City Lights:

Am I man enough to date a Roller Girl?

That was the one question on my mind Friday when I signed up for Date a Derby Dame at Suds Sports Grill.

The OC Roller Girls, Orange County’s female roller-derby league, have their second home match of the year Saturday. To publicize the event, titled Love Hurts in honor of Valentine’s Day, the girls put on a speed-dating extravaganza and invited men to try their luck for $5 admission.

Here’s how speed dating works: The available women (or men, as the case may be) station themselves at tables, while their prospective dates get in as much conversation as they can before the buzzer rings and they rotate to the next table. After the last buzzer, interested parties can mingle, and organizers send e-mails to men and women who marked each other down as a favorite.

I’m a terrible athlete, having played one season of Little League and gotten one hit, and in addition to editing a newspaper, I write and publish poetry for a living. So if I found true love with any of the Roller Girls, it would clearly be a case of opposites attracting.

Or so I thought. When I interviewed members of the team for this week’s feature story, they stressed that the Roller Girls come from all walks of life (and they’re not all young, either; some are nearly old enough to be my mother). Sure enough, when I made the rounds at Suds, I found an impressive array of personalities.

Speed dating is a hectic pursuit, with the buzzer sounding after just a few minutes, so it invites players to be creative. One Roller Girl, when I sat down in front of her, started with “Pirates or ninjas?” (Ninjas.) Another opened by asking me if I thought the Death Star from “Star Wars” should be rebuilt after the heroes blew it up. (No, the pieces should be melted down and turned into playground equipment on Tatooine.)

Given the violent nature of roller derby, I was curious how the girls felt about traditional gender roles. Most said they didn’t care for them at all.

“I run my own course,” one declared, “and I hope, someday, I’ll find someone to run it with me.”

Another, though, had the opposite view. “Love them,” she beamed when I posed the question. “I don’t ever want to fix a sprinkler. I don’t ever want to wield power tools. As far as I’m concerned, that’s man’s work.”

Perhaps suspicious of my question, she asked if I considered myself a metrosexual. I asked how she defined that, and she asked if I trimmed my nails or just bit them. I silently stretched out my fingers, fresh from the nail clipper.

“Oh,” she deadpanned.

I hit it off more easily, though, with a girl who said she wouldn’t date musicians because she believed most of them were irresponsible pot-smokers. Did she feel the same way about poets? I asked.

“A poet is different,” she enthused. “That’s way different. Poetry, that takes intellect. It takes brain power.”

It’s not every day a poet gets a rave from a Roller Girl. Of course, I know a number of musicians who are sober and hard-working, and I thought about mentioning that. But considering that she mauls people on the rink two nights a month, I figured I shouldn’t argue with her.

City Editor MICHAEL MILLER can be reached at (714) 966-4617 or at [email protected] .