Category: Bellydancing

When I first met Jon I got paid by his publisher to drive him around on his book tours.  I went to events within driving distance with him, drove him to TV interviews in NYC, and dropped him off and picked him up from the airport when he traveled.

We had only been friends for a while when I first got this job and I was certain he’d turn into an asshole as soon as we go on the road.

I had little faith in men back then and I was just waiting for him to turn on me.

But he never did.

Whether I was helping out with the animals on the farm or bringing him tea as he signed books for the people waiting in line at the bookstores, Jon never treated me differently.  And he didn’t change either. He was the same person when they made a  movie from his book A Dog Year, as when we stopped for a quick lunch on the Thruway.

He also put as much into his book talks whether there were three people in the audience or a hundred.

But for someone who was used to that kind of attention, and loved it, he’s also great behind the camera.

After our Bellydancing performance, I told Jon how I appreciated that he gave me space before and between sets.   He was taking pictures and videos of the performance, so he wasn’t with the rest of the audience.

But he also wasn’t intrusive.

That’s when he told me how he learned when he was the Executive Producer of CBS Morning News how to be around people who were about to go live on the air. How to be supportive but leave them alone, understanding they need to prepare even if it looks like they’re not doing anything to someone on the outside.

It was so helpful that Jon understood this.  I wouldn’t have had the words to explain that need, since I’ve had so little experience with it.

I did pay more attention to Jon than I probably would have because he was still recovering from covid and I was concerned that he’d get tired and I didn’t want him to overdo it. But Jon isn’t any easier to stop when he’s doing something he loves than I am.

He got some great pictures of us dancing (you can see them on his blog and on Julz’s blog too) and took portraits of each of us before the performance began as well as videos.  And it was great to have him there.

Jon has a healthy ego and loves to be the center of attention, he’s never more comfortable than when he’s on stage, the bigger the audience the better.

But he also appreciates that quality in other people.   It’s one of the reasons why he is so supportive of me in my work. Creativity is a like a religion to him and spreading and nurturing it in other people is a calling.

He can be annoying and pushy at times, but Jon never became the asshole I thought he might be.   He could be bitter no longer having the fame he once enjoyed, but the older he gets, the more thoughtful and generous he’s become.

The night after our Bellydancing performance I woke up at 4 am and couldn’t go back to sleep.  So Jon got his iPhone and we watched the videos he took of the performance.

When we had seen them all, I curled up next to him and we both fell soundly asleep in each other’s arms.

I meant to post this video after I wrote about Bellydancing this morning.  Apparently I forgot to hit publish. But it’s never too late for Bellydancing.  Enjoy!

That’s Trish up front, and me next to her.  Then from left to right it’s Julz, Callie and Emily.  But you’ll see we keep moving, one person after the other taking the lead.   We danced in duets and trios with two or three of us in the chorus beind the dancers, keeping the beat and yipping and zaghareeting, in support and encouragement.

I’m still a bit high from Bellydancing last night. All I have to do is think about it and I smile.

It was the first time I danced in front of an audience who were paying attention and the first time we performed together in three years because of Covid.

And we had a blast.

We danced really well and laughed and supported each other through the problems.  I know the audience picked up on how together we were and how much we were enjoying ourselves.  Even I who, at times, was confused and a little lost could feel it.

We danced on a small patch of grass, except its very different dancing on grass than it is on a wooden floor.  You have to work harder to move around, your feet having more resistance from the soft uneven surface. But once Julz turned up the music, everything else disappeared and it was just the five of us dancing.  All of us doing our best.

We started the first set in a circle facing each other.  Julz led us in Gratitude, which is a combination of moves honoring the space we have to dance in, the music, and each other.

It was a wonderful way to begin, a way of connecting us to each other and giving us a chance to ease into the performance. I always get a little emotion dancing Gratitude even in class.  There’s some superstition around it too.  There are many stories about the mishaps in performances when Gratitude is forgotten.

I was surprised to hear the audience’s applause at the end of the first song.  It was definitely encouraging.  The only other time I danced in public was at the farmer’s market and mostly people just walked by and stopped for a  minute or two.

Our little patch of grass, lined with a low slate wall was like an outdoor stage.  Most of the people were there to celebrate the 25-year anniversary of the Out Door Sculpture Show.  People who care about art and were also interested in watching us dance.  But there were some children there too.

At one point there were four or five girls around 10 years old watching us.  Later I saw them dancing together, their arms high in the air, their bodies swaying.

Performing is different from not performing.  I feel like class will take on more meaning for me, knowing that will be doing something like this again soon.  It makes me want to learn even more, to try new moves that I don’t usually do in class.  To practice so I can do more and better next time.

And for all my fears and worries, I can’t wait to perform again.

