Tuesday evening I was in the car coming home from my new bellydance class. It’s a “drills” class, two (or so) hours long, with my beloved teacher Ruby. It is very hard. First you do a half hour of zils, which are those little finger cymbals that are really very difficult to play. Chaka ching ching chaka chaka ching chaka-ching! Ching ching! Ching ching chaka-ching! Ruby is a drummer and so she’s all about drum patterns on zils, and I’m sure if I even knew what that meant that would make doing it even harder. It’s not as though I don’t have a sense of rhythm, because I sure do, but it doesn’t even matter because chaka ching ching! Chaka chaka ching ching cha-ching! is just so hard. You’re never never never supposed to zil without dancing because if you get used to just standing there with a frown on your face staring at your fingertips which are slowly turning blue from the little elastics that hold them on, you will never be able to actually dance with them. It’s very difficult, and I’ve been dancing for several years now and am still not very good at it, to say the least. Zils kill me.
So after zils you get down on the floor and do pilates for a while, which also kills me, and then you do….uh, butt squeezes. There’s a special butt squeeze song that Ruby uses for butt squeezes in every class she takes. The Butt Squeeze Song is a very rockin’ song (sung, as it is, totally in Arabic) to which Ruby will yell, in time with the beat, “Right! Left! And a right left right and a left right left!” She’s talking about butts there, my friends. Butt cheeks, to be brutally honest with you. Now, doing butt squeezes isn’t so hard when you’re sitting down (in fact, if you must know, I am practicing at this moment for toning purposes) but Ruby makes us do this thing where you stand up and bend over into a very obscene squat and push your knees apart with your elbows, if that makes any sense, and then you have to Squeeze in that position, and let me tell you that that makes me want to die. Owwwwww. “Right left right and a left right left! Okay, squeeze and hold! And hold! And hoooooooooooooold!” Apparently all this squeezing and holding does wonders for the hip figure eights and everything, but it’s really hard.
When you’re done with butt squeezes, the drills class really begins. Drills are just what they sound like: about an hour doing the same four or five movements over and over again. Step cross change with a little ummi ummi in it, which is a very tiny hip circle, which will make sense, probably, to almost no one reading this, but whatever. Step cross change, ummi ummi. Step cross change, ummi ummi. When you get tired of that…well, you just do it some more, but when Ruby gets tired of it, you shimmy for four or five hundred hours. Shimmying, while very difficult, is very fun. When I’m in a larger class with everyone shimmying and sweating and crying because it’s hard but laughing because it’s fun, I always want to say something like “Ladies! Start your engines!” Shimmy shimmy shimmy shimmy.
Right, a larger class. This class had three people in it. One was Ruby, and one was me. The other was the fantastic Elizabeth Dennis, who is this famous dancer (well, in Seattle anyway) and from whom I’ve taken classes, and who is a good friend of Ruby’s. It was, um, a little intimidating. Last week she was filling in for Ruby and I was the only one who showed up for class so we just did an hour of stretching, including real yoga which I’d never done before and which made me sore for the rest of the week (in a good way). But yeah, Elizabeth Dennis! As a student! In a class I was taking! A little over my head, here! Ruby was very nice to me though…she told me my ummi ummis are looking pretty good and she helped me with snake arms…for future reference, all you aspiring bellydancers out there, when you do snake arms, don’t lift your arms with your shoulders, but instead with that weird spot between your shoulder blades. Oh, forget it, just come to Ruby’s Tuesday night class, she can explain it better than I can.
So driving home from class Tuesday night. I wish I could have taken a picture of the late long Seattle summer evening and posted it here. I drove through the CD, past Ezell’s Chicken and Carl’s high school, down through Capitol Hill, past all the gorgeous old houses and the gorgeous old hipsters. On the 520 across the Arboretum, the sun was finally beginning to set and I was listening to some weird ambient music on the radio which turned out to be 18th Street Lounge which Carl has kept trying to make me listen to. Smooth and mellow and just right for the sunset, the water, the geese; even the stadium rearing up was sort of blurred and softened by the evening. I was in a movie all of a sudden, the girl in her car listening to music and driving somewhere she didn’t know anything about, or somewhere where she’d find herself right at home, the kind of girl who is out in the sunset in her city and whom you watch on the screen because she’s not perfect but you know somehow that she’s sort of you and that you could just as easily be in her movie if you weren’t living your life mostly on track, and the music is barely there and it’s all dropping away down into the pink and orange water under the freeway. I wish I could have taken a picture of that for you.
I wish I could take a picture of this summer and all its heartaches and discontents and the times of joy and the moments of calm and peace. I wish I could take a picture of the soreness in my muscles and the little bit of pride I had in being able to dance, a little, with people who are so much better at it than me. I wish I could take a picture of four years in Seattle this week, a picture of my late twenties, a picture of this exact time and place in the world. I don’t have very many moments of stillness, of now-ness, and so I wish I could have captured it for you (and for me) so that I could always know that I was, in fact, at one time here.