Belly Dancers Should Be 🔥HAWT!🔥 (don't you DARE be too hawt.)

How I became an 8-week wonder.

Li’l palate cleanser, because I’m traveling in wondrous locations that are not conducive to computers and will be for the next month, so here’s one from Ye Olde Blog’s vault.

Besides, over on Tinkerings: DanceStory, we’re approaching our deviation from my earliest shiny-sparkly stages to textile-n-tassel-laden campfires. But before we hit that pivotal transition, we need to wrap up a few dangly threads. Threads that are better covered here, rather than over there because…

They are.

Ahem.

If you haven’t read IRON WILL: THE MOVIE I WAS ALMOST IN about why my name doesn’t appear in the credits of Disney’s dogsledding movie, and how I first got hired as a professional belly dancer, this post won’t make nearly as much sense to you. Quick recap if you don’t wanna backtrack or if you don’t quite remember what happened:

• I started taking belly dance lessons when I was nineteen.

• Within weeks, I got invited to perform with my teacher and another student.

• My dance buddy, Diana, and I concocted a super-duper fantabulous idea of how the three of us could get hired at the local Greek restaurant.

• Did I mention that I was nineteen? And super-duper naive?

• Dookie: Fan: Splatter.

• Diana explained to our teacher why we did what we did and we were forgiven.

• Okay, Diana was forgiven. They ditched me instead of giving me a ride to the movie shoot of Iron Will where we were all supposed to dance and sing as Will tries to finagle himself into the dogsled race.

• So then what happened was…

---

Winter 1993
20 years old

I've come into the Greek restaurant between classes to satisfy my teropita addiction. Don't get me wrong, I love the spanakopita, but the butter-slathered phyllo pastries stuffed with only the feta cheese, instead of the spinach-and-feta? Ah, heaven...especially when dunked in avgolemono. (That’s the bowl of lemony-chicken soup for the soul.)¹

Since it's afternoon in the middle of the week and the lunch crowd has gone back to work, it's not long before the owner and his wife sit down to join me.

"How did the movie shoot go?" he asks.

I huff out through my nose, then gulp down my last bite of cheesy goodness. "It didn't."

I go on to explain what happened—and why. "The whole thing just sucks. All Diana and I wanted was find a regular place to dance—for all three of us. I know Hala’s husband won't let her perform here, which is…crap. I mean, c’mon! We’re in America, yo! And I know. Other cultures, blah-blah. Whatever. She gets to dance with us other places, and he even let her do that movie shoot. I mean, if he's okay with her dancing on the big screen, what's the problem about performing here? It’s not like she’d be dancing solo here either. If she just would have let us invite her up, a little bit at a time for the first few weeks, I'm sure he eventually would have allowed her to tell you guys yes. But noooo…” I roll my eyes with all the piqued angst that only a hacked-off, just-turned-twenty-year-old Acting Major can pull off. “Now I'm suddenly the back-stabbing devil.”

Me. 1993.

One of my eyebrows lifts as I add, “Although she's fine with Diana again. Those two are back dancing together, but Hala still wants nothing to do with me."

I have my suspicions about why that is, and I cannot help but wonder what exactly my teacher was told about me from my dance partner and closest friend.

Is she? Still?

Or did Diana throw me under the bus to get back in Hala’s good graces—and get into that movie? Diana still doesn’t really have an explanation for why she was forgiven but I wasn’t.

Across the table, my bosses exchange confused looks, then shoot matching ones my direction. "What do you mean, 'tell us yes'?" the owner asks.

"You know…from when you guys asked Hala to perform here ages ago?” I stare at them, expecting them to nod in recollection any second now. They don’t, so I prompt further, “But her husband wouldn't let her?"

Their exchanged confusion shifts to exchanged cringing.

"Actually," the owner's wife says, "Hala came in one night for dinner and she approached us about performing here."

I blink hard. This time, both my eyebrows lift. "Oh?"

"Yes. I don't know why she told you that. Her husband is American. He came with her that night, and seemed completely supportive of her performing here. We were the ones who told her no."

