Susan Senator

Michele Dove, a bellydance blogger, has done it again. She is brilliant with posting great bellydance vids from YouTube. Here is Shakira’s Hips Don’t Lie Grammy performance (don’t forget to turn on your sound so you can hear Wyclef Jean’s beautiful soft voice and Shakira’s sexy full one).

Shakira is the one who started it all for me, the bellydance, and the whole idea of fulfilling old childhood dreams, if they are still there. When I first watched Shakira perform, I was filled with a deep excitement and longing that stretched back to my girlhood, when I imagined I would be a ballerina or a singer. Back when all things are possible. I didn’t consider bellydance, because it is not part of mainstream American culture except as some kind of shameful or ridiculous notion of erotic dancing. (It is not and never was, though it certainly can be sexy.) But my aunt, who was already non-mainstream because she had married an Indian man, had taken bellydance lessons when I was a kid, and though I never saw her perform, it stayed with me that she, a wife and mother, would go do this thing that was so out there, so different from what the other mothers (including mine) did.

But watching Shakira last spring, I had that feeling of, “Well, why not me? If I want to be like that, why can’t I be?” (After all, I just published a book, which had been a dream for years. I didn’t get on Oprah, another dream, but I did get on the Today show. So why not become a bellydancer? Why the hell not?)

Amazing how we simply dismiss things that we want to do and be. We just say, “Oh, I can’t.” We think we’re too old, too busy, too fat, too this, too that. But there is always a little room, somewhere, sometime in these God-given days, to do just a little more.

If you’re saying, “I can’t, no time, no money, …” Your lips are lying. You need to think again about what it would take to do this one more thing that would make you happy. And then, just do it.