Thanks, you guys. I’m starting to remember why I don’t blog every day. It’s hard! Not that I don’t love sending out a few typed sentences into the internet. That’s easy and I do love it. But deciding on quality content and really doing a good job putting something together takes longer than a few minutes. As you can see by this hastily drawn belly dancing me, I could put a lot more time into it and do a way better job. But alas, my day calls with a list of things to do.

The other night I took a belly dancing class. I did! It was crazy and fun and totally up my alley. I don’t know why I’ve never looked into taking a class like this before. This class is taught by an older woman in her home. She and her home interest me the most. You can tell that she was really something in her day. She still has the body to prove it. She moves around the room like a twist of sinews. Her feet are veiny and narrower than her calves in a way that makes my tiny size 6.5 feet jealous. Her home is two stories and all wooden floors.

When we got there we knocked on the purple double door and nobody answered. We had to holler up to the second story window (that was open and light flooded out from it) to get her attention to come down and let us in. She was wearing a soft tan colored ballerina wrap-around shirt that tied in a bow at her rib cage. Her belly was wrinkled and hung lightly over her jingly belt and some sort of red satin sheet that was tucked up into her belt. She lead us up the dusty wooden stairs to her studio which was just a small bedroom with no furniture in it and mirrors lining one wall. The windows on the other side were open to the crisp night air.

We stood in the room kind of awkwardly staring at each other (there were just three of us and the teacher). The teacher popped a cd into the ancient CD player surrounded by stacks of ancient cds and we started our lesson. It turns out belly dancing is all in the feet! I had no idea. When you start out grounding your feet to the floor firmly and then lifting up your toes and heels to a beat, the whole belly shimmying thing is so much easier. Like really easy! Like maybe this could be my thing!

I loved it. We learned how to make snake arms and how to pop out our breast bones like opening up a book. It was really good for my ongoing effort to unlock my  better posture. The teacher was really kind to us and constantly told us we were doing well. We were doing so well that she began to teach us choreography to an actual dance but she would lose her place in the dance because she had to stop and teach us basic principles. At the end she let us pick out pretty scarves from a basket and we swirled them around each other in a circle. There we were waving our scarves in and out like children in beginning ballet. It was a blast.