My jaw drops, along with the last shredded remnants of desire to make up with my old dance teacher. I'm suddenly super glad that I've finished swallowing all my teropita. Shutting my gaping gob, I blink a few more times as several formerly confusing pieces of this saga finally shift into place, bringing with them the lightbulb of “Ah-hah.”

After a bit more wincing and fidgeting, the owner chimes in, "Her style was...well...we thought she was a bit..."

His wife hauls out the verbal scythe, slicing down all attempts to keep things delicate. "Her dancing was too sexual for a family restaurant.”

I stop blinking. "Oh."

---

So there ya go. This was my introduction to becoming a professional belly dancer. These issues would come up over and over in my thirty-year adventure. As I said in the original post about this subject: ²

{This lie and these issues} …started an avalanche that never truly stopped crashing until my grand belly dance adventure at last disintegrated into rubble amidst the Great White Belly Dancer War of 2014. Considering the way I had been introduced to this dance style, and considering some of the obstacles, brushfires, and betrayals that pockmarked my career, somedays I’m amazed that I stuck it out for as long as I did.

What can I say? I love it. It is one of my most enduring passions, and it gave me some of the best friends I’ve ever had in my life - people who are My Pack, my chosen-family to this day, no matter how many different countries and states we live in.

Belly dance also literally saved my life.³

---

But something stinks about this whole thing…

Before we go any farther, let's peer a little closer, shall we?

Why DID they hire two college-age, American newbs still technically in their teens, while rejecting the skilled, knowledgeable, experienced dancer who taught us?

Hala had made our costumes to match hers, so ours were just as revealing. Our moves and attitudes were inherited from hers, with significantly less expertise behind them. I barely had a clue what the bleep I was doing to this foreign music except loving it and embodying how it made me feel with my whole heart, body and soul.

And yes, there is something to that. Something very significant that has always helped to fill in the cracks of my educational shortcomings.

But let’s face it. I was even more gawky, twitchy, and awkward than I am today. I desperately needed two more cheeseburgers a day to combat the hours I danced at the university, compounded by my new belly dance obsession, my recovering mental health crisis, and my overactive metabolism. My ribs showed when I took a deep breath, I barely had boobs, and I was still years away from growing into my woman-hips. Until that happened around twenty-five, I had to work way too hard to fling those coins and fringe in a way that could live up to my teacher’s honed moves.

Yet I was the one they chose.

Un/fortunately, the restaurant owners probably made the savvy business-choice, considering their location. In Northern Minnesota of the early ‘90s, certain nearby locations openly touted, “Belly dance?! We’ll have none of that here!” So Diana and I would have been far more appealing—read: less sexually threatening—to a great many of the conservative clientele dining in the restaurant.

Heck, before college, I'd only had sex 6.5 times between my pair of longterm boyfriends, yet even I had taken slut-shaming fallout time and again since junior high.

By the time I auditioned for the restaurant, it’s not like I’d grown into some sort of awakened sex-goddess to terrify the Northland with my DSLs and some kind of Phenomenal Vaginal Powahhh. Quite the opposite. In the year before I started belly dancing, I had carved vast cross-sections out of my sexual memory and stuffed them inside a Tupperware container in the back of my mental freezer with the label "Never Open Me, Even In Emergency."

That conversation at the lunch table with my new employers hammered another four nails into a tightly sealed coffin that constrained my juicy, sensual femininity to levels that my homeland could tolerate. Eventually, its corpse would finish rotting and it would rise from the dead, going on to haunt and torment the sexually buttoned-up and ashamed everywhere, 🔥RAWR!🔥

But when I was twenty—a very naive, highly traumatized, highly influenceable twenty—I might have shown a lot of flesh every weekend while shaking my money-maker, but I was quite sexually buttoned up and ashamed myself.

So the lesson pierced all too easily, lodging deep within my heart, self-confidence, and lusty loins. It would be repeated over and over for the entirety of my career in this dance style:

You're a belly dancer
so you have to be sexy!
BUT DON’T YOU
DARE
BE TOO SEXY.

So I made damned sure that I wasn't.

And so?

They hired me and Diana, not Hala.