I can’t upload the videos that Jon took onto my blog, but you can see us dance here. 

I asked Jon to take a picture of me with the headscarf that I made.  He was happy to do it. I already added another small piece to it after I saw the picture.  Also plan on trying to put some Zinnia’s on it too.  But that will have to wait till Thursday, the evening of the performance.

I’ll also tie a ribbon around my little ponytail.

We will perform this Thursday, August 25th at the Bennington Museum. We’re part of the 25-year celebration of the North Bennington Outdoor Sculpture Show (NBOSS).  We’ll be dancing two 15-minute performances at 5:30 and 6:30.   Click here for more info or email me at fullmoonfiberart.com.

If you live nearby, please come see me and the rest of the Bennington Beledi Bellydancers perform this Thursday, August 25th at the Bennington Museum.  We’re part of the 25-year celebration of the North Bennington Outdoor Sculpture Show (NBOSS).  We’ll be dancing two 15-minute performances at 5:30 and 6:30.   Click here for more info or email me at fullmoonfiberart.com. 

I wake up feeling like my old self before I got covid.  I’ve been thinking about tying more knots in the yarn hanging off the back of my head scarf all morning.  It’s the first thing I do after letting the dogs out.  I start knotting the beautifully straggly pieces of yarn to hold them together and make them stand up higher on the back of my head.

While I was at my sickest, I put thinking about our Bellydancing performance aside.  It was always there in the back of my mind, but there was little I could do about it.  Sometimes I would listen to the music, even dance to it in my head.

But a part of me was just discouraged.

Our performance is on Thursday, just two days from now.  Tomorrow I’ll go back to class for the first time in two weeks.  I feel great in the mornings, but by the time the afternoon rolls around, I’m tired.  So tired I have to lay down.  I don’t usually sleep, but I still need to rest.   It’s not only fatigue but my back, my knee, my wrist, all the places that always mildly ache, now demand I stop for a while.

I have no idea how much or how little I’ll be able to do in class tomorrow.  It will be two weeks since I felt the first symptoms of covid and since then I’ve taken only two walks and danced to two slow songs.

I tell myself not to worry about it, I’ll either be able to do it or I won’t.

Last week my teacher Julz called me.  She told me how they’ve figured out what order we’ll be in during the first song of the set so that I won’t have to start any of the songs.  “If you get tired,” she tells me,” just hand the lead to someone else or stay in the chorus so you don’t have to dance at all.”

Even though our dance is improvisational, there is still a structure for where we stand and how we take the lead.  Everyone else follows whoever is leading then they hand the lead off to someone else.  We also take turns dancing in duets and trios, the rest of the people who aren’t dancing stand in a line behind the dancers keeping the beat going by zilling and doing one continuous move at a time.

Not only was it a relief to hear that I had these ways of opting out of dancing if I got tired, but I loved that the class was thinking of me and figuring out how to make it easier since I haven’t been able to practice with them.   They could have said that I shouldn’t dance in the performance, but they chose to figure out how to include me instead.

When I mentioned this to Julz, she said, “Just like the families we didn’t have growing up. I’m grateful for my dance family”

I cried a little when I heard that.

Yesterday, as I was beginning to lag again at the thought of dancing, Julz texted me a picture of the headscarf she would be wearing at the performance.   It had metal pieces on the top and was loaded with purple and white flowers and feathers.

She put it together with thread and hotglue.

I couldn’t help thinking of the book I just read How You Get Famous by Nicole Pasulka about the drag scene in Brooklyn.  How the performers had taken drag to a new level, reaching beyond the traditional boundaries of big hair, high heels and lip sinking.  They blurred the lines between drag, performance, and art.

We are not in that category of performance.  But Bellydancing is probably as close to drag as I’ll ever get.

So when Julz suggested I make my own headscarf, “You’re an artist,” she said, “make it your own.” my heart swelled and the creative part of my brain sparkled and crackled.

In my mind, I immediately begin going through the special fabrics in my studio, thinking about my Bellydancing jewelry and my little spice drawer filled with broken pieces of metal and jewelry.

The idea of dressing up and dancing which seemed a bit daunting was now something I was excited to do.  Julz had sparked my creative self.  And now, even if I found that I couldn’t dance, I’d make my head scarf for when I could.

I’m still working on the head scarf, but I have a good idea of what I’ll be doing with it and what it will look like when I’m done. My plan is to add some fresh Zinnia’s to it on the evening of the performance.

Now I’ve got to do some work.  The hens are gathered outside my window and I have a couple of people who would like a potholder with them on it.  But later this afternoon, after a nap, I’ll get back to the headscarf.

When it’s all done, I’ll ask Jon to take a picture of me wearing it and put it up on my blog. Hopefully, I’ll be wearing it Thursday night too.

