TACOMA, Wash — "I tell people all the time that I'm a magical girl," Miracle Sepulveda said, dressed to the nines in a cotton candy pink outfit that can't be ignored. With her smooth moves and more than 60 thousand TikTok followers, Sepulveda gets a lot of attention no matter where she rolls.
"When I have on my roller skates, I feel like I am harnessing all of my power into those wheels," Sepulveda said. "I can speed as fast as I would like to. I get to dodge and weave in between people. And just narrowly like be able to look at them and be like, 'I see you, you don't have to worry about it.'"
We met Sepulveda the first time she and her best friend Tyler Richards saw her scene stealing display at the Washington State History Museum's skating exhibit, "Rinks, Derbies & Disco's in Washington Skate History."
"Wow," she said, laughing. "This is really cool. Just me skating!"
Sepulveda taught herself to skate just a couple of years ago.
"I'm not a dancer but I just love moving," she said. "And being in the pandemic, it was like, it would be nice if I could dance outside and roller skating did that for me."
"This exhibit was really fun to put together, " curator Gwen Whiting said.
Any exhibit with a disco ball is going to be fun. This one showcases the fashions you might've seen in the disco era, as well as some of the earliest forms of roller dancing.
No exhibit about Washington's love affair with skates would haver been complete without a large part of it devoted to roller derby.
"The interesting thing about roller derby is that it gave women a chance, for the first time, to become paid professional athlete," Whiting said. "So it started this journey of empowerment."
Strap on some skates and you too may feel empowered. They're Miracle Sepulveda's own miracle.
"I just feel so grateful to skating," she said. "I love that I can represent it in such a way."
Washington State History Museum's "Rinks, Derbies & Disco's in Washington Skate History" runs now through Aug. 20.
There is a second exhibit worth seeing at the Washington State History Museum.
It's a traveling exhibit that looks at the ways the incarceration of Japanese-Americans during world War II has has a ripple effect through the generations.
It's called "Resilience" A Sensei Sense of Legacy."
It involves art by a third generation of Japanese-Americans whose grandparents and possibly parents spent the war in camps. And it's deeply moving.
One of our friends found her family name in Wendy Maruyama's columns of replicated camp ID's.
Another artist, Seattle's Roger Shimomura, writes in his statement, "Despite research by many scholars and experts in history and immigration, many misconceptions that stigmatized the Japanese American experience are contained in similar issues that now plague the American Muslim community."
The exhibit "Resilience: A Sensei Sense of Legacy" is at the Washington State History Museum through July 7.
KING 5's Evening celebrates the Northwest. Contact us: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Email.