Six Rounds Backwards
Updated: Nov 5
“Hey, Betty. Do six rounds backwards. Don’t touch anybody.”
That was the challenge, the dare. Open skate at Skateland in Northridge, the floor full of people, and me, thirteen or fourteen years old, already gaining speed. I went backwards through the whole crowd, threading between bodies, and skated back to him wound up. “I did it. Hell yeah, I did it. Didn’t nudge a single shoulder. What you got for me next?”
The guy handing out dares was one of the instructors at Skateland’s hockey camp. He grew up in the Valley, he was a little punk rock, and he loved hockey. It was my first year at camp. I was the only girl there, and I was good. He noticed on the first day and looked out for me the way a big brother would. Besides coaching, he ran the open skates, and he started enlisting me to host the games. My favorite was three giant stuffed dice, each one at least three feet on a side. I’d roll them across the floor, and whatever they landed on, everybody had to race to that part of the rink. Musical chairs on eight wheels.
One of those first days of camp, after he’d watched me skate and play, he said, “You know what, Erin? I’m going to call you Betty.”
I had no idea what it meant. I was used to being with the boys, and used to big-brother energy taking me under its wing. I’d like to think it was because of how well I skated and played. Either way, I wore Betty like a badge.
He was only my instructor for the first couple of years. I lost track of him after that. But I kept the name top of mind.
I’m telling you this story because I want yours. Right now, through Wednesday, November 25, 11:11 Projects is collecting stories like this one for the BETTY zine and digital archive, a record of the Valley’s underground told by the people who lived it. The rink, the schoolyard, the garage, the nickname that stuck. Keep yours in mind while you read. I’ll tell you where to send it at the end.
Skating was my jam. I started on roller skates and graduated to rollerblades. This was the nineties.
If you read Through Sherman Way, you’ve already met the elementary school across the street from my house. That campus was my entire geography. It held a lot of my firsts. The first day of school, the first time I argued with a teacher, the first A+. Also the first cigarette, the first time I snuck out and climbed onto the roof, the first time I smoked weed. This was before campuses were locked up and closed off. We could get in any time, day or night, and the staircases and rails were ours.
All the skaters in the neighborhood ended up there, and all of them were boys. A few rode skateboards, but this was Valley suburbia, and rollerblades ruled. Mine were built for grinding: a plastic frame with a hard plate in the middle, made to slap down on a rail and slide. I was the girl with all of the boys. Yes, I was a little more scared to jump the sixteen-step staircase. But goddamn, did I do it.
Then my cousin Marc bought me real hockey skates, and everything changed. A metal chassis instead of plastic. Thick padding wrapped around the ankle. A stiff boot built to stop on a dime, cut hard, and take a hit. The grinding skates were for showing off. These were for winning.
I had that Leo drive, competitive, with a lot to prove. I’d go up to the school parking lot with my new skates, my stick and a bag of pucks and practice my slap shot. It paid off.
I played through my teens in two leagues at the West Valley YMCA on Vanowen. In the women’s league, I scored hat tricks almost every game. In the men’s league, nobody handed me anything. The boys didn’t want to pass me the puck. I heard the comments, the ones meant to remind me who I was skating with and where they thought I belonged. I played right forward. When I scored, or pulled off a move that left somebody behind, I’d find whichever boy had been talking the most shit, look right at him, and slide my stick home like a sword going back into its sheath.
It never stopped me. I’d been the girl with all of the boys since the schoolyard. Playing with the boys isn’t scary. Being told to stay on the sidelines is, and I never stayed there.
At seventeen I was working the early shift at Bed Bath & Beyond, linens department, top floor. One morning I took medication on an empty stomach and drove to work. On Victory Boulevard I got sick. My head went down, and at about forty-five miles an hour I hit a light pole. It took the Jaws of Life to get me out of the car.
I broke my femur and my humerus. I spent months in a wheelchair, sleeping in a hospital bed set up in my parents’ living room. All I wanted was to get better and get back on my skates.