If you haven’t already, check out Julz’s blog Julzie Style.  It’s as creative, fun, outrageous and loving as she is.

I’m working on my costuming for our Bellydancing Performace on August 25th at The Bennington Museum.  

Kat (aka Kitty) gave me a pair of her yellow pantaloons.  We wear these under our skirts, they look great when we spin and you get a peek of another color as the skirt lifts.

I have a few pairs of pantaloons that I got at thrift stores and one pair I made myself.  But I’ve never had a pair that was as big as the ones that Kat gave me.

When pantaloons are made from five yards of fabric, they billow out and help puff out the skirt.  This pair is also made from fabric that the skirt won’t get hung up on when it’s moving.

The pantaloons Kat gave me were way too long.

Last week I shortened the elastic waist and cut some fabric off the bottoms of each leg.   Then I sewed the fabric I took off the waist, and cut it in half lengthwise.  I gathered the fabric on each leg using a basting stitch and pulling on the thread.  Then I sewed the fabric from the top of the pants onto each leg.

There’s enough fabric to tie around my ankles.

But when I got it all done, I saw that the pantaloons were too short.  So today I undid the work I did last week and sewed the fabric I had cut off of each leg back on. Then I gathered the bottoms of each leg and sewed the fabric to tie around my ankles back on.

With all the cutting I did the pantaloons were now the right length.

Last week in class Emily told us all about a dance performance she saw by The Farm To Ballet Project.  This is a ballet about farming that takes place on different farms throughout Vermont. So there are dancing vegetables and animals as well as seasons being represented by the dancers.

The message that Emily had for us was how much fun the dancers were having, how much they were enjoying themselves.  Their smiles and their joy were infectious and felt by the audience.

After hearing that, I decided that from now on in class and when I perform,  I was going to have fun dancing.  That doesn’t mean I won’t take it seriously or won’t continue learning, it just means I’m going to enjoy it, even when I get it wrong which is often.

After all, I’m a 58 year old woman who is learning to dance for the first time in my life.  I’m not doing it to be a professional dancer.   I’m doing it because it brings me joy,  because  I really like learning something so new at this point in my life and because I have come to love the women I dance with.

So that’s what I want people to see when they watch me dance on August 25th.

And maybe someone in the audience will see themselves in what I’m doing and try to do something that they always wanted to do but never thought they could.

Our Performance on August 25th at the Bennington Museum is a part of the celebration of 25 years of the Outdoor Sculpture Show. It is free  from 5-7pm and open to the public. So if you’re nearby please come see us!

“You look beautiful,” Julz said to me.  I didn’t know what to say. We were practicing zilling in Bellydancing class and Julz was across from me in the circle.  “No really,” she said, “I’m going to take a picture then you can see what I see.”

And she did.

After class Julz texted it to me, with the message that my smile was real too.

We’ve been working on smiling while we dance along with many other things in class to get ready for our performance on August 25th at the Bennington Museum.

I wrote about that a while ago, saying how I didn’t think I was good enough to perform with everyone else.  What I haven’t written about is what happened after that.

First Kat (aka Kitty who introduced me to Bellydancing) read my blog post and called me up to reassure me that I’d be fine.

Then Julz texted me.  Her message began like this…

“You did fine, it was the first fucking time we all danced to that set!”  Then she assured me that by the time of the performance I’d know the songs and be able to dance to them and that I get better every week.

Julz said that it’s rare for her to finish a performance and feel like she did well.  That it’s only after she’s watched a video of it that she can see that it wasn’t as bad as she thought.  “There have only been a small handful of times we knew we kicked ass” she texted me.  She said we all really dance the best when we love the music and when we’re having fun.

Basically, Julz was letting me know that what I was feeling was perfectly normal and that I shouldn’t be so hard on myself.

She also came up with some ideas about practice and performing that made me feel better about the whole thing.

Julz also wanted me to write about it.  She felt that it was only right that I let my readers know the truth.  Because even if I still question myself as a dancer, Julz doesn’t.

After that, I got my confidence back.

Since then I’ve been going to class with the attitude that I’m going to be able to perform.  Honestly, I don’t think about the performance much.  I just work at learning as much as I can and trusting it.

When I think of myself as a Bellydancer, I still don’t believe it.  It makes me want to tell anyone who ever believed they couldn’t do something that if I can Bellydance, anything is possible.

Dancing is something I didn’t think I was capable of doing. Yet, I’ve been doing it for five years and I still don’t understand why it means so much to me.  Jon says it’s who I really am.  But when I take that idea and roll it around my brain, it doesn’t quite land.

And yet a tiny part of me thinks…maybe...

