Rollin With My Homies

Raven did a great post about roller skating and how it is so natural to her even now, years after she first learned how to glide. While I am happy, and slightly jealous of her mad skills. Reading her post flashed me back to my own roller rink memories-which were not so candy colored.

I avoided skating parties like the plague. Every time I flipped open a invitation with some for of baby animal or clown (shudder) inviting me to a party of my classmate, I prayed that it was not being held at a roller rink. As I scanned the card for the location of this birthday celebration I would chant, "Please be at a bowling alley, backyard, park...anywhere but the roller rink!"

Much to my dismay skating parties were all the rage in the early nineties. And being a social girl I would go and lace up my skate in honor of the birthday girl or boy. I usually would not let my mom stay at these parties with me simply because I didn't want her to see her daughter at such a low point.

There I would be clinging to the side of rink, my skinny little legs struggling to keep me up with a fake smile plastered to my face. My friends would skate by and say "come with us" and I would do my best to convince them that I actually preferred the white knuckled grasp I had on the wall. And within the last fifteen minutes of the party I would finally get the swing of this whole "roller skating thing". I would let go of the wall and do this hesitant "glide", that really resembled how someone who had just messed their pants would skate; the bent knees, the butt held out just in case of a fall and the arms stretched out at a petrified angle. 

It would always be these times in which my friends would come skating along holding hands and say "come on hold our hand". Oh this was risky but it was nice for the first go around the rink, that was until they decided to play crack the whip. For those of you fortunate enough not to know what crack the whip is, it is when a long line of kids hold hands and try to swing their arms so that the person on the end of the "whip" goes flying off into the wall they had just reluctantly, let go of. Tell me how is this fun? Whatever happened to pin the tail on the donkey, or scavenger hunts, or a pinata?

But then roller blades came along when I became a decent skater and that was also the same time when skate parties went out of vogue. Naturally. So that is my little flash back about skating...do you share my pain or are you as talented as Raven?