Squeals on wheels

Mothers, nurses, artists let loose as first roller derby team in N.H.

Lisa Crear of Lowell, who skates under the name Diabrawlical, stretches out after a practice with the Skate Free or Die Rollergirls. (Boston Globe Photo / Josh Reynolds)

TYNGSBOROUGH - Clad in colorful helmets, screamingly red lips clenched around mouth guards, they wait.

Fierce. Nostrils flared. Eyes slit.

When the whistle finally screams, they kick off, skates thrumming against the hardwood like horse hooves.

A mass of purple and blond ponytails, striped socks, pierced lips, and inked arms shrieks past. Wheels whir in fluorescent pink, lollipop red, lime green, and black. Arms pump like pistons. Knees and hips crouch as the skaters rumble around the curves.

Derby girls.

Brash. Tough. Oozing attitude. Tactically blocking with shoulders and backs, swiveling hips like battering rams, and muscling opponents into walls.

Outside the rink, they are EMTs, engineers, nurses, mothers, and artists - but once they lace up those quad skates, they become bawdy and menacing bruiser babes with the Skate Free or Die! Rollergirls, New Hampshire's first roller derby team.

Following the nationwide resurgence of the crash-and-slam sport over the past three or four years, the group of 20- and 30-something women began rallying here last fall. They now come to Tyngsborough's Roller Kingdom every week from all over the Merrimack Valley and the southern-central sliver of New Hampshire to skate, vamp, and train for on-rink battle. They hope to begin league play in 2009.

Most, when asked, don't spare adjectives about the sport, in which teams of five skaters each try to score points by passing packs of their opponents as everyone careens around a rink.

"I'd have to say fierce, exhilarating, and flat-out awesome," said 26-year-old Ellen Walsh of Wakefield.

On skates, Walsh rolls as Mizz Dizzastah; she flaunts platinum- and black-streaked hair, four mouth piercings, and an unfinished spider web tattoo on her left arm.

"It gets everyone's attention," she said - not of the tattoo, but of derby.

It always did, but now for a different reason, say players: While in the past it was considered a vulgar, violent, and stagy spectacle, today it's a real sport - albeit one that has not loosened its embrace of the burlesque.

Every self-respecting derby girl, for instance, adopts a vixenish persona.

For the Skate Free or Die! Rollergirls, those have included Estrogena Davis and Skahface. And Tanked Girl - "She's a drinkah," organizer Alley Trela, or Dee Stortion (her rink name), said with a chuckle during a recent practice.

The group assembles at the squat Roller Kingdom building, slung along Middlesex Road just a few minutes from the New Hampshire border, every Thursday night.

They come in all types: fast and seamless; wobbly and stiff-legged; petite, curvy, beefy, and muscular. None, however, is "built like a refrigerator with a head," as Jim Croce jested in his early 1970s song, "Roller Derby Queen."

Most display piercings - steel balls or bullrings in eyebrows, lips, or noses - and almost everyone is tattooed, some blooming with several. Fishnets seem almost like a requirement; ripped ones are even better.

Many idolize cult musicians, including Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen, and legendary pinup goddesses, such as the sultry, raven-haired Bettie Page.

Lori Leonard is among that siren's worshipers; she rolls up her sleeve to show off a newly inked tattoo of the bondage model sprouting angel wings.

At 41, the Nashua baker is one of the group's oldest members. But being a former figure skater, she is also the most experienced. "I like the speed," she said. "It's daring, it's physical."

But before the real battle begins, there's boot camp. Since the girls are not likely to be ready to terrorize the track until next year, their practices involve building strength, developing endurance, and fine-tuning the arts of war.

On this particular night, they split into two gangs, wrangled by a pink-haired, red-clad, whistle-brandishing martinet.

At the center of the rink, one group cranks out sit-ups and spine-stiffening exercises ominously called planks, which involve suspending bodies on elbows and toes like a push-up in freeze frame. As they drill, cellphones tucked into purses sometimes holler with punk songs.

The other crew rips around in laps, fishnets and star stickers on their helmets whipping into a funky, colorful blur.

"Work the crossovers on the corners!" their taskmistress growls. "Push it harder! Get low!"

After four roundabouts, the girls collapse into a slide. One among their kittenish crew accents the move with an artful 360-turn. Another - wearing black and blue socks, fitting for the sport - throws out her arms like a rock star beckoning an avalanche of applause. Then, they clamor back up and reverse direction.

One warrior, clad in a black- and white-striped shirt and snug black shorts, whirs out of the crowd and glides off the floor.

"This is exactly what I needed," the 24-year-old Marissa Buergin, a.k.a. Raggedy Antics, says as she clunks down. (That's her third alter ego, by the way - she first tried Mod L Misbehavior and Kat A Clysm.) "I found the sport I'm supposed to be doing."

As she talks, the nursing student and mother of a 4-year-old son picks at a hole in her red fishnets exposing her right knee.

Once the group starts bouts, she intends to be a jammer. "I'm kind of pumped for it: The crowd, the adrenaline rush."

She leans forward and adds, "I just don't want to lose any teeth."

Indeed, some intense sprees end in broken bones and concussions. One skater with Chicago's famed Windy City Rollers even suffered a spinal cord injury.

Yet some see a positive in the sport's furious nature - it shatters sexist stereotypes. As black-ponytailed Dementia A GoGo, or 24-year-old Rachael Hapenney, puts it, "Women are supposed to be dainty and cute."

But that they certainly are not - at least if you look at roller derby's phenomenal growth.

The Women's Flat Track Derby Association has swelled from 30 leagues in the United States in 2004 to 234 last year, according to Kristin Hendrick, chairwoman of the board of directors for the St. Louis-based organization, which sanctions the sport.

Some credit that growth to a management shift: Today's teams are generally matriarchal and nonprofit.

The Rollergirls, for instance, plan to donate proceeds from their future bouts to local charities, said Stortion, 26, who assembled the girls through "punk rock, do-it-yourself recruiting" with fliers and a Myspace page.

The derby dames extol the sisterhood.

"There's such a strong sense of it - it's amazing," said 23-year-old Shay Heath, who skates as Devotchka Riot ("but most people just call me Riot"). "Every single one of these women is your sister." And although they are all divas sporting high-wattage looks, Heath, a Manchester body piercer, is particularly electrifying.

Her midnight hair is twisted into a mini beehive; penciled-in eyebrows and sable-fluttering eyelids stand in stark contrast to her ivory skin. Her body screams with tattoos: stars dotted behind her ears, a cornucopia of fruit on her chest, happy and angry moons on her legs.

Enamored with rockabilly and "old-school" pin-ups, derby fits her niche, she said.

"It helps with everything in life," she said. "You gotta skate it out."

And with that, she did, pumping back out onto the rink, joining the cycling, grunting whirlwind of her fellow warriors-in-training.

Taryn Plumb can be reached at taryn.plumb@gmail.com.