Last night I had one of my women's group meetings...there are two each month. We conduct our business at the beginning covering matters than are important to the entire club and the department that I'm in, then we move on to our program for the evening. The program last night was on learning to belly dance.
Can't say that I'm a fan of belly dancing. (Haven't ever been.) I love other cultures, and learning new things about them, but I could not get into this at all. For starters, I'm not a fan of looking at bare bellies that don't need to be bare. Yeah, yeah, yeah... love your body and show it off to the world, right? Not this cat. Some people just need to stay a bit on the over dressed side, shall I say. (Don't get me wrong, I pass judgment on my bod each and every day, no matter how hard I try to tell myself to love me just as I am. I am an equal opportunity body critiquer by all means.)
So, I gave it a shot... I moved the hips as instructed, rolled them from side to side and snakey-ishly, added the arms when directed to, even partook of the white veil so I could swirl it around my body. This lasted about 15 minutes for me. Then I was done. The ladies providing us with the demonstration began walking around the room offering tips and help to those who were really digging this training session. Some of us other girls started chatting while we were still moving our hips so as to appear to be "in to" the scene. These instructor ladies (aka professionals) kept moving around the room for what seemed an eternity, but was probably less than 10 minutes. I had had enough. I folded up my veil, turned it back into the box, then sat my happy but at the back of the room with a couple of other rebellious ladies who were also as done as me.
I felt like a little teenager not sticking it out until the end of the program. More than that though I realized that I can't stand, and I mean absolutely can't hack, belly dancing. The music was ok. The costumes were fine. The dancers were....um, good at what they were doing, I guess. But, me...I'm confident I will never try that again.
After we applauded the teachers' efforts they offered their business cards to all of us, noting that they were happy to perform at parties we might have coming up. Right. No thanks, ladies. Best of luck to you, though.
