Live from Austin!

A&E is showing a reality TV series about one of the Austin roller derby teams, the Texas Rollergirls. Reviews from the New York based media seem to have missed something.

AP writes:

This new generation of roller derby queens skates that thin line between blue collar and white trash, balancing nights of tequila shots with days of their real-life careers as nurses, teachers and rubber-lingerie designers.

[...]

Despite their penchant for fishnet uniforms and rump-shaking celebrations, they bristle (in episode two) at the suggestion that roller girls are easy. Still, they smoke and drink and curse like sailors and extend their middle fingers liberally. When Miss Conduct is missing in action at a practice, a teammate offers this explanation: “Miss Conduct is drunk.”

The New York Times isn’t quite so diplomatic:

For a while, it seemed as if Roller Derby was a lost art, like illuminated manuscripts or clog dancing. Actually, it’s more like polio: many people assume it was eradicated in the 1970’s, but it’s still around and, in some areas, quite virulent.

[...]

Reality contests take ordinary, identifiable women and pose them in an absurd, artificial fantasy fishbowl. “Rollergirls” is a documentary that takes women who pursue an absurd, artificial fantasy sport and tries to pose them as ordinary, identifiable women.

[...]

These players are all based in Austin, Tex., which is supposed to be Texas’s classy town. One can only imagine Rollergirls’ Night Out in Fort Worth.

Ouch.

In October 2001, Chante Mallard, a 25 year old woman in Fort Worth, Texas, was driving her 1997 Chevy Cavalier home. On the East Loop 820 split with U.S. 287, she hit 37 year old Gregory Biggs, a homeless man. Both of Biggs’ legs were broken by the impact, and he was hurled headfirst through the windshield of the car.

Ms Mallard quickly drove the few miles back to her house, with Biggs still lodged in the remnants of the windshield. She parked the car in the garage, then went into the house, leaving Biggs begging for help. It was apparently at least two days before he died of blood loss and shock; once he was dead, Mallard got several of her friends to help her dump the body in a nearby park.

On October 27th, two men found the body. That might have been the end of the story, except that Mallard had told a friend about the accident while at a party. The friend was unable to live with what she knew, and told police. On February 26th, police obtained a search warrant for Mallard’s house. In the garage they found the damaged car, still spattered with blood, hair and other trace evidence.

Explaining her actions, Ms Mallard told police that she panicked after the accident happened, and that she had been drinking and was also on Ecstasy at the time. She also added that she occasionally went into the garage to apologize to Biggs as he slowly died.

Mallard’s attorney says that the police are going too far in charging her with murder:

“I think this is overreaching on the part of the prosecution and the police, and in the end, I believe the law will shake out that this was simply a case of failure to stop and render aid,” Heiskell said.

No word as to whether she has lost her job as a nurse’s aide.

[Sources: The Denver Channel, DFW Star-Telegram.]