(Wee warning: this isn’t entirely safe for work or for environments where people are sensitive to nipples, the F word, Rosie Perez, Spike Lee, and/or awesome scenes from awesome movies.)
Aside: I started writing this post and began thinking about how Spike Lee focuses on heat waves and how they make people crazy in some of his movies. Do the Right Thing and Summer of Sam are two obvious examples, but there are some very memorable monologues from When the Levees Broke in which Katrina survivors describe the oppressive heat in the days following the storm, including Phyllis Montana LeBlanc who uses the phrase, “Africa hot.” Interesting.
I don’t know if you heard, but it’s hot here.
Hotter’n hot wings, in fact. We are in the midst of a heat wave that includes such awesome features as temperatures in the mid-90s and freakish humidity and haziness. Those who have not entirely lost their will to live have morphed into bitchy, sweaty beasts or total psychos, doing stuff like shooting up wave pools.
I was telling the husband this morning that I remembered a drought period during my childhood. I feel like I must have been 5 or 6. It seems pretty universal that being uncomfortably hot or cold doesn’t really affect kids. I don’t remember ever cursing the summer heat as a child, but rather itching to go outside and play all day. However, despite my young age, I distinctly remember not liking that drought period and thinking, “I am really hot and uncomfortable.”
We don’t have air conditioning in our house and for the most part, this isn’t a problem. Neither the husband or I like air conditioning and we definitely weren’t trying to deal with the electricity bill that would come with cooling a house our size. Because our house has high ceilings, lots of windows, ceiling fans, and is on a hill, it’s pretty comfortable most of the summer months. But there are some times when it just sucks and now is one of them.
One of my quirks is that I have to have at least a sheet covering me when I sleep. I feel vulnerable without it. (And you know how impenetrable a high-thread count is!) But last night, I collapsed into bed and slept the whole night with nothing on top of me. Nuts.
Our cat is, I think, sarcastically thanking us for adopting him from the air-conditioned animal shelter so that he could endure the summer in a fur coat.
He spends a lot of time in this position. Occasionally, I put a mirror up to his nose just to check.
Before we started living life on the surface of the sun, the Fourth of July happened. I’m not what you would call patriotic, but I enjoy any holiday that primarily consists of grilling, drinking, blowing shit up, and the 1812 Overture. We spent the day at my mother-in-law’s house, where there were babies…
…and swimming with cousins…
…and eschewing the rush to find a good spot to watch the city’s fireworks for some sprinklers and the like in the back yard. Not a bad time whatsoever.
On Monday, I had off of work so I got to go see the baby in action at one of his swimming lessons. We had to sit in the sun to be able to observe and this was when the 95-degree highs kicked in. I endured it for as long as I could, but at one point I was pretty sure I could feel my brain actually melting, so I moved to a patch of shade.
The baby’s actually a good little swimmer and has grand ambitions to join the swim team in a few weeks if he can work on his breathing during the freestyle stroke.
I am about two hours away from a three-day weekend so today I’m doing pre-mini-vacation stuff like working for no more than three minutes (or as long as my attention span allows) and then doing stuff like taking pictures of myself in the ladies’ room mirror.
Something that I’m hoping my running and other exercises will help me with is my posture. When I was a ballet dancer, I of course had pristine posture. But over the years my shoulders have steadily slumped down and forward. Quitting ballet made me less aware of my body, I gained weight (both the normal amount that comes when you begin consuming food after a 10-year hiatus and the extra stuff that I packed on because, well, “It comes deep-fried? Can you put some wine on it, too?!?! EXCELLENT!”), got a desk job where I spend a lot of time furiously typing, and also the regular beatings that the universe rains down on me.
I was sorting through clothes the other day to get some stuff together to give to the Vets and found a dress that I bought two years ago. I remember wearing it to see Eddie Izzard and the husband took a picture of me in it and I couldn’t believe how decrepit I looked, just because of my posture.
I’m wearing it again today and it reminded me of my efforts to stand up straight. Allow me to illustrate.
Standing up straight.
Slumping, though you can’t tell the difference too much. So let’s go for the dreaded side view.
