Susan Smith: Madison’s derby Dolls more than just “hurt in a skirt”

Originally published Aug. 17, 2008

By Susan Lampert Smith

A funny thing happened in the four years since I’ve been to a roller derby bout.

It’s become a real sport.

Oh, yeah, the women – who fill roles as substitute teacher, mom, or IT tech in daylight – still sport funny stage names and the costumes. The summer travel league team, the Dairyland Dolls, dresses in their blue and white gingham dresses. Think Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, if you left her out in the rain until her dress shrunk to the approximate size of a teddy, the better to show off her panties – and her massive pair of quadriceps.

The Dairyland Dolls play up their bad farm girl image with a mascot in a Holstein costume, and a cheer that goes:

“Don’t gimme no pop, no pop
“Don’t gimme no tea, tea.
“Just gimme that milk, moo, moo, moo, moo
“Wisconsin milk, moo, moo, moo, moo.”

But once they hit the rink – their next home bout is Aug. 30 against the Burning River Girls from Cleveland – it’s clear the sport has come a long way.

In July, they made progress in the rankings, by narrowly beating the Charm City Roller – a Baltimore team dressed unwholesomely in black, at their home rink, Madison’s Fast Forward.

The team’s star jammer, a tiny girl in braids named Mouse, cut through the Baltimore bruisers like a mouse through Swiss cheese. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) As she came around the oval, scoring a point for every opposing member she passed, her arms churned (sorry again) like those of an Olympic speed skater. There were referees’ whistles and fouls, but none of the professional-wrestling style antics that marked the team’s birth five years ago.

“This is definitely the future of derby,’’ said Tammy Faye Undertakker, the dolls’ spokeswoman. “Anymore, teams that are just show and fake fighting aren’t respected.”

The Baltimore bout was serious business, as Baltimore came in ranked 13 nationally, and the local team 17th. The top 12 teams in the East will qualify for the Women’s Flat Track Derby Association’s Eastern Regionals, which will be held Oct. 10-12 at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison. The top four teams will advance to Portland, Oregon, for the national championships in November.

Derby in Dairyland has come a long way since the Dolls first season in 2004. The four Madison area teams that play locally -- the Vaudeville Vixens, the Reservoir Dolls, the Unholy Rollers and the Quad Squad – have been joined by the Appleton-area Fox Valley Foxs and the Milwaukee-based Brew City Bruisers.

And Crackerjack, a Doll who currently serves as president of the WFTDA, expects the sport to grow some more after the release next year of the Ellen Page (of “Juno” fame) and Drew Barrymore movie, “Whip it,’’ about a Texas girl who gives up beauty pageants for the track. Texas was the home of the roller derby revival early this century (it all but died out in the 1970s), so it’s appropriate the film is set there.

Standard rules and athletic training have made it more of a sport and less of a show.

“The hits are harder, but cleaner,’’ said Crackerjack, a Dolls founder. “Before, the rules weren’t clear, so it was street justice.”

And the girls, many of whom never played an organized sport before, are in better shape than ever.

Witness the “baby dolls,’’ a group of about 25 women hoping to make the local teams this fall. Their summer regimen consists of two or three days doing core strength work at the Monkey Bar gym, and three nights of training at the track.

“We play tag and learn how to properly fall,” said “Baby Doll” Robin Giles, who was limping around Fast Forward on a crutch, the result of wrenching her knee during a practice.

Still, for every bout, there’s an ambulance and a paramedic team on hand, giving truth to roller derby’s motto, “Hurt in a skirt.”

For schedules and info, see http://www.madrollindolls.com/

PHOTO INFORMATION: A Dairyland Doll named Mouse passes on the outside during a recent derby match in Madison vs. Baltimore’s Charm City Roller team./PHOTO by Neil Stechschulte

Susan Smith: Capitol Square restaurant serves an Old Fashioned good time

Originally published July 27, 2008

By Susan Lampert Smith

MADISON – Doug Griffin can’t recall his first brandy old fashioned.

“No. No, I guess I can’t,’’ he said. “I have enjoyed them very much over the years.”

He won’t forget the 100,000th. Not his personal 100 grand of brandy, mind you. No this was the 100,000th served by the namesake restaurant, The Old Fashioned, which opened in 2005 on the East Side of Madison’s Capitol Square,

Griffin and Kevin Kiley, his pal from their days at Green Bay’s Notre Dame High School, and half the town, it seemed, crammed into the noisy bar on a hot July night, urged on by $1.50 Korbel brandy old fashioneds.

General manger Jen De Bolt and her staff glistened with perspiration as they muddled sugar and bitters, splashed in the brandy and soda, and speared cherries and oranges like they were on an assembly line. As the brandy went down the hatch, the noise level in the bar soared, a natural consequence of mixing Cheeseheads with brandy.

The bar wound up serving 761 old fashioneds during the three-hour special and another 145 afterward. Not so unusual, really.

“We sell the most Korbel brandy of any restaurant in the state,’’ said De Bolt. So much that the president of Korbel paid the bar a personal visit back in January. (There were $1 old fashioneds that night to celebrate, but since there was a blizzard raging, they only sold about 300.)

The Old Fashioned restaurant is a tribute to all things Wisconsin. From the old Blatz beer signs on the wall to the Green Bay Packers souvenir bourbon decanters behind the bar, to the menu, where you’ll find the wares of Wisconsin’s small food companies.