I kept all my hockey gear for years, sure I’d get back to it. I picked it up again in college, but it didn’t last. I’ve laced up a handful of times since. It’s still fun. But I’m in my forties now, and the skills just aren’t there.
Skateland isn’t there either. It opened in 1958, and over six decades it hosted everyone from Ike & Tina Turner to Iron Butterfly at its dances. Olivia Newton-John trained there for Xanadu. Then the pandemic shut its doors, and in 2020 the owners sold the building. It reopened in 2022 as the Trebek Center, a 107-bed shelter for people experiencing homelessness. For my generation of Valley kids, that was the end of something. Skateland was where we had birthday parties, first crushes, couples skates, and for me, a name. It closed the way so much of the Valley’s culture has disappeared: without much notice from anyone over the hill. If it had to become something else, I’m glad it became a place that takes people in.
I don’t remember when I found out what Betty meant to everyone else. I remember wondering, at some point, whether it meant he thought I was hot. I didn’t let myself live there. I didn’t want to burst what we had, that clean big-brother thing where the only question that mattered was whether I could do six rounds backwards without even a brush on someone’s shoulder.
It’s a word with a long résumé. Betty Cooper was the wholesome girl next door. Betty Grable was the pin-up. Bettie Page was the rebel, Betty Rubble the housewife. In West Coast surf and skate culture, a betty was the pretty girl on the beach, waiting for her surfer boy to come in from the water. Every one of those Bettys was somebody else’s picture of a woman.
Mine was a dare. He took a word that usually meant sitting on the sidelines and gave it to the one girl at the rink who never did.
The surf-and-skate betty hit its stride in the eighties, the same decade the rest of the country met the Valley Girl. She talked a certain way, shopped a certain way, and lived a carefree life in a place everyone assumed was white, middle class and culturally empty. Nobody ever mistook me for that kind of Valley girl. The mall was still where we went. We just never went inside to shop. We met up at the abandoned mini golf course behind the Promenade, sat on the cracked concrete where the fake waterfalls no longer ran, and made something out of the margins.
There were a lot of ways I carried a subcultural identity before I had a word for it. I never quite fit the mainstream. I never really found my people. I wasn’t a stereotype. The closest I came to belonging was on wheels. At the rink with a stick in my hand, being dared to do something hard. Or on my bike, crossing Sherman Way, weaving through traffic, always searching for something to plug into.
Here’s what I understand now that I didn’t then. The Valley was never void of culture. When you grow up in the suburbs, you’re left to your own devices. We didn’t have the same places to plug into, so we made them ourselves, in garages and backyards and empty schoolyards. That imagination and that rebelliousness built a lot of what the world now calls Los Angeles culture.
Teenagers were cruising Van Nuys Boulevard every Wednesday night from the fifties into the seventies. Nirvana recorded Nevermind at Sound City in Van Nuys. Rage Against the Machine played their first show at CSUN. The studios that the world calls Hollywood sit in Burbank and Studio City. The Valley has always been full of recording studios and band lockouts, because space here was cheaper and easier to come by for people just starting out.
Then the city takes the credit. Over and over, culture born here gets extracted and claimed by somewhere over the hill.
Shannon and I saw this firsthand while putting BETTY together. One of our artists comes out of the lowrider scene. I asked her what her connection to the San Fernando Valley was. She said her first lowrider mentor had a shop in the Valley. Most people would tell you lowriders are East LA. But the first shop she walked into, and the person who taught her, were here. One sentence, and a piece of the record changed. That’s what we’re collecting.
That’s the question I started asking in 2019 with Valley Girl Redefined, when 11:11 Projects brought twenty-three Valley women to Brand Library to answer the stereotype with their own work. In my curator’s statement I wrote about the formulas I was handed growing up, and how rebelling against them only got me filed under a different one: the defiant troublemaker going nowhere fast. Then I asked, what about everyone else?