Standing up straight.
Slumping. Also, hey when’s the baby due?
That second side view is from a slightly different location because someone walked into the bathroom right before I was going to take it, so I had to scramble and act like I was just pacing around the bathroom looking at my phone…because that’s far more normal. It also resulted in this picture:
Anyway, I assure that I’m not exaggerating my posture in any of those pictures. If I relax to the point where my typical posture is, that’s what it looks like.
Maybe I’ll start walking around with a book on my head, old school style.
As I mentioned to an exhaustive degree during the Sonoma Grille/Seviche giveaways, this blog is not heavily marketed. So you know that if I’m touting a product it’s purely because I bought it and had a good experience.
Endorsement #1: Neutrogena skiniD. Around the time that I turned 27 or 28, I suddenly had an acne problem. I had pimples fairly regularly as a teenager, but after I had kicked puberty to the curb, my skin was pretty normal with maybe a pimple or two here or there. The adult acne wasn’t severe, but it bothered me. I was especially not fond of the dozens of small pimples that covered my now greasy forehead.
I thought about trying Proactiv, but honestly something about their commercials was unsettling to me. I’m highly perturbed by the caliber of celebrities that endorse their products, though I did get to hear Puff Daddy utter the sentence, “It really moisturizes my situation.” skiniD seemed less…Amway-ish, so I did the online quiz and within, I think, a day and a half the products arrived on my doorstep.
Full disclaimer, I have been drinking more water and eating a little bit better, so that could contribute, but my skin is pretty effing clear now. The only downside is that something in one of the products that I use has some kind of mild reaction with my sunscreen that causes a stinging sensation in my face. Not fun.
About my sunscreen: also Neutrogena. Ultra Sheer Dry Touch, spf 85 (yes, 85). Expensive, but feels awesome and I don’t get all grumpy about having to reapply it. A few weeks ago I wrote to Neutrogena gushing about how much I loved it, hoping that they’d send me some coupons. A few days later, they emailed me back with a hearty, “Thanks, glad you like it.”
So…yeah.
Endorsement #2: Blueberry Boy Bait. I made this once last summer and the husband nearly died of ecstasy. It’s so delicious. It’s called “boy bait” for, I imagine, purely alliterative reasons but I’m fairly certain that it would work on either gender. All I’m saying is that I made this sucker again last night and, well, it’s a testament to restraint that I don’t have a hickey or twelve today.
Endorsement #3: Louie. I know I mention how much I adore Louis CK a lot, but the dude is seriously one of the best comedians ever. Please watch this show. His first series, Lucky Louie, which was brilliant, was canceled after just one season and I informed him of my great disappointment over this in a rather frightening manner. Don’t make me scare him again. Watch the show. Get his ratings high. Please.
You know that site People of Wal-Mart? I’ve never really liked it because it seemed really mean-spirited and I am, as I’ve mentioned, sensitive about the fact that we shop at Wal-Mart a lot.* But I don’t think I can really decry the meanness of it since I generally laugh at stuff like latfh.com and antiduckface.com. So, as long as I’m not a potential target of mockery, I’m cool. At least I’m honest about my hypocrisy.
Anyway, last weekend we stopped at the store and I was wearing this sundress that had a drawstring-type embellishment at the collar. I had tossed some tomatoes into a produce bag and because I never bother with twist ties, I quickly whipped the top of the bag into a knot. When I went to put the bag into the cart, I was surprised to find the top half of my body dipping into the cart, as well. In my haste, I had somehow managed to entwine the drawstring into the knot of the produce bag.
I picked at the knot but couldn’t seem to find where it began. So, I did what any normal person would do and let the bag of tomatoes hang off of the front of me while I went looking for the husband to help.
His facial expression changed from confusion to amused horror as he saw me approaching, plastic bag of produce swinging from my neck. “Could you help me, please? I tied these to me and I can’t get them off,” I said. “Whaaa…Why….Wha…” he stammered, before giving up and picking at the knot. He eventually had to rip the bag off, leaving me with some remnants that were slightly easier to remove.
I survived the rest of that shopping trip unscathed, though certain I would find myself on the aforementioned site.
