Organization for Transformative Works News

Random, but with thinking so much about hockey, I keep remembering this:

I used to do figure skating. My only interaction with ice hockey at all growing up was away teams showing up to the rink and just staring at me, or on very rare occasions starting to enter the ice before my coach chased them off. They were not scheduled to have the ice yet, but the coaches would try to get us to leave anyway and the boys wanted me out of the way. They were very entitled, and very confused why some kid in a pale purple leotard was in the way of important things, like them. The coaches would go on about the poor boys having come all this way in a van and needing to get on the ice already to perform their best that night, but they did not have the ice until four.

I guess all the bluster and entitlement worked at other rinks, but it did not fly at the Dorothy Hamill Skating Rink. They were not actually the main focus and that was very confusing for them. Dorothy Hamill - if that name isn't familiar to you - was a figure skating legend who helped raise the profile of the whole sport in the US. At the time she was a household name, and in the county she was from a bit more than that. I never met her, but the rink's focus was not hockey. It's just where the local high school games where held. It was just very much the wrong place to try to pull that, and in retrospect it's kinda funny.

I was never any good. I was part of a program to make figure skating more of an accessible thing, something people could do like any sport, rather than only done with a competitive focus. I could (sometimes) do the thing where you are skating forward and then you do a thing and land on one foot going backwards. My brain thinks these are called reversals, but googling it that doesn't seem to be the term. That's just what my coach called them. I didn't do it terribly long. When I was selected to be in a showcase showing what the non-competitive 'started too late' kids could do, my parents didn't seem to realize that it was like an actual show. They pulled me one week before the show, which was really shitty because not only was the coaching I got heavily subsidized and nearly free, but I got extra private coaching for the show and the program books had already been printed. My parents just didn't take it seriously when I said I was going to be in a show. When they realized I wasn't kidding, suddenly no more skating. Still glad I got a chance to do it. Having access to a program like that was pretty nice. I never followed figure skating after that. I do not know the terms for jumps. I trained for months for a thing I never got to do, and I guess that put me off wanting to watch it.

I'd love to get a chance to skate again, but I'd probably be a mess. The whole no longer having a sense of balance might be an issue even just for going around in circles. But hey, my local rink here in Portland is also associated with a famous figure skater. Tonya Harding was famous for different reasons, tho.