Vanessa, age 38 , isn’t into dance skating for the social whirl; in fact, when asked to dance, she refuses to follow anybody’s lead. She’s on her own when she’s on her wheels, and that’s the way she wants to keep it.

I started skating in the hallways of the projects of New York when I was probably eight years old. That’s back when you had the clip-on skates with the metal wheels, and you’d make all that racket in the hallways in the Lillian Wald projects, on 6th Street and Avenue D.

Everyone’s kids were in the hallways at the same time, skating, banging into everyone’s door, ‘cause we didn’t know how to stop and those skates didn’t have stoppers. So we’d just bang into everyone’s door. Most of the time, people wouldn’t come out. We made a lot of noise, but people didn’t mind, because it was safer to have your kids in the hallway of the building than outside on the street.

I really started hitting the rinks when I was about 13 years old, and just falling in love with indoor skating. I think someone invited me to a church function that was at a rink, and there was something about the smoothness and the quietness of the wheels against the floor …

It’s about expressing myself on the wheels. I know lots of people go to the rink and they stand around with other people and they practice, but I, personally, can’t skate with anyone else. I’ve never been able to skate with anyone else. Sometimes people will come up and just grab my hand and want to do some moves together, and I’m like, “Look, I can’t do it.” I need to be on my own, on my skates, in my own zone. And I can’t allow anyone else into that.

I consider skating my therapy. If I have a lot on my mind, if I have an argument with my husband, if I’m just feeling down, I’ll head out to the rink, put my wheels on and go around and around for four or five hours, till I feel better! It’s the freedom that I feel when I’ve got wheels on my feet. You’ve got the breeze against you, the music going, and there’s just something about that combination of movement … and you feel like you’re flying!

Skating is part of who I am; it’s just my thing. Most people know me as, “Oh, yeah, that’s Vanessa, she’s going skatin’ again.”