* Mostly big grocery shopping trips because the average cost is lower and I have no interest in taking on the equivalent of a part-time job clipping coupons, though more power to all of the frugality bloggers who rock that approach.
It took me longer than 9 weeks to do the whole thing, there were a few times that I didn’t feel well and took a few days off and other times I just had trouble scheduling it into my day.
I’m also not yet able to run 5K. I’m somewhere around 2 and 1/4 to 2 and 1/2 miles in a 30-minute run. I would guess that I’m still about 2 or 3 weeks away from being able to run the full 5K.
But! I can now run for 30 minutes at a time, which is something I could NOT do back in March when I started. In fact, I could barely run for 1 minute at a time back then. I remember looking forward in the program and wondering how the hell I was ever going to run for several minutes at a time.
It’s still really hard. I don’t think it ever gets “easy” and I’m not sure that it’s supposed to, but I know that I’ve gotten much stronger and will continue to get stronger the longer I keep at it. And the pain that I was in at the beginning is gone now, which is a huge improvement.
I’m not going to lie and say that I love running now, but I like it a lot more than I thought I would. And I would really like for it to remain part of my life. I would also like to try running in a 5K at some point. Hopefully by the end of the summer I can attempt one.
I’ve also been throwing in a yoga class here and there, which I like because it’s similar to the muscle memory and flexibility that I already have from ballet. I’ve noticed that if I run the day after a yoga class, that run actually feels pretty good.
I’m able to devote more time to exercise right now because summer is less hectic at work, so I can be at the gym working out and then showering for an hour without things getting too out of hand in my absence. During the school year, I’ll have to figure something else out, which worries me.
Still not “dieting,” per se. Despite still battling with ballet-era demons, I have no interest in doing any kind of calorie restriction. Small changes that I’ve made include trying not to eat after 9 p.m. and just eating healthier (lots of veggies) overall.
At my graduation party about a month back, one of my professors stopped by with her husband. He and I were talking about Pittsburgh, and he asked me where I lived, specifically if I lived in a neighborhood.
I was happy to tell him that I do and even happier to tell him that my neighborhood has become more, well, neighborly since we moved in over four years ago.
We moved to Brookline for two main reasons: it was still near a grandparent (free babysitting is key) and we could buy a big house there at a ridiculously cheap price. The offset, especially for that latter reason, is that we were nowhere near the central “cool” areas of the city. Despite being only a block away from the main drag, there was virtually nothing within that short walking distance that was worth the effort of putting your shoes on…unless you needed to get drunk, get pizza, get a spray tan, or get your nails done. In which case, you could conceivably do all of those things at the same time. So, it sucks when you want to support your local businesses, but instead find yourself headed to another area of town or worse, the mall. (I’m not diametrically opposed to malls, but I like them to be a last resort. Like that time I needed both a VHS copy of American History X AND some Monistat at 1 a.m. on a Sunday night and good ol’ Wal-Mart was there for me.) (Don’t ask.)
But in the past year or so, my neighborhood has been slowly working its way out of whatever rut it had been in and we’ve really been taking advantage of it, which has been wonderful.
Last weekend, my sister-in-law was in town. After the baby’s afternoon baseball game, we went down to the main drag and stopped at Las Palmas, where we bought fresh, homemade tamales, tacos cooked on the grill right in front of us, and Mexican Coca-Cola, which is the kind made with cane sugar and is so much tastier than regular Coke, it’s ridiculous. Maybe it’s the glass bottle and the inherent dose of nostalgia that I somehow manage to conjure up, even though cans were the norm by the time I was a pop-drinking American, but Mexican Coke is refreshing and filling without being too sweet or heavy. And when I’m done drinking it, I don’t fiendishly crave another, like I do with regular Coke. I’m satisfied by the treat and get on with my life.
A picture of Las Palmas that I quickly snapped because I'm still scared of getting yelled at by people for taking pictures of them.
