Bellydance Superstars

It occurs to me that I should probably explain my fascination with bellydancing. If you already know or if you simply don’t care, then just skip this post!

Anyway, it all started when I was in Spain with Paula (and some other girls, but they don’t really play into this story, so I’m going to leave them out of it all together since that will make for an easier read. If you ever want to know about them, then that’s a whole ‘nother post!). Paula and I saw a bunch of posters for a show called “Bellydance Superstars” all over Barcelona, and when we found out that it wasn’t very expensive, we decided to go.

It turned out to be one of the best nights I had in Spain. Not only was the bellydancing super fun and awesome, but then that night was some sort of festival (I think for St. John, although I don’t remember very well any more), so the entire walk back to our hostel was accompanied with oodles of fireworks. And not the kind you see at a professional show, these were the neighborhood, little kids in the streets setting them off variety of fireworks. A little scary at times since you never know where the next explosion would come from, a lot loud, and lot of fun, too. I think the subways were closing down, also, so it took us forever to make our way back home and we enjoyed every minute of it! (A few days later my purse (with my passport in it) would get stolen and Spain would take on some darker memories for me, but that night in Barcelona was pure magic.)

Just for the record, bellydancing, at least the kind that I saw, is not erotic or gross or bad or anything. It’s just really cool. Those women shake their bodies in some amazing ways, and it was just a lot of fun to see. I enjoyed it as much as I’ve enjoyed ballet and hula and a lot of other dancing. I just want to emphasize that there was nothing weird going on here, lest you get the wrong idea about me.

And the group, Bellydance Superstars, is actually an American group that just happened to be on tour in Spain. So later, when I was back at BYU working on my master’s degree, I happened to look them up online and found out that they were coming to Salt Lake! Well, I couldn’t miss a chance to see them again, so I decided to take my boyfriend to the show. As the date drew nearer, it turned out that my Mom and little sister were going to be flying into Salt Lake that same night, so I figured we’d just go straight from the bellydancing to the airport.

Poor Craig. I’m pretty sure it was the weirdest date he’s ever been on. Because it turns out that the people who follow bellydancing in America are very different from the people who follow it in Spain. In Spain, the performance was just in some big auditorium and everyone attending looked pretty normal to me. In Salt Lake, the show was put on in a Masonic temple. Yeah, right there the “weird” flag starts waving a bit. And the people who go to a bellydance show in Utah, besides Craig and me, are really weird. Women with strange dreadlocks sporting feathers, beads and who knows what else stuck in their hair, and who also bring their two-year-old daughters with matching crazy hair and sad skanky outfits that I would NEVER put on my sweet innocent little girl… Yeah, it was enough to make me feel slightly uncomfortable, and enough to make Craig (good old EFY counselor Craig, who still likes to say things like, “Modest is hottest” and “Hazards of the horizontal”) wonder about the girl he was dating. In my defense, though, the bellydancing itself was still really cool. So I don’t think you can blame Bellydance Superstars for a bunch of wacko Utahns.

And then after that we headed straight to the airport where Craig got to meet my mother for the first time! But no pressure or anything! (At least Craig had already met Rachael, so she shouldn’t have been too scary. I hope.)

Before all this I’d told my humanities class about my Friday plans for me and my boyfriend. As I recall, there was a pause and then one of boys simply said, “He must like you a lot.” That turned out to be true. And we did get married, so I guess I didn’t scare Craig too badly.

Anyway, shortly after Bentley was born, Paula came to visit me. She brought me a bellydance skirt telling me it might help me lose weight, which I thought was about the coolest thing ever. We talked about going to see Bellydance Superstars again, since they were coming to DC, but I was feeling too poor (and too overwhelmed by being a new mother!) to manage it. But now that I’ve been practicing my bicycle hips and my crescents, I’m thinking I should start saving up for the next time they come…