The first thing I have to do whenever I come home from a belly dance performance is visit the false eyelash farm under the sink. This is a Mac eyelash box with several dozen pairs of false eyelashes mashed together in a jungle of black hair, old eyeliner and glue. It’s a gory, disgusting and unflatteringly frugal practice, especially since I have been getting them for free – thank you Mac! But this eyelash gravy train might not last, and I know that some day, I am going to have to risk conjunctivitis and take a Fear Factor like plunge back into these frilly castaways, since I am running out of brand new ones. Even though I doubt anyone would actually come up to me and accuse me of recycling my lashes, but I’D KNOW, and that might be enough to make me trip and fall or have my bra unsnap again.
The second thing I have to do is write down all the things I can remember about the event. This one was incredible! I knew that Leela’s show was going to be amazing, since I was so impressed by last year’s, and Leela is the best bellydance producer around. Not only does she dazzle us with her own show every year, but she is also responsible for bringing the inimitable Suhaila Salimpour’s Sheherazade to LA. Whenever Leela is putting anything on, I am always going to get right in line for tickets, because I know the evening is going to be about me crying, just from the sheer beauty of it all. I did mostly a lot of suppressed crying last night, because I’d spent nearly an hour applying the false eyelashes and cat’s eyeliner, which claimed to be waterproof but I wasn’t taking any chances.
I danced in the gilded box next to the stage before the show, in a funny Gibson Girl go-go outfit, complete with huge, billowing picture hat and parasol. I am not afraid of heights, which is a good thing, because the harrowing climb up the skinny, spiral staircase to the box would probably scare the wits out of anyone suffering from the slightest degree of vertigo. It was fun, and a good way to warm up for the show. I did more posing than dancing, but it was a really funny outfit.
The show was really stupendous! Leela is combining classical Egyptian bellydance, with jazz and modern dance steps and setting it to non-traditional music, which is very exciting and provocative. I adore a chorus of Blond Ambition-era Madonnas flanking a gorgeous Gentlemen Prefer Blondes-era Marilyn in a surreal take on iconic image and ecstatic blondness. Leela’s tableaus, with her clean and elegant choreography and limitlessly inventive imagination are a kind of fantastical post-modern Busby Berkeley, but with a good deal more drama and lots and lots more sex! It is the kind of show that girls like me will spend countless nights pretending that they are in, burning up bedroom floors and steaming up bathroom mirrors, bubbling over with feminism and killer dance moves.
I have a little demon inside – the one inside today’s woman that is the Femin-isn’t, who is the dark side of the Feminist. It is the one who protests women showing too much skin to get attention. It is the puritan that blanches at the prurient – not to enforce the old ways of the status quo, but trying to challenge that same status quo – albeit out of warped-feminist reasoning. While wanting to protect the woman from the dreaded ‘male gaze,’ the Feminisn’t rages at women for being too ‘girly,’ too sexual, and blames the lack of gender equality on women’s inability to keep her clothes on and her morals intact. I have done my best to stamp out the demon, and shows like this help. Women’s bodies are glorious, and should be seen, and shown, but on their own terms. The Feminisn’t would look at a show like this with fear – disguised as contempt and derision, but this is hardly the kind of exploitation that deserves to be on the same level as Human Trafficking. Death to the Femin-isn’t!!!!!! This show is feminism at its best: Sacred, surly, sensual, and smart.
We had a great time with our drum solo. The performance went by so fast I could hardly believe it. By the time I had grasped the moment firmly in my consciousness, it was over. The audience was a whirling, gasping galaxy of popping flashbulbs and cell phone lights, and the thunderous applause of Dads, Moms, daughters, sons, husbands, lovers and co-workers was deafening and over way too fast. We all went downstairs and crammed next to the tiny monitor to watch Catherine Delish strip out of an extravagant lacy corset and take a bath in a giant Martini glass. It was the most exhilarating thing I think I have seen, and I wanted to do just the same, although I would have to do it in a Big Gulp, straddling the straw right down into the Thirsty-two ouncer.
Other fantastic performances included Princess Farhana, proving to be the sexiest bivalve ever, a mollusk straight out of the Vargas sketchbook, slipping out of a cushiony clamshell, holding a giant pearl like a beach ball. Olu did a gorgeously trance-inducing number, putting me in a daze with her hypnotic undulations – because that is pure drugs to me – a terrifically beautiful girl moving her body well – it is the best thing in the world! If Olu did backward and forward camels over Iraq, I believe we would have peace on earth. Everyone was great, and when it was over, I wanted them to start right over again at the beginning. But like the rest of us, I will just have to wait until next year.