After polishing off our lunch at home, the sister-in-law and I went back down to the Boulevard to get pedicures (nail shops in excess may be tacky and a sign of a suffering business district, but having one good one is essential). When our toes were dry, we went down to Geekadrome, a little comic book/nerd emporium, because the baby had stopped in a few weeks ago to ask about getting a beginner’s Dungeons & Dragons set. (No luck yet, much to my growing dork’s dismay.)
We made another stop at Cannon Coffee to caffeinate before deciding to go to the tiny, BYOB Italian restaurant, Mateo’s, for dinner.
All of this on one street, walking distance from my house. (And basically the perfect counter-argument to my farm longing.)
The husband joked that I am becoming the most Brookline person he knows, especially when I suggested that we go to Moonlite Cafe, also on Brookline Boulevard, to celebrate our fourth wedding anniversary last week. Moonlite, if you’re at all familiar with Italian cuisine in Pittsburgh, is one of those restaurants that serves big, hearty “immigrant Italian” food. No Tuscan this or fancy cheese that. Spaghetti. Meatballs. Marinara sauce. Mancini’s bread. And lots of it, dammit. This is America! And that was exactly the kind of meal that I was in the mood for.
That? That is the platter of rigatoni that they placed in front of me. It had to have been close to a pound of pasta and I took that picture after I had been shoveling noodles into my mouth for twenty minutes. As you can see, I was only able to clear away one tiny corner of the plate. Obviously, we took the leftovers home which fed all three of us for dinner the next night. Seriously.
But all of these things are part of what make living in a city neighborhood so rad. People can mutter about how Pittsburgh is just a big small town, but there’s plenty to be said for having all of these things at your fingers.
As if I wasn’t already so chamber of commerce about it, the baby wrapped up his little league season last weekend. They came in second place overall, which bummed them out, but the coaches treated them to a big picnic afterward that was really cool.
That’s my kid, just prior to the pie-eating contest. After I successfully pushed all traumatic images of the blueberry pie eating contest from Stand By Me out of my head, I was able to enjoy their scaled down and less barfy contest. Also, this picture immediately makes me go all Holly Hunter-in-Raising Arizona: “I luhuhve him so muhuhuhuch!”
You know sometimes you look at your kid or a kid that you know or are close to and you suddenly think, “When the hell did this happen?” I mean, LOOK at him. He’s all tall and lanky and looking like…a DUDE.
Let me do something really terrible and show you the picture that I took of him on his first day of preschool back in 2004.
It's blurry because I was sobbing.
Back then, he was all sweet and squishy and rode in his backpack carrier on the bus with me to his little school. And he did this cute little overbite thing whenever he would call me “Mum.”
Now he dishes with his teachers about A Tribe Called Quest and places bets with them on the NBA championship (he lost, had to write a book report). He groans at me when I drag him out of bed in the morning. He rolls his eyes and melodramatically declares, “I hate my life,” when he doesn’t get his way.
But he also does cute and funny and sweet things from time to time. Like the other morning when he climbed into bed with me for a few minutes, looked at me with those sapphire eyes, and said, “You’re awesome.” And the other day when he saw a police car and mistakenly said, “Nine Oh!” instead of “Five Oh.”
He finished second grade on Wednesday. I need a drink.
There are times, usually when I’m doing something domestic, like cooking or baking, or lamenting my perpetually messy and dusty house, when I get a twinge of wanting to devote myself to wifey things. This gets even more perverted when I think about how much I would like to micro-manage our food; have a garden, do all of our baking, try to do everything that I can to make sure that what we eat is the best that it can be for us and the earth. /hippie
But these are things that, when I’m honest with myself, I just don’t have the time or, more importantly, the energy to take on. I can’t just pack every second that I’m not at work with housework. I need to relax and sit sometimes.
Anyway, I told my friend Angela the other day that I was having a Diane-Keaton-in-Baby-Boom moment because I had some down time at work and found myself searching real estate websites for farms for sale.
Farms.
Turns out Angela sometimes has the same urges for a more scaled-down and self-sustaining existence, one in which we don’t rely on companies to do the right thing but instead grow our own food and whatnot, go to bed when it gets dark, wake up with the sun, work, retire to the porch, send the baby outside to play all day or do his chores.