BETTY is the answer, and it comes in two parts.
The first opens January 25 at the CSUN Main Gallery. BETTY: A Sequel to Valley Girl Redefined brings fifteen artists together around the scenes that never made the movie: punk, queer, immigrant, Chicanx and Latinx, lowrider, skate and street. A basement punk venue from Granada Hills, rebuilt couch by couch. A wishing well with pieces of trans experience set into the cement. While the world was laughing at the Valley Girl, all of this was happening underneath. That’s what made it sub.
The second part is the one closest to my own story. Betty on Wheels, at Third House in Van Nuys and curated by Megan Pinkston, is about the Valley’s culture of wheels. Skates and skateboards, bikes, public transit. Lowriders on Van Nuys Boulevard. In Over Sherman Way I wrote that the Valley was planned for living and commuting, not congregating. Wheels were how we congregated anyway. Betty on Wheels runs January 22 to March 12.
Betty on Wheels is built on Culturama, the community-rooted practice artist Marlené López developed, where storytelling and collective creation come before any finished object. The artists have lived this culture or are exploring it now, and they’re making the show together instead of handing finished pieces to a curator. It’s a lot like open skate. Everybody’s moving at once, in different directions, at different speeds, and the trick is to make something together without knocking anybody over.
I’m not as close to the underground as I was. But running 11:11 has given me a front-row seat to the Valley changing. The stigma I grew up with is fading. People aren’t talking shit about the Valley anymore. They’re talking about how cool it is. Valley love is strong.
And 11:11 is the place teenage me was searching for, riding across Sherman Way. A place to plug into, built by people from here, for people from here. I know for a fact we’re filling that gap, because I watch the kids who walk through our doors find what I didn’t.
So here’s my ask. The BETTY open call is live through Wednesday, November 25, and we’re making a zine out of what comes in.
Most of the Valley’s underground history lives in shoeboxes, on phones and in people’s memories. Get it out of the shoebox. If you were one of those kids, send me your story. Maybe you jumped the stairs at your own open schoolyard. Maybe you were the only girl in the league, or you learned to build a lowrider in somebody’s garage. Maybe your tía ran the club, or your brother started the band, or your friend threw the parties everybody still talks about. Send the photos from shows, skate spots, bars and backyards. The flyers, set lists, ticket stubs, patches and tattoo flash. The poems, journal pages and lyrics. The collage and the drawings.
You don’t need to be an artist, a writer or a historian. A snapshot and a couple of paragraphs is plenty. Every submission is kept in full in the BETTY online archive, a public record of the Valley as the people who lived it remember it. Selected written pieces and emphemera will be printed in the BETTY zine alongside the exhibition artists and curators, and every published contributor gets a free copy.
Submit at 1111projects.art/betty by Wednesday, November 25.
These are the stories behind the stereotypes. For decades, somebody else told the Valley’s story. This time we’re telling it ourselves.
I grew up riding through traffic looking for somewhere to belong. Turns out I already had a name for it. I was a betty. Not the kind waiting on the beach. The kind taking on challenges and asking what’s next.
What’s yours?
Top Left to right: Me with my dog Alice munching on some gummy bears 1988ish. Sometime around the year 2000, hopping off my bike to run in the wildflowers near Pierce College. Bottom Left to right: Freshmen year of highschool, 1996. Same year i went to Skateland Hockey Camp. Last photo is my Junior year school portrait, just before the car accident.
BETTY zine and digital archive. Submit at 1111projects.art/betty.
Zine deadline: Wednesday, November 25.
BETTY: A Sequel to Valley Girl Redefined. CSUN Main Gallery, January 25 to March 11, 2027.
Opening reception Thursday, January 28, 5 to 7pm.
Betty on Wheels. Third House, 7712 Gloria Ave, Van Nuys. Curated by Megan Pinkston. January 22 to March 12, 2027.
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