Musings on Dance, Food, Geek Stuff
“It’s not possible to be unhappy skating,” my friend Kristin said to me on her second outing to the Skating Place in Golden Gate Park. I understand the sentiment. We’re rollerskating in a beautiful park in the city by the bay. There’s disco and funk pumping out of a boombox. People of all ages are…
One of the things that I miss about my communities is the feeling of being cared for and expressing care for others. It’s just so much harder to experience care and kindness when you aren’t physically together. Skating has reminded me of that though. Nearly every time I go out skating in the park, there…
So this October I had this crazy idea that I wanted to be TRON on skates for Halloween. More specifically, the character Sam Flynn from TRON: Legacy (2010). (Yes, the movie was a hot mess, but it looked and sounded amazing.) There were really two options for TRON costumes I found in my research: Buy…
This evening in the Skating Place there was a boy who was maybe six or seven years old going around the circle with us. At that hour, there were about ten of us skating, all adults. I round a corner and see the boy lying on the ground just bawling his eyes out, while two…
Hey it’s been 3 months since I started quad skating in July! I’m still skating pretty much every day and learning new stuff all the time. My current obsession is unlocking how to do toe spins. Wicked hard! I thought I would celebrate by doing a little jam skate video. I could think of no…
If this isn’t a perfect city summer vibe, I don’t know what is. God damn do I love skating in the park.
There are lots of kinds of roller skating: park skating (ramps), trail skating, derby, figure. But I have had one primary motivation for learning how to quad skate: dancing. Or “jam skating” as it’s called in many places. Early this morning, I celebrated two months of quad skating by jamming to one of my favorite…
So I’ve been roller skating for about a month now. I can’t think of anything I’ve “worked” so hard at at the start. Pretty much every day I’ve put in at least 1-2 hours of practice. And when I’m not skating, I’m probably watching skate videos. I didn’t do anywhere near that much practice when…
So we are in Month 4 of the coronavirus pandemic quarantine, which is unbelievable and weird. Time has no meaning anymore, as people are fond of saying. Despite not getting to go to most of the places that were part of my regular routine (the office, the climbing gym, dance clubs and bars, restaurants, bakeries),…
Last weekend at Hunter College I had the pleasure of seeing the "Bronx Gridlock" take on the "Manhattan Mayhem" as part of the 2010 season of the Gotham Girls roller derby. I'm generally not a sports person, and certainly not as a spectator. But there's something wonderful, subversive and inspiring about roller derby that always…