Last night was the Inaugural Bout of the Rat City Roller Girlls and it was an absolutely amazing time. Awesome. If you're in Seattle you must attend.
The Rat City Roller Girls is a roller derby league a full year in the making that has four teams of extraordinarly bad ass women--Grave Danger, Throttle Rockets, The Derby Liberation Front (D.L.F.) and the Sprocket Wrenches. Fast skating, full contact, superb team uniforms, snarky announcers, and a band at halftime.
It was an all ages event which made the whole thing genuinely sweet and exciting as opposed to an ironic, hipster-centric event. I loved it. I also had to leave earlier as I was completely exhausted from my week and a day spent moving Elaine into her wonderful new pad (She has a lot of books; books are heavy!; Mark is out of shape.)
Here's my photostream of the evening (and yes, most of the pictures are crappy--if you look at the highest quality image you'll see more stuff). And here and here you can watch cameraphone videos of some hardcore roller derby action.
Oh, and I owe this experience completely to Cathy who blasted out an Evite to many people with the result being that, well, I came. She was hanging with her friend Justin from San Jose who I expect will shortly be moving to Seattle. Cathy kicks ass and apart from a brief tree climbing episode last summer I've not seen her in Seattle except for last night. I believe that qualifies as a crime.