But really, it doesn’t matter much what I think, because I’m doing it.  I’m dancing.

I drove home from Bellydancing class certain that I shouldn’t be dancing in the upcoming performance.  Even though Julz was positive about it, saying it was the first time I had danced to these songs and we had two months to practice,  I felt like all I’d be doing by dancing is make us all look bad.

In the past, I’ve prepared for our Hafla’s by choosing two songs and practicing to them.  But the audience at the Hafla is the other people in our class.  There are eight songs to get to know and practice dancing to for our performance at the Bennington Museum.  That’s two sets of dancing for fifteen minutes straight.

Because the type of Bellydancing we do is improvised and the lead dancer, who the rest of us follow, is constantly changing, we never know when we will be leading and to what part of a song we will be leading the dance.

This is one of the things I love about ATS Bellydancing.  It’s very creative and like my quilts and potholders, no two dances are ever alike.

But it’s always what makes me very nervous.   There have been many times when I’ve stepped into the lead and completely forgotten all the moves I’ve learned.

All the way home, I thought of texting Julz and telling her I could dance the slow songs,  but I didn’t think I should be dancing to the fast songs at all.  And when I got home the first thing I told Jon was how bad I danced.

Then I went upstairs to put my clothes away and when I pulled my skirt out of my bag out came the shawl that I had been given in class.

In my anxiety,  I had completely forgotten about the shawls that Julz and Kathleen, presented to me and Trish before class.

Last night we had our yearly meeting.  During the meeting, we went over how the money we pay for classes is spent (to cover rent for the space, any extra is donated to a charity we all agree on.  The teachers don’t get paid) and talk about the structure of the class and ask questions if there are any.

Then Julz said how when people are ready to dance in performances they officially become part of the Bennington Beledi Bellydancers.  She pulled two shawls out of a bag and handed one to me and one to Trish.

Everyone who is a Bennington Beledi Bellydancer has one of these shawls.  They’re all different colors and designs, and Julz chose the shawls that would go best with our skirts.

Then Callie ceremonially tied Trish’s shawl around her waist and Emily tied my shawl around my waist.

I don’t think I really registered the impact and meaning of the shawl until I pulled it out of my bag, brought it downstairs, and showed it to Jon.

That’s when I thought of how when I knew I danced poorly last night I didn’t think that  I could practice and get better.   I immediately wanted to give up.  I was sure it proved that I’d never really be able to dance well.

I’ve felt this many times after class, but five years into it, I’m still trying. I’m not sure what keeps me going back after I lose confidence in myself.  I think part of it is the women I dance with, that we are kind and encourage each other.

The other thing is, when I get it right, it makes me feel really good about myself.  The way it boosts my confidence is cumulative, while the times I lose it don’t last long.

It may turn out that during the performance  I don’t dance all the fast songs, or maybe I just don’t lead during any of them.  But that’s something that will become clear as we practice in class.

I still believe that I’m not a natural dancer.  But I also know that I’ve learned a lot in the past five years, more than I thought was possible.

And, that I can and will keep learning.

Last week in Bellydancing Class as we were dancing, one of my Zills, fell off my thumb.

Zills are the little cymbals we wear on our fingers and play to the beat of the song while dancing.  One goes on the thumb the other on the middle finger.  The elastic on Zills are always stretching and they constantly need to be adjusted.

When my Zill fell off I just kept dancing, moving my bare thumb against the cymbal on my finger no longer making any sound, but also not missing a beat literally or figuratively.

Kathleen, one of my teachers, complimented me on not stopping when the Zill fell off, saying that’s just what to do when something like that happens during a performance.

And things like that, happen all the time.  Kathleen and Julz have lots of good stories to tell about the mishaps that have happened and how the dancers dealt with them.

If a Zill or a piece of jewelry falls off one of the dancers and is in the dance space someone will kick it out of the way when they’re close enough to with making it too obvious.

I’m nervous enough about performing without having to think about everything that can go wrong. But it’s an important part of performing and there are some things that I’ve learned from experience.

Such as, if I floreo with the wrong hand, I shouldn’t try to correct it, most of the time the audience won’t notice it’s wrong unless I stop mid-floreo and switch hands.

But since I can’t be prepared for every situation, I know the best thing to do if I make a mistake is to make the mistake with confidence, to pretend it’s exactly what I meant to do.

That way the audience might just believe it.

However, I’d rather have as little go wrong as possible.  That is why I was sewing the elastic on my Zills, before class tonight, tightening them up so they don’t fall off my fingers while I’m dancing.  I’ve been told that you know your Zills are tight enough when your fingers turn blue from wearing them.

I still need to shorten those bright yellow pantaloons that Kat gave me, but that will have to wait till next week.  I’ll let you know how it goes.