Yes, I Said "Belly Dancing". Ya Got a Problem Wid Dat?!

Just add it to the long list of stuff I would never dreamed of doing 3 years ago. Cinthia, this may have been your influence... I can't remember how I found it, but I stumbled upon the website of a local bellydance/Mid Eastern dance teacher at nobodys-watching.com (exactly the condition I need to do it) and on impulse e-mailed her an inquiry as to whether this was the proper class for a beginner just interested in some exercise with music. I never actually want to exhibit my abs to anyone besides Fuzz, much less perform. The teacher was encouraging, so I went, dragging along my best friend. She's been trying to lose those 30 pounds of post partum weight since her six-year-old was born.

So far (2 classes) so good but I am INCREDIBLY uncoordinated. And I was flabbergasted when the teacher told me I had to stick out my stomach more to start to undulate my ab muscles. This is the same tummy(well, a smaller version of it) that I have been desperately trying to suck in for over forty years, the one my mother kept trying to coax into a girdle when I was twelve. I stared downward at my torso, at a loss at exactly how to perform such a reversal in a long standing, unquestioned habit. I managed a half hearted undulation, but it's going to take some practice. Just the same, by the end of the second class, I had my camisole tucked under my chest, trying to see how my roll was coming along.

I wish I could say that I had the courage to do all this physical stuff when I was 300 pounds, but I didn't. I remember reading an assignment to my class when I was in grade five and getting howls of laughter when I said I would like to take ballet, and I was likely a relatively slender 160 pounds. That humiliation then ruled out the possibility of dance. I had to be satisfied with dressing up like a duck or a maid as comic relief in the school play. It was then that I discovered I could really make people laugh, and from then on I was known for my comic timing. If you can't beat 'em... all that jolly fat crap--- it felt like a good defense at the time, but I was usually just taking the handle of the knife they'd stuck me with and giving it a further twist.

There are some heavier women in my class, and a nice age spread of about 40 years from youngest to oldest, but nobody really obese. It's really too bad, but we took in the message that we should be ashamed of our bodies with our mother's milk. I think there would be a lot more healthy obese people if we weren't ridiculed by strangers when moving around outdoors.

My friend doesn't know the half of it, and she's been around me long enough to know she doesn't. For most of her life she had been quite thin. Before she was pregnant she was a smoker who actually forgot to eat (huh?). Yet even she remarked that the bellydance class had a different atmosphere from most of the ballet and jazz classes she had taken as a young woman. Of course, in those classes there were many girls and women with their own version of an eating disorder, just a more socially sanctioned one.