---

My other suspicions…

Although my dance partner was a year younger than me, she was far more comfortable in her skin than I was. She also had the greatest curves for belly dance, and made no bones about using them to their fullest extent.

So was the driving reason for Hala's blacklisting from that restaurant solely about the way our teacher danced? The way she presented herself? Had the older, wiser owners sensed things about Hala’s inner nature that I had missed—all those things that came seeping out in her fickleness and cruelty to me?

Or were there other unspoken factors at work that had nothing to do with Hala personally?

The restaurant was not of an Arabic flavor, after all. It was Greek, owned by an elderly couple from Greece. I have no clue how the owners felt about people of Hala’s Lebanese heritage. Back then, I wouldn't have even thought to wonder, and I certainly wouldn’t have brought something like that up.

I do, however, remember how a lot of Minnesotans felt about people with dark hair, dark skin, and dark eyes, because I had two of those three qualities. Even my pale skin hadn't been enough to save me from being branded "ugly" once I lost my coveted toddler blonde.

4 vs. 22

This was such a big deal that, even though I didn’t fully understand why, I spent my entire youth instinctually attempting to lighten my hair on the sly with lemon juice because my mom wouldn’t let me bleach it. I tried to use makeup to make my eyes appear rounder and bigger, and to soften the sharp lines of my face—something I could never accomplish to either my or society’s satisfaction.

Not until I moved to Colorado.

To my shock, there I was considered mid-height-to-tall, with golden-brown hair and nearly hazel eyes to match my “ghostly-blue” skin. In Colorado, and especially in all the time I spent in New Mexico, I was teased about being “such a white-girl.”

Which I am.

At least, I think so. I’ve never done the blood test, so could my French-Canadian heritage have some indigenous lines from the Western Hemisphere that my ancestors would have loved to deny? Is it a swarthy Mediterranean line?

I dunno. Does it matter?

It sure had always seemed to, especially in my birth-state.

Guaranteed, it mattered for Hala. She had a gorgeous, night-black mane, entrancing coffee-brown eyes, rich womanly curves, and skin that verged a couple shades darker than the preferred “bronzed beach babe.” I doubt an Arab accent made things any easier for her in cliquish, reserved, exclusionary Minnesota.⁴

I mean, sheesh. English is my native language, yet from my youngest years, my immense vocabulary, my pronunciation which I heavily inherited from my transplant mother (via Virginia and Florida), and my neurodivergent way of forming thoughts and sentences got me ousted as “Not Our Kind. Weird. Outsider.” Excuse me…“Different.”

And that was a very bad thing.

Unfortunately, on the day I sat at that table in the Greek restaurant, it hadn’t yet occurred to me that my syntax and pronunciation, combined with my brown, almond-shaped eyes, brunette hair, and non-Scandinavian/Germanic features might have had anything to do with why I was treated so terribly as a kid.

That bolt of comprehension wouldn’t descend until I was 26 when someone in Colorado pointed out how different I looked from so many of my classmates growing up. (I wouldn’t fully understand the neurodivergent piece until my late forties.)

So it also would have never occurred to me that these kinds of things might have influenced why I got hired to dance at the Greek restaurant and Hala didn't. After all, AllThatRaceStuff had "gotten handled in the 60s."

Remember? 🤨

Maybe none of these things were a factor. Maybe they were. We'll never know for certain.

Either way, no shit, there I was. Freshly informed that I'd been—not just backstabbed and left in the dust during that movie shoot—but lied to multiple times by my once-trusted and revered mentor. Simultaneously, I got zapped yet again by my bosses’ warnings of what happens to strong, powerful, sexually awakened women.

They get rejected from a job for being “too sexy.”

In other words… “slutty.”

It’s even worse if you’re not white, and are not from around these parts.

So joyous of joys, I was hacked off, hurt, and very confused as to what the heck was really going on. Thus did I hunker down, baring my teeth as I became that most reviled of creatures.

THE 8-WEEK WONDER.

