletic in my life, I never played sports, I was never on a team.' It's a serious sport, and we're taking it very seriously, but we're having the time of our lives.”

Apparently, while wearing skates, kicking ass and taking names is standard procedure for being a Roller, the derby girls work to instill their members with a sense of community. If it works for them, I'm buying it. All the girls' faces were full of excitement for the evening.

The Rollers, a group of 60 or so (mostly tattooed) women ranging in age from 22 to 43, each create a Rollers moniker rather than going by their real names: Juanna Rumbel, Sister Sledgehammer, Sharon Needles, Miss Fits, Ivana Krushya and so on. While I was slightly confused by the some of the names, the Rollers were good sports about it, having placed their names on the backs of their tight, and sometimes torn, turquoise t-shirts to let me read their chosen identity.

Apparently I had made a good enough impression on Juanna to pull some of the girls together for a photo shoot. But none of the Rollers were behaving; they pulled up the backs of their skirts and flipped off the camera. While some of the girls were distracted, I took advantage of the lull to snag Juanna again. How, I asked her, did the group of girls directly to my right showing the full spectacle of their sexuality for the camera fit in with the philanthropic ideals of their chosen charities?

“We may be rough and rumble in the rink, but we're definitely dolls at heart,” Juanna explained. “So what we want to do is help other people one of the basic philosophies when we started this was that we wanted to be able to give back. So what we plan to do is that anytime we have any benefit or bout proceeds, a percentage of that will go to some kind of charity.” The Rollers, I suppose, bridges the gap of assisting a battered women's shelter – while oozing sexuality with a fuck-it-all attitude and fishnet stockings – quite well. Juanna explains further.

“It's all about being sexy and being smart, and not being ashamed of either one,” she said. “What it says to me is that some of these girls think, ‘I don't care what I look like, because I know what's here” – Juanna points to her heart – “is beyond anything that you could touch physically.”

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