Susan Senator

Sorry, must switch channels. I need a sequin fix. I woke up obsessed with raqs beledi again. Thank God!
Here is my favorite these days:

It’s weird; it keeps changing on me. There are so many days lately where I look at my two garment boxes filled with cossies and I think, “I guess I should sell these.” Because I have not really been wearing them much for dancing, and I haven’t even been dancing much. For one thing, it’s so cold in my living room! For another, all the cossies need repair and so in order to wear them I have to get Ned to safety pin them onto me. You can imagine how he likes that: “Ow!” “Hold still!” I got to get out my sewing kit: maybe today; we have no vacation plans for the day (it’s the kids’ vacation).

For another thing, I feel discouraged with my belly. I dance with two mirrors propped up: one long one facing me and a shorter one for side views. I do this to check form, but I can’t help but think, “jeez,” sometimes.

I wish and wish that things were different in the media. Everywhere you look is plastic and stretched. There is so little space for a past-40 or 50 to stand. (and guess what? I’m going to be in L.A. on Thursday and Friday! D’oh!)

I realized the other day that I was actually feeling ashamed of my changing face. I was glad to realize this because I stopped right away. But I see how easy it is to buy into the thin/young paradigm.

Ned is so thoroughly sick of hearing me run myself down that he’s halfway ready to divorce me.

On my bellydance website so many of the dancers are thin young things; every part is smooth and flawless. I feel jealous on so many levels: mostly, how did they know at such a young age that this is what they wanted to do? How did they have the confidence at 20 that I only now have at 46? Why didn’t I learn and perform when I was younger? I can’t do it now, I just feel like I can’t. But I also feel like I could. I do routines now for entire songs, song after song, that look really really good. Especially when I just forget this self-hate and I just hear the music and pretend I’m surrounded by happy people. Then, I smile, clap my hands over my head, and I know just what to do, move-by-move. It rarely happens when Ned is filming me. There is too much to be self-conscious about at those times and you cannot be self-conscious and perform well.

That is why I love bellydance so much. I have always been pathologically self-conscious. In a debilitating way. And so bellydance is actually teaching me how to drop it. By making myself so vulnerable, I am forced to be strong.

So it was good today, to wake up and think about dancing and to feel myself making some of the good old isolations and moves, even in my pajamas. I feel a little like Groucho: Today I saw a bellydancer, in my pajamas! What she was doing in my pajamas, I’ll never know!