This incident also transformed me into a clueless, juvenile asshat who unwittingly stabbed her first teacher in the back by usurping a position of monetary gain ahead of the way more qualified Woman of Color, who’d been born to the Hashtag Actual Lands from which this dance form originates.

Go me!

Granted, I would have made vastly different choices if I hadn't been lied to like that. By Hala. By my culture. By dance documenters who fed us way more Orientalist and Goddess Revival Fantasy than dance history.

Nobody behaved well.

Especially once the Greek Restaurant Fiasco bled into The Iron Will Incident.

---

As it turns out, I never would have danced in that movie anyway.

"Oh, what a nightmare," one of my dancer friends told me the next time we got together after the shoot. "We pretty much went up there for nothing. After the choreographer taught us the dance and placed us all in position according to height, they started rolling the cameras and we started dancing. Unfortunately..."

One of the taller dancers who had been placed in the back apparently didn't like being put in the back and kept dancing her way to the front of the configuration. They called, "Cut!" The choreographer put the dancers back into position. Cameras rolled again. They cut again for the same reason. And once more, until they were so exasperated with these local-yokel dancers that they cut the whole scene from the film.

Now…since I spent those hours fuming in my parent's kitchen, discarded and gut-punched, I can't give a firsthand account of that incident. I can only tell you what I was told by several people.

Knowing the heights of the dancers in question, I know which ones would have been put in the back. Given the interactions I've had with all those women, I see no reason to call "Bullshit!" that this was the same person who had told me I was forgiven and then ditched me instead of picking me up for the shoot.

You can, however, see one of my old dance-mates about a half-hour into the movie, singing her guts out to "Kaiser Bill."

Hey, at least one of us got to be onscreen for a second.

Woot! You go, Gina!

Of course, after all the suspicious sleuthing and eyebrow-furrowing I’ve done in this post, I can’t help but wonder. Gina is a petite, sweet, blue-eyed blonde. Was the reason they put Hala in the back solely because she was taller than some of the other dancers? Even if she’d been shorter and placed in the front, would they have ever chosen a closeup of the drop-dead gorgeous Arab woman dancing her sexy heart out for a Disney flick in the early 90s?

For that matter, once my luscious dance-sisters started moving and grooving in their spangly janglies, did those Hollywood filmmakers realize JUST what they’d gotten themselves into when they thought it would be a super-duper fantabulous idea to put belly dancers in a family-friendly movie about Minnesota’s dogsledding history?⁵

The world will never know…

UP NEXT:
Part 2 - KISMET - turns out I’m destined to become a dance innovator—by necessity, not by my original choice.

© 2021 Hartebeast

1. Teropita - Greek feta cheese pie or pastry puffs

Spanakopita - the spinach-and-feta version

Avgolemono soup - lemony chicken soup

2. The original post about this subject:

3. Belly dance literally saved my life: Be warned. This series might start out all Pink, Gold, and Berry Blush, but this is one of my darkest tales: DYE JOB.

4. Minnesota Nice

• Newcomers say Minnesota is “nice” but not warm. - It’s good to see that there are places starting to recognize these issues and actively do something about it. Because when I lived there in the 70s - 90s, the number of people who were born, lived and died in this state (often in the same region of their birth) was significantly higher. So were the homogenous demographics, and of course —before the internet revolution— access to the realization that other people do things very differently, and it’s not automatically “bad.” But if you grow up not knowing that and never travel, never move, never connect intimately with people who are “different”…well, then you can’t really know anything else. Or even know that there is something to know.

• Decoding Minnesota Nice

• One Minnesotan spills the beans on why Minnesotans are so “nice.”

• If you’re on the inside, visiting, or need help (and you haven’t been deemed “different” or a threat at first sight), then yeah. It can be truly wonderful. Some of my favorite people are Minnesotans. And no. Minnesota is not everybody’s cup of tea.

5. It’s been ages since I’ve seen it, but I really did love Iron Will when I owned it on VHS. I am a sucker for an underdog story.

• Making of Iron Will

• A review of the movie and a bit of the actual history upon which it was based.

• Director Charles Haid talks about making the movie

• One of the stars, David Ogden Stiers, talks about the theme and conditions making the movie