You can dine on natural casing hot dogs from Salmon’s Meat Market in Kewaunee, or on crusty hard rolls from Sheboygan’s Highway bakery. Appetizer choices range from smoked chubs from Charlie’s Smokehouse near the tip of Door County, to landjaeger sausage from New Glarus to cheese from the Fayette Creamery in Darlington. For color, add some Bea’s picked beets, and wash it down with the neon colored sodas from Seymour.

For co-owner Tami Lax, the menu is a way of preserving the foods she grew up eating in Green Bay. When she moved to Madison, she’d return from a visit home with a cooler packed with bacon, braunschweiger, and cheese. If she loved these things, she figured, so would others. And she’d be keeping the distinct flavors of Wisconsin alive.

“Some of these things are going extinct because our tastes are becoming more narrow,’’ she said. “You save them by eating them. We can keep Seymour Bottling in business by buying hundreds of cases of their sodas.”

And, thanks to dedicated customers such as Griffin, who says he “got here early and parked my keister on a stool” to wait for the special, they’re doing their part for brandy, too.

PHOTO INFORMATION: While people elsewhere might mix an old fashioned with whiskey, every good Wisconsinite knows it’s really made with brandy./PHOTO by Brent Nicastro

Susan Smith: Only in Madison -- Grad student is human mosquito magnet

Originally published July 20, 2008

By Susan Lampert Smith

Elsewhere in Wisconsin, people tend to tend to roll their eyes at the mere mention of Madison.

You’ll hear it is full of liberals and politicians and nothing like the rest of this solid Midwestern state. But in at least one way, Madison is classically Wisconsin: Its chain of lakes, marshes and woods have, this summer, produced a truly amazing crop of mosquitoes. One Madison surveillance trap sucked in 20,000 mosquitoes in a day.

But, yes, there’s a Madison twist here, too. Because on nice summer evenings, when the rest of humanity wisely flees indoors, swatting at the swarm, somewhere in Madison, Patrick Irwin is baring parts of his linebacker-sized body for science.

The UW-Madison graduate student knows, scientifically speaking, he’s a piece of meat. But he does have his limits.

“I told my adviser that I’ll be the bait, but I won’t shave my legs,’’ said Irwin, a doctoral candidate in Entomology. (His advisor, Entomology Professor Susan Paskewicz, a nationally known mosquito expert, is doing research in Uganda, where mosquito-borne diseases cause death and suffering to millions.)

Part of Irwin’s research involves “human landing studies.” This means during prime biting times, Irwin stations himself in a likely spot, such as a subdivision in the UW Arboretum near Lake Wingra, to count how many mosquitoes land on one lower leg in a 10-minute span.

His record? About 120 in 10 minutes. He sucks them up in a bug vacuum to be taken back to the lab, and counted by genus and species. Right now, he’s testing to see whether those carbon-dioxide-emitting bug traps, sold under names such as Mosquito Magnet, really work.

“We know that they catch a lot of mosquitoes, but what we’re interested in is whether (the traps) reduce biting pressure on humans,’’ he said. Maybe they just attract your neighbors’ mosquitoes or maybe they trap mosquitoes that don’t bite people.

The evidence is still coming in, but let’s put it this way: Irwin hasn’t spent any of his own money on the devices.

For his master’s degree in public health, Irwin surveyed Madison’s storm sewer system, swamps and drainage ditches to find the breeding places for the mosquitoes that carry West Nile virus. And, since he learned the vast majority of Madison’s mosquitoes breed in about a dozen or so “hot spots,” mostly in drainage ditches, he’s come up with a idea for killing mosquitoes without chemicals.

He recently got permission from the Department of Natural Resources to seed the drainage ditches with fathead minnows.

“They’re a native species,’’ Irwin explains, “And fathead minnows really love to eat mosquito larvae.”

If it works, it might be one fatheaded idea from Madison the rest of the state can embrace.

PHOTO INFORMATION: Patrick Irwin, a UW-Madison graduate student, settles into a spot at the UW Arboretum for “human landing studies” of this year’s amazing mosquito crop./PHOTO by Brent Nicastro

Dennis McCann: Searching by the dock of the bay

Originally published Dec. 10, 2008

Half of the time you could ask me what I was doing at this time yesterday and I’d have to think long and hard to answer. The old cranial database is getting increasingly leaky.

But ask me what I was doing 41 years ago today and watch with wonder as I come up with the answer. I was riding around Lake Monona in Madison that foggy evening in my friend Tom Hart’s car, helping searchers look for the remains of Otis Redding’s sunken plane.


Well, that’s too generous by half. We were riding around looking for the searchers, not that there was much of anything we could have done to help beyond general rubbernecking and head shaking, and there’s never a shortage of that kind of “help”. The real truth is we didn’t find the searchers anyway, so the recovery of the twin-engine plane that carried Redding, the hot young soul singer, and his band, the Bar-Kays, was eventually accomplished without our teenage contributions. But it left us with a we-were-there moment for the ages, even if we weren’t really.

Redding, his manager, pilot and four members of the Bar-Kays, all en route to Madison for two shows at The Factory, a downtown club, died in the crash. One band member survived the crash; another who had flown by commercial plane was not involved. The event has become another somber moment in Wisconsin music history, right up there with Stevie Ray Vaughn’s death in a1990 helicopter crash at Alpine Valley near East Troy.


What’s most amazing, looking back, is how young Redding was at the time of his death – just 26 - and how big a musical figure he became after it. His biggest-selling pop song, “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay,” recorded just three days earlier, reached number one on both pop and R&B charts, and his label had a string of other posthumous hits. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1989.

Naturally, I don’t remember what I was doing the night he was inducted. But on the sad note of this anniversary let’s at least enjoy this You Tube video of Otis and “The Happy Song (Dum, Dum).”