One thing that I like about living in a city is that you are always coming face-to-face with the fact that being part of a society means relying on each other. From macro things like paying taxes so everyone can have roads and sidewalks and schools and fire departments, to more micro things like the bus driver coming on time so that I can get to work and help the people that I work with everyday.
But at the same time, I find myself longing to be away, quiet, and having some semblance of control over my environment. Plus, Pennsylvania has some really beautiful country.
However.
I realize that this is highly idealized vision of such a life, that it’s incredibly hard, physical work that I’m just not used to. And I know that, realistically, I would get so sick of living in the middle of nowhere after a short time.
There’s also the not insignificant matter that I’m somewhat terrified of the country, having seen too many horror movies where psychotic, mutant axe murders lurk in the trees, waiting to chop me into bits and bake me in a casserole to be served to their inbred, mutant family.
I told my mom about my farming idea the other day and she immediately reminded me of the time we went to a family friend’s farm outside of Conneaut Lake and I got thoroughly freaked out by a group of kids who went to play in the corn field. At night. And there was some flood light or something that bounced their shadows along the barn and it looked so creepy that I remarked to someone, “Ten children went in, but only five will come out.” I sought refuge in the farmhouse, the walls of which were covered in deer heads. I’m not in any way opposed to hunting, but when you’re trying to calm down, decapitated deer aren’t the most soothing sight.
Quit looking at me like that.
Another obstacle to my rural fantasies is my incredibly sensitive skin, which achieved some kind of notoriety this past weekend by getting horrifically burnt while I was firmly in the shade of a wooden structure. It took a few hours to really develop, but on Saturday night, the husband came in late from a bachelor party (which did not include strippers but instead consisted of poker, cigars, domestic beer, firing guns, and watching Ultimate Fighting, aka The Most Dude Agenda Ever) to find me half naked in bed, an alarming shade of red, covered in damp rags and making some kind of, “Ehhhhhhhh,” sound. He couldn’t wrap his head around my ability to get burned under those circumstances and has since teased me at every opportunity. Last night, for example, on our way to the movies, he asked me if I had sunblock on. “That projector gets pretty bright, man.”
(Aside: the weekend before last I managed to get extremely drunk from three beers. I feel like all of my defenses are failing me.)
The final big obstacle to my farm-to-be is that the husband has absolutely no interest in moving out of the city. We either split up and I forge ahead on my own or I drag him out there and just let the axe murders behind my house know when he’s whining about the lack of sidewalks and public transit.
I sat down at my desk last Wednesday morning, tired, sore, and frazzled from sleeping through my alarm and having to rush out the door. The familiar sounds of my daily life made their way back into my brain and I became kind of sad. I was glad to be home, as I always am, particularly because my back could not sustain another night in our discount motel room bed. But having spent so many days in a row with some of my favorite people on the planet made settling back into the normal groove of things difficult.
As I mentioned in my previous post, we were in Detroit over Memorial Day weekend for the music festival and its related events that we attend every year.
Probably only the folks who have at least a passing interest in the music featured will care about my evaluation, but those of you who don’t might appreciate a glimpse into the subculture where I spend part of my time.
To sum it up: Nothing gold can stay. I don’t think anyone really believes that the accidental beauty of the first few years of the festival could ever last and I don’t think anyone is opposed to change, but there’s a difference between changing and blatantly going down the quickest path to the most possible money, all while spewing empty platitudes about “internationalism.” If the only way to have a festival every year is to churn out such nonsense, then it’s best to let it die gracefully before it’s too late.
People like me and my husband and many of our friends got into dance music in various ways. At the time that we all met, the best way to hear dance music in all of its genres was at raves, which at the time (the late 90s) were already past their prime. Occasionally, there was an all-ages night at a club, but those were never that great. Whatever half-hearted interest that I had in the culture of raving was pretty much gone after about a year and a half of going to them. I liked staying out all night, I liked dancing, I liked hanging out with my friends. I didn’t care for the pseudo-infantile behavior that began to dominate the culture. But, and I still maintain this viewpoint today, just because I think something is dumb, it’s not hurting anyone, so you go ahead and cuddle your teddy bear and suck on lollipops, even though I’m pretty sure I just saw a grey hair on your head.
