Hello World!

Discovering belly dancing was the best thing that ever happened to me. I immediately fell in love with the music, the dance, and oh lets not forget about the costumes. I love the costumes. The music is amazing and very hypnotic.

After a few years of Karate, and finally achieving a black belt is when belly dancing entered my life. Being flexable definitely helped my dancing. Karate helped me most with aquiring the mental strength neccesary for the physical exertions of belly dancing. The karate disipline trained me to have the endurance neccesary for several minutes of physical activity. My specialty is the sword ofcourse. I have a collection of 7 swords now. Some from my karate days, and now some from belly dancing.

Anyone can tell you that doing this for the money is just not a possibiltiy, however they don't know what they are talking about. I have spent so much money on classes, costumes, private lessons, music, videos etc….. I can ofcourse go on and on. I do it for the love of the art.

You would be surprised to know that there is a large number of people that have absolutely no idea of what a belly dancer is. The following offended me.
When I was working at a law firm and one of my co workers found out that I was teaching belly dancing. His immediate remark was “what could you possibly be teaching them? “How to shake their boobs or their ass? “I don’t understand how you actually have a class of women going to you just to learn how to shake” I can not explain to you how upset that made me. Hadn’t this man with a college degree and his own office even comprehend the word choreography! Didn’t he know that belly dancing is more complex than anything I have ever experienced before. Was he just an idiot? I did not realize that these types of people even existed. A large number of people seem to believe that it is easy. It is not easy at all and takes many years of commitment, classes and dedication to acheive the professional quality of a New York City Belly dancer.

I have now been performing as the feature dancer at Les Babouches for almost two years now. It has been one of the best experiences of my life. I love love it love it. The owners are an amazing married couple. We have all become family through out the years. It is a pleasure to work for them, and they make my experience a wonderful one. They are very supportive, and understand all of the hard work and effort that is put into the performance. Because of the support that they give me it empowers me to give the most amazing performances. Their encouragement and support gives me strength. I would hope that other restaraunt owners would follow their example.

However there is another restaurant that I work at where the management can be rude. They are mostly unpleasant and seem very unhappy with their lives. They don't realize that a dancer needs support to do a good job to make people happy. It can be difficult and uneasy to perform after being yelled at. As a dancer I walk into a restaurant and raise the energy level of the entire place with my enthusiasm and happiness. People respond to this by getting up and dancing and feeling the same happiness that I do when I dance. Can you see how difficult it is to perform when management is MEAN. However I don't let it bother me, and I give a fantastic performance, because I know how to spread happiness and joy, and I love it. I believe that professionalism is about the end product which is spreading that happiness and joy.

There are also a lot of funny moments.
Costume malfunctions are always funny. My girlfriend was performing and her nipple popped out with out her realizing, I had to signal her, and I could not stop laughing. She laughed too. Another time my girlfriend balanced a cane on this older man, and his hair piece started moving back and forth we laughed about that for weeks. And I will never forget when I first started performing, I was wearing a brand new costume and I had no idea how far the skirt went up when I turned. Needless to say I was wearing thong painties and everyone got an extra show. I was mortified! I would have never known if this belly dancer in the audience did not tell me. I was eternally grateful to her. No one else said a word! where is the love?! There was a lot of belly dancers in the audience! When I have more time I will give you an update on my future adventures and more info on belly dancing.