Billy the Kid is showing the newbie referees how to take charge. “Every time you make a call, somebody will be mad at you,” he tells the roller-derby tyros gathered at the walled edge of a roller-hockey court in Revere. In a Sox hat and glasses, Billy, Providence’s head ref, has come north tonight to coach five volunteer male and female arbiters still learning the fine art of roller-girl rule enforcement. And so he instructs: “You gotta yell. You gotta be like, ‘Pusssssssssyyyyy!’ ”
The Pussy in question is Pussy Venom, number 28 on the Boston Derby Dames, the all-women’s flat-track league that has been training locally for the past 10 months. With her double entendre of a derby moniker, Venom is not only one of nearly 40 local players practicing this Tuesday night at Greater Boston Indoor Sports, she’s also one of the recently incorporated LLC’s six executive-board members. Along with Dames Sarah Doom, Evilicious, Raquel Squelch, Malicen Thunderland, and founder Ivana Clobber, Venom will help steer this young enterprise of wheeling women with sexy-tough alter egos. (The aliases aren’t just for show. “People don’t even really know each other’s government names,” says Clobber. “Frankly, my parents even call me ‘Clobber’ now.”) And this Friday is the bona fide beginning, when the Derby Dames will have their first home inter-league bout, for which they’ll divide into three competing teams: the Wicked Pissahs, the Cosmonaughties, and the Nutcrackers.
Clobber started the Derby Dames after moving here from Madison, Wisconsin, where she had skated in derbies. A 26-year-old Medford resident who works as a nanny, she started recruiting from the Providence league last spring and holding regular practices in Boston in May. “The first practices, we had five or six girls,” she recalls. “I used to joke that at that first practice when we had ten skaters, I would take everyone out and buy [them] a beer. I said that for so long. And then one day I just looked around and we had ten skaters. And I was like, ‘Yes!I know this is going to happen now!” (She still owes them that beer: “Nobody ever took me up on it!”) Ten months later, the Derby Dames are one of 30 national clubs in the Women’s Flat-Track Derby Association. The Dames maintain around 30 active players on their roster and carry a long waiting list of potential recruits — a/k/a “fresh meat.”
But right now, at practice, they’re still refining the basics. Doing laps around a makeshift track outlined by orange cones, they’re a dizzying blur of regulation gear: shiny armor-like helmets, laced-up roller skates, and exoskeleton-like knee, elbow, and wrist pads. Some wear short-short-short shorts, while others have donned miniskirts with granny underpants. Evilicious changes from her Diesel jeans and cat-eye specs into a red pleated cheerleader skirt and goggles. Sarah Doom throws on a lab-coat dress — a costume left over from her days with the Rhode Island Riveters, the Ocean State’s traveling team, for which she and Clobber used to play.