Music and culture changes and out of the quintessentially 90s and neon versions of house and techno and the like, a new version emerged. One that was more grown-up, deeper. Baby-making music, if you will. Or perhaps just a mature and refined iteration of what came before it. There was no particular culture attached to it. Adults who still preferred to dress like Rainbow Brite were welcome to attend clubs where this kind of music was played, though the spectacle of, “Look at me! I’m shiny and glittery and dancing with glow sticks! LOOK AT ME!” had definitely been replaced by a feeling of letting only the music be the focal point, allowing listeners to truly lose themselves in it and dance and be free. Letting go of the ego and letting the id rule for a bit, if I may draw on my Psychology 101 class from 1999 (gulp).
Going to the festival for the first time was a revelation. Here we were, outside, in the daylight, surrounded not only by people from all over the country and the world who had emerged from rave culture into the same general moment in dance music, but by families and “regular joes” from Detroit, by raver kids whose devotion to moments of a technicolor existence was almost endearing, by musicians of various levels of fame and infamy. Through the awkward adolescence of raves, we had grown up and were comfortable listening to the weird, the deep, the soulful, the rambunctious, the political, the luscious beats of a generation of people, no matter what their age, who were finally comfortable in declaring, “This is the music that I like. This is the music that helps me to define who I am. This is the music that I hear at my most joyful and my most desperate. This is the music that will be played at my wedding, at the births of my children, at my funeral. This is the music that will be played in my next life.”
I had a transformative moment in 2005 when some of the Underground Resistance guys closed the festival on the main stage. They played “Transition,” while images of people like Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Mother Teresa, and Albert Einstein flashed behind them. The crowd of thousands around me melted away and I was alone when I heard the lyrics, “Point yourself in the direction of your dreams…and make your transition.” From that day on, I did, freed from the notion that I needed to worry about the uninformed and frightened opinions of people who would dismiss this music as silly and scoff at my inspiration.
Transition or not, my annual trek back has changed a bit each year. The cost of admission goes up, a necessary evil that we’re told is the only thing keeping the festival going year after year. A cost we’ve been happy to pay to support the work of the people from that city who have helped so many people figure out their lives through music. Something else changed, too, though. Artists from Detroit are bumped from better time slots and given lesser areas to play in favor of their more European counterparts, those who make and play the same music that got old 15 years ago, the music that is almost rhetorically composed for the Rainbow Brite crew who fork over $60 for the opportunity to feel like they’re getting away with something. They parade in front of each other, eager for reactions, armed with an arsenal of camera-ready poses, dying for that first moment when someone points and finally, finally notices them. In the background, the music could be Carl Craig or it could be Linda Ronstadt. They would scarcely notice the difference. They pay good money and lots of it for admission and shirts and blinky, shiny things that vendors sell because they know an opportunity when they see it.
This year, nearly all of the Detroit artists were shuffled unceremoniously to an underground stage that, despite the organizer’s best efforts, still sounded like listening to an off-balanced washing machine while nursing an earache. The glittering kids danced outside, in the sunlight, to tracks that they couldn’t name to save their lives, that could very well all be the same record or mp3 for all they know. They formed dance circles, breaking up whatever collective energy had been present on the dancefloor, so that they could stand and watch one person dance. If that isn’t the saddest goddamned thing ever, I don’t know what is.
Again, they are welcome to. I am happy to share that experience with anyone. But I didn’t feel like I was in a position of sharing this year. I felt like I was stuffed in a basement while the higher bidders enjoyed what used to be our moment in the sun.
I don’t want to focus entirely on the negative. We did hear some good music at the festival and even more at the after parties that we attended. The husband has a good round-up of the music that we saw/heard/got down to while we were there. Not surprisingly, his criticism of the unprofessional and/or just plain shitty aspects of the festival management are drawing ire. The organizers had previously agreed to sit down with him for an interview, but later recanted. I, however, as a professional writer, offer up my tape recorder for any statements that they want to make. If people like us, a numerical minority, who are genuinely passionate about the music and the experience of it, are no longer important, dropped in favor of the wealthy and serotonically tweaked, then just say so and we’ll stop bugging you with all of our demands for care and quality and respect.
