When Rachel Karlic and her sister, Rebecca Hinsdale, were students at Western Michigan University, they sometimes played pinball with her friend Kate Porter at a 24-hour video rental store near campus.
After graduating, the three women went their separate ways, meeting in Chicago in 2011. That was around the time pinball machines started to become more popular again, after nearly disappearing in the early 2000s thanks to the competition from home game consoles.
It helped that the new machines were more complex, with modern electronics and mechanical functions. The number of players grew, as did the number of competitions. Many of these events were sanctioned by the International Flipper Pinball Association.
In Chicago, one of the centers of the pinball revival was a former record store in the Logan Square neighborhood. In 2014, store owner James Zespy transformed it into a pinball bar and arcade called Logan Arcade.. That’s where, in 2017, Karlic, Hinsdale, Porter and their friend Tavi Veraldi started the Chicago chapter of Belles & Chimes.
Founded in 2013 in Oakland, California, Belles & Chimes bills itself as “an international network of inclusive women’s pinball leagues run by women, for women.” The Chicago chapter has about 50 members.
Hinsdale, 41, makes custom pinball-inspired patches for top female players each season. The patches are “a celebration of what Belles is supposed to represent, which is that anyone who is marginalized can play in a tournament and in a league,” she said.
While some members of Belles & Chimes have been playing for years, others, like Katie Frederick, a 33-year-old Salesforce consultant, started recently. She had visited Logan Arcade shortly after moving to the neighborhood.
“When I came it seemed like there was some event that involved a lot of women playing pinball, which is not always what you see in a spark room,” she said during a recent Belles & Chimes tournament there. “Usually when you go to a spark room, there’s a certain type of crowd there. Male. Noisy. White. Heterosexual”.
Jessica Papilla, 32, said playing with Belles for two seasons has increased her comfort level with spark rooms.
Karlic, Hinsdale and Porter said they had seen sexism at pinball tournaments. The male-dominated culture is evident in the machines themselves. Although most art on modern machines is no longer filled with the erotic images of the machines of the ’60s and ’70s, even the newer ones do not feature empowered women, Papilla said.
Zespy noted that pinball culture had developed in male-dominated places. “Pinball, pool, darts,” she pointed out. “They were considered the stuff of pool halls and seedy bars.”
Zespy, 46, sees similarities in the evolution of pinball with that of punk rock. Boy bands dominated at first, he said, but things changed with the arrival of the Riot Grrrl movement in the ’90s. “That’s how I feel about Belles & Chimes,” he said. “It’s a new community saying, ‘We have our own version of this.’”
Natalie Nonos, 32, lives in Indiana and travels about 56 miles to Logan Arcade as a member of Belles & Chimes. Pinball was her pandemic escape valve, she said, but it has become so much more.
“It gives me the biggest thrill I’ve ever had,” he said.
By: Peter Kujawinski
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/6763218, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-06-15 22:00:06
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