How I Fell in Love with Belly Dance

All the years I belly danced, people always asked me, a girl from Utah, how I became a belly dancer. These questions were usually asked after a gig, with me drenched in sweat, huffing and puffing and loud music playing. I wanted a quick exotic story, so I would make it up on the spot, saying things like I was a direct descendent of Cleopatra, or that I had a dream about a pink glittery snake that taught me to dance, or I learned on a mystical island for goddesses called Avalon. Kim and I had loved to lay around at night and think up fantastic stories to tell people about our dancing, so our fans would be entranced by our glamour and mystery. Most of them made us laugh until our stomachs hurt–no one ever found us funnier than we found each other. But now, I’ve decided to write the true story.

Once upon a time, a little girl visited an exotic land full of scorpions and tigers, magicians and shysters. One afternoon, she went our for pizza…

No, seriously, belly dance captured my heart at a pizza joint in Las Vegas when I was twelve.

My cousin, April, took me for a “surprise” lunch, giggling mysteriously as she made me sit on the outside of the booth. She thought she would scandalize me, her innocent Mormon cousin from Utah, but little did she know that scandal was EXACTLY what I was looking for!! The belly dancer came whirling out and shook her jingles right in my face, and though I blushed, I said to myself, “What is this strange and wondrous thing? Who dares to shake their jingles so flagrantly? I want to be part of this!!” (As fortune would have it, I became friends with that Vegas dancer years later–Anaheed, a librarian by day, belly dancer by night.)

A few years later, I came across a belly dance instruction book in my local library and I checked it out and taught myself some moves (and in another twist of fortune, I also became friends with the gorgeous dancer who wrote that book, Marta Schill). I signed up for classes at the local adult education school when I was home for a bit in Utah, after guitar and tap didn’t work out. My parents bought me my first costume as a christmas present, a pink and lavender homemade fantasy with golden beads and pearl fringe. My belly dance teacher had made it herself, and my parents drove me to a sketchy part of town under a freeway overpass to buy it. I thought it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, and though it was way too big, I wore it anyway. I would dance for all our Mormon family parties with my parents cheering the loudest. They found me hilarious. After a year of waiting tables in Hollywood, I saw a billboard with a pair of beautiful eyes and a veil, advertising a Moroccan restaurant. A light bulb turned on over my head: I wonder if they have belly dancers there? I walked into that Moroccan palace on Sunset and Voila! Belly dance became my instant career from that day forward. Within days, I found myself belly dancing in my pink pearl costume in a marble palace in Bel Air, standing on tables at Lebanese restaurants in Beverly Hills, and whirling around Persian weddings at 2am in downtown LA, surrounded by women carrying toddlers in velvet dresses and men carrying tiny boys in tuxes, all joining me on the dance floor with a thrilling exuberance. I had no idea this joyful world even existed, that while I slept in my Hollywood bungalow, there were these beautiful events happening all over the city. Now their world was mine, and I drove in my put-put VW Bug from party to party, changing the molecules in the room, raising the energy and spreading sparkles and laughter with every twirl of my bejeweled bare feet.

And that’s how I fell in love with Belly Dance.