Sigh.
Aside from the fact that, last Wednesday morning, I pried my eyes open and stared, confused, at the numbers on my alarm clock which read “7:55″ aka The Time at Which We Should Be at the School Bus Stop Holy Crap You’re Late as Hell O’Clock, getting back into all of the aspects of life seems to be increasingly difficult every year. Only this past Monday did I cook a meal and pack my lunch. Over the weekend, I got most of the laundry done (but not all of it). There are still several bags of random travel things gathering dust in our entryway. And I still poke around my office, unsure of what I normally do during the hours of 9 to 5, Monday through Friday. I’ll figure it out eventually.
I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here too much, but the husband, the baby, and I have taken up roller skating as a pretty serious hobby.
I used to roller skate a lot when I was a kid. For most of elementary school, everyone had a roller skating party for their birthday and so most weekends I would spend an afternoon at the Ches-a-Rena in Cheswick, skating in between courses of that kind of gross but kind of delicious frozen pizza and way too sugary birthday cake. Then I just didn’t go skating for a long time until college. A group of us went back to Ches-a-Rena during spring break. And in case you weren’t aware, roller skating isn’t really like riding a bike. You do forget how to do it and I fell. A lot. Sore and embarrassed, I figured that was that for me and roller skating.
A few years ago, during our annual trip to Detroit, there was a roller skating party at one of the big rinks there. “Hmm. Roller skating. I guess I’ll give it another try.” However, the skaters there were seriously skilled. While I struggled to stay upright, people would fly past me, dancing or sometimes rolling backwards on two wheels on one foot.
It was really humbling. But it was also really inspiring.
Over the past year, the three of us have started going roller skating as often as we can, usually a few times a month, and we’ve become kind of obsessed with it. We’d been getting pretty good on rental skates, but the expert skaters that we talked to told us that if we really wanted to get serious about it, we’d be much better off investing in our own skates. Plus, they’re much more comfortable than rentals.
A few weeks ago, I called the owner of the rink that we’d been going to and asked him how much skates were, naively thinking that we would just go, try on a few pairs and be on our merry way. The owner told us, “About $50,” to which we said, “Great! We’ll be right over.” However, dude had not fully unpacked that answer. Skates are $50 for kids. For adults, they’re considerably more expensive and you don’t just plop a pair on your feet like you were at Payless. You pick out boots, bearings, plates, stoppers, and wheels and order them, then have someone assemble them for you.
So, we placed our order and waited anxiously for him to call us, letting us know that our skates were ready to be picked up.
Last night, we headed out there after the baby’s baseball game. Tuesday nights are the adult sessions, which not only means are there no kids present, there’s also no one under the age of 60 there.
I had never paid much attention to the culture of roller skating, but it’s definitely a lifestyle for some. The folks in attendance last night had been doing this for a long time. The ladies wore short, little skirts and shiny pantyhose and danced around smoothly and expertly with their partners to organ music. “What the hell is going on?” I muttered, but apparently there are people who do what is essentially ballroom dancing on skates. It’s weird but also kind of bad-ass.
We got our skates on and teetered around a little bit. They felt much different than the rentals. As I wobbled around the rink, a 90-year-old woman zoomed past me on one leg.
We’re taking our skates with us to Detroit this weekend and returning to another iteration of the party that got us hooked a few years ago. And though I know I won’t be on any kind of level with some of the skaters that we’ll see there, I’m a little bit closer than I was.
If you’re so inclined, I highly recommend roller skating as an activity. It’s a hell of a workout and it’s really satisfying to get better at it. And if you’re looking for some inspiration, I recommend checking out a documentary from a few years ago called 8 Wheels and Some Soul Brotha Music, which chronicles much of the history of roller skating in the U.S. and how it came to be an urban pastime. Some acknowledgments are given to roller derby and the couples skating that we saw last night, but the contemporary focus is on rinks in cities and how they become centers of communities. Very interesting stuff.
