Chapter 1 - How it all began

♪Funny Song♪ Joan of Dark, Strawberry Jam, and Sweet C are sitting around Strange Brew Coffee and they're like -Hey, let's form a roller derby team! And I said that's a dumb idea because you're gonna get hurt. ♪ I heard about it from a friend of mine, I was planning a move to New York and a friend sent me an email that said: "I saw this flyer where they're starting roller derby, Gotham Girls Roller Derby." (laughing) So I started emailing Gotham Girls and getting all the info, and the move ended up not happening and I needed to come home. So I came home and I thought surely someone around Indianapolis is doing this and nobody was, so I just put a MySpace page up. ♪Pop Dance♪ (Joan of Dark) Strawberry, she was telling me what roller derby was because I had never even heard of it and I immediately wanted to be involved. ♪♪ (Joan of Dark) I had been in punk bands and all this kind of stuff so I loved that whole subculture idea. ♪♪ (Joan of Dark) and I I love working out and I'm really aggressive, like I love boxing and all these different things, so it seemed like the perfect thing! I was like I can be a punk rock boxer on skates, this is awesome! (laughing) ♪One♪ ♪Two♪ ♪Three♪ ♪Four♪ ♪Clap your hands♪ ♪One♪ ♪Two♪ ♪Three♪ ♪Four♪ ♪Clap your hands♪ ♪One♪ ♪Two♪ ♪Three♪ ♪Four♪ ♪Clap your hands...♪ It was right around the same time when Amber posted the MySpace page. Somebody shared it that I knew. I got Michelle Pemberton, who skated under the name Red Rocket and just kind of said "Hey, we should do this. Maybe we'll do a story on it. We should check it out." And I think I talked her into it under the guise that we were gonna do a story but I wanted to do it. It sounded really fun. We saw the invite for the roller derby meeting and we're like: OH! Let's go check it out! maybe we'll do a story about it. and then we immediately got sucked in by its sheer awesomeness. ♪♪ The first time we got together, we would meet at the skate rink on the east side and just go to open skates just try to remember how to skate. Try bring that 13-year-old back out of us. We just kept skating there until we wanted to actually start doing drills But we didn't have any money. There was a church by my house (laughing) and we just started showing up at that church parking lot and jumping over cones and ropes (Jane Ire) When we first started out, we commandeered a church parking lot. I'm not entirely sure that we had permission to be there (laughing) but they seemed to put up with us okay We would just show up and put our track out. People driving by would honk at us as we were doing push-ups and sit-ups in the parking lot. At first I was completely terrified (laughing) A lot of the people that were already skating knew what they were doing, and I had zero skating skills. So I was a little nervous at first but everyone was really welcoming. It was the first time in my life I had ever played a sport. It was a really great community of people. Those things all combined made me want to join roller derby. ♪♪