Dancing

Recently, it began to occur to me that even if, best-case scenario, the Republican majority in Congress is obliterated in the elections this fall, and if in 2008, some progressive Democrat or--why not, this is a fantasy--Green wins the White House, and if the newly non-Republican government decides to end the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and (by then) Iran and Syria, aggressively address concerns about the environment, restore our civil rights, jail Bush and Cheney for war crimes, and re-install the solar panels on the White House roof that Jimmy Carter put up and Ronald Reagan took down, we are still in Big Trouble.

When I figured this out, I did the only thing a person can do under the circumstances: I took up bellydancing.

It had never occurred to me to bellydance until I met the women who live down the street from me in what my weird friend Bob calls Girl Row, a ghetto for acupuncture students who teach bellydance on the side. One of them was starting up a class, and I thought, what the heck, and tried it. I came to laugh, as the saying goes, or at least get some exercise, but I stayed to pray. As the saying goes.

I had always wanted to dance. I first realized this at age six while watching a talent show at the local Y as a roomful of glamorously old eight-year-olds tap-danced to a song called "A Guy is a Guy," which my mother opined was "vulgar." I wanted to take tap lessons, or at least ballet, like every other girl I knew, but my mother wasn't wild about that, either--vulgar? I can't remember. I had piano lessons instead, and to this day, I play incredibly badly.

I did have a brief exposure to dance every year in my high school gym class, when we did a unit on modern dance in which we'd spend about a week pretending to be trees. While we underwent various contortions, our gym teacher, who everyone called Onetwothreefour, would editorialize on our bodies: "Susie has a dancer's body," she would observe about some skinny waif, and she would call attention to the phenomenally wide leg-spread of Cindy, who happened to be the school slut, unbeknownst to Onetwothreefour, who couldn't understand why everyone laughed hysterically at her critique. Onetwothreefour made it quite clear that if you didn't have a dancer's body and/or a good leg-spread, you might as well not bother trying to dance because you'd just be wasting your time and everyone else's.

During my brief fling with a college in Manhattan, one of my roommates, a dancer, often took me to see the Joffrey Ballet at student rates. The audience consisted mostly of pony-tailed, leotard-clad girls my age who pirouetted up and down the aisles like people in Jules Feiffer cartoons. I fell in love with the Joffrey's colorful costumes and stunning movements, but it still never occurred to me to try to dance myself. A few years later, I took up Jazzercise, which is to dance what a Big Mac would be to filet mignon if the Big Mac were really good for you, and have kept that up for decades, but I'd only had brief flurries of actual dancing all that time until this bellydance addiction hit me.

Now, every week I go to bellydance class, and no matter how bad I feel, how tired or sore (often very sore), or worried about the state of the world I am, when the music starts, I suddenly recall how amazing it is to be alive. We weave snakily in styles from around the globe, exotic movements that make me realize why people have danced since the beginnings of civilization. Apparently, ancient peoples danced not just for fun but because they thought it would ensure fertility, fruition, and good weather, and when a whole roomful of women in flowing skirts and coin-scarves start moving, this seems entirely possible.

If I am dancing for any cosmic reason, it is to get rid of George W. Bush and his ilk, but so far, it doesn't seem to be working. Every day, a new Watergate-caliber scandal bounces off the White House like water from a duck's back. The other day, the Vice-president shot a man in the heart, and no one even seemed to think it was odd; it's the kind of thing one expects from him.

Meanwhile, Bush is simply running America into the ground. He has pumped a gazillion dollars into the failed war in Iraq, is warming up for Iran, and shows no signs of remorse. He has frittered away all the money that should have been going to education and health care, and even if he were to leave office tomorrow--please God--we would still be in dire economic straits. According to some scientists, we have already reached the "tipping point" on global warming, for which Hurricanes Katrina and Rita were only the hors d'oeuvres, and are about to run out of oil. The Supreme Court, too, has reached a tipping point, and soon we will probably have to kiss Roe v. Wade, as well as our rights to privacy, marriage equality, and perhaps voting, goodbye. It seems pretty clear that the Bush administration is a dictatorship in "embryonic form," and that if we don't all mind our P's and Q's, we could all end up in one of the many internment camps that Halliburton is building in case of an "immigration emergency.

In short, things are in a horrible mess, and it's entirely possible that we've reached a national tipping point at which the country we could, and should, have been is now forever beyond our reach, and all we have to look forward to are decline, fall, and catastrophic weather patterns.

I don't know about you, but this just makes me feel like dancing.

The form of bellydance I have taken up is not that seductive undulation you see in restaurants (Cabaret), but a style known as American Tribal. According to FatChance BellyDance, a San Francisco-based studio, store, and resource center, Tribal Style has origins in the dances of the Middle East and North Africa that were synthesized by an American, Jamila Salimpour, whose background as an acrobat with Ringling Brothers led her to conceive of her dance performance as a "circus-like variety show that someone might see at a bazaar in the Middle East." As the FCBD website states, "Bellydance is both a celebration of the female spirit and a physical display of the strength and beauty of women. Its roots can be traced back to the rituals of past matriarchal cultures and to the secular entertainments that evolved as the gypsies traveled through India, Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa and Spain." Feminism, the matriarchy, Gypsies, and burning 800 calories per hour--you can't beat it.

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