Is Improvisational Belly Dance Obsolete?

 I've been thinking about this - does improvisation have a place in this day of belly dance competitions & Youtube? There is no denying that it's a new world, & our dance is transforming, as the stage for performance changes. What makes a good performance, & what doesn't? What makes one competitor better than another? Can one go out there & wing it anymore, hoping for the best when one really only has one shot?

  Improvisational Oriental Dance was the hallmark of the 1970s club days. A dancer typically performed to live music 6 nights a week, and possibly several shows a night. A dancer had to be ready to perform to any song & any style; to good music & bad music; to make it look natural, beautiful & entertaining. Improvisation was the skill that allowed the dancer to walk out the door with dance bag in hand & be automatically prepared for anything the night might hold.

  And there was an element of uncertainty & even audacity about each performance. There was always that possibility of magic, what some call "tarab" or athletes might call "being in the zone". Like jazz musicians, we had our own little jam sessions nightly, smoky rooms with dance intertwining with music - perhaps a moment of weightlessness as the music seemed to carry you like hands on a ouija board.

  Not to say that euphoria happened with every show. For each performance where it all came together, there were probably ten performances that were total bores. Not to mention nights where one seemed to have two left feet, or shimmies that just wouldn't materialize properly. But the beauty of improvisation in those days was that there was that possibility, & if it didn't happen one show, well there were twelve more that week where it all might come together in breathtaking harmony.

  I must admit I am woefully set in my ways when it comes to an Oriental solo. I cannot do a choreographed one to save my soul. Even to a canned song I've heard a thousand times I would never think of going out there & doing the same movements to it time after time. But this is where I'm falling behind in the performance space of today's online & competitive dance. The choreographed solos look better on video.

 If you only have that one shot in a competition, or you have that one performance that will inevitably show up on Youtube & define your ability, does one really have the luxury of improv when one could possibly fall flat on one's ass so to speak?

                                                             Doing what comes naturally

 Today's dancers have every gesture, every hand movement, every nuance choreographed, & the result is a polished, professional look. If you want your name known by your videos, it's important that you bring on your best stuff, no leaving it to chance. Improvisational dance to canned music just doesn't seem to translate as well to video because it is a medium of imperfections. In an intimate live setting with musicians those imperfections are forgivable because the dance is a process, not a finished product.

 As I browse through videos of competitions & performances, I see beautiful young dancers with impeccable technique & clever steps. I like what I see, even though something is missing. I guess what is missing is what Oriental dance used to be - not so much clever & crisp, but free form & fluid - amorphous. But who has time anymore to watch a 45 minute Belly Dance solo develop? Four minutes is pushing the attention span of most video browsers. So I totally see the need to pack your best stuff into those four minutes - don't miss a chance to hit that beat with a new & innovative move. Make sure your dance is practiced & perfected.

 So if a slight hint of insolence is detected on my part regarding the slick new style of Belly Dance, I admit I have a kind of love/hate relationship, but that's ok. Time marches on & I'm not one to fight it - it's a global stage & the competition is fierce. I've talked to younger dancers who say they wouldn't stoop as low as to dance in a club or restaurant - that they are stage performers, & that makes sense to me in a way. It certainly brings our dance form into the realm of serious art. And as much as I'm sounding like an anti-choreography curmudgeon, in actuality I produce yearly theater productions entitled "A Choreographers' Collective" & "A Choreographers' Eclectic" featuring group choreographies by some of the finest in the business, & I teach a weekly choreography class.

                                       

On being an Older Dancer, Changing Identity & Acceptance

  I brought my memoirs into the present recently, but I don't want to stop there & sit in my rocking chair. There's so much I have to say about this dance, about the present & about the feelings that come at the end of an almost 40 year career.

  After going back & reading my story I really regret that I only started studying Belly Dance seriously after my performing career had ended. There's something that comes with being a young professional dancer that makes them (us) feel they can put the training on pause. As a teacher I had to swallow my pride & realize there's a lot I don't know. The advent of Youtube & easy access to dancers from around the world keenly brought into focus my mediocrity.

  So as an older dancer I often find myself in workshops surrounded by hobbyists & young pro wannabes. I'm the one who doesn't drop in dramatic fashion to the floor, the one who doesn't always remember the choreography, the invisible one.

  The change in a dance career begins slowly - you're not even sure it's really happening. Suddenly you get passed over for a job. You hear friends whisper about a show they did as a group & realize you weren't invited to perform. You look in the mirror & notice the subtle changes, but convince yourself you still look pretty good. But pretty good isn't pretty young, & in the professional world of Belly Dance, youth is mandatory. I'm talking about parties, restaurants, nightclubs - paid work. This insidious rejection becomes more difficult to ignore, yet you fight to not succumb to the reality that your career is almost over. You are no longer young, you are no longer beautiful, you are no longer wanted.

  You know it's all over for you as a professional Belly Dancer when working troupes don't even pretend to be interested in having you perform with them. It's assumed by all parties that you are not working anymore. I have gradually become OK with that. Is a matter of fact the last thing on earth I want to do is go out there trying to make money performing. My last year at Burger Continental (& this was 2013) I imagined when I came into the room, finger cymbals blazing & the costume a little more modest, the audience must have thought "Yikes, this one's old". So I quit, & that part of my career is signed, sealed & gone for good.

  So what do you have left if you aren't ready to hang up the old bra & belt? Teaching is the logical progression, but it wasn't something I was comfortable with, especially since I hadn't really taken classes. Jazz & Ballet, yes, but Belly Dance - not since that first year way back when. But teach I did, & it's taken me 20 years to finally figure out how to best bring this dance form to my students. The fortunate part for people like me is the dance world has changed. It's now all about workshops & showcases. The older ladies are invited to dance as the classic Divas, & that's a good thing. Our audiences are comprised of dance students & other teachers, & we/they are more forgiving of the old, the heavy, & other "flaws", considered to be repugnant by the general public.

  Maybe it's harder getting older if you spent half your life depending on your looks, I'm not sure. I guess there are plenty of women out there getting their faces "fixed" who weren't in a business requiring beauty. When you age you don't realize it as much because you don't feel different. You feel 20 inside, yet the outside clashes with the inside & you can't seem to make people realize you're the same free spirited young girl. They see someone old when they look at you.

  It always feels like a dream - like this is just a movie of my life & I'll eventually go back to the real me & shed this old skin. But then you come to accept that this is it. It's gone by fast, & you better make the most of this life, even as an invisible woman.

With fellow '70s dancers Zahra Zuhair & Nabila at 2012 Cairo Caravan's 1970s Bellydance Panel

  I don't want to scare the ladies who are crossing over into this older age business, but there's no denying it's not for the faint of heart. But the good part is it matters less & less. I am very fortunate to have many young friends in the business & they are respectful & genuinely interested in the knowledge that comes with years of experience. I am so grateful for that, & it's one of the main reasons I find old age bearable.  Being a mentor brings me satisfaction & pride. Passages are hard, but if you're lucky you find a new & rewarding identity.

What's Past is Past. The end of my Little Story.

  I've told my story. I know there's a lot I've left out - some intentionally, some from sheer lack of memory. It's just a little story, comparatively speaking. Now Belly Dance has become global, thanks to the internet. From the USA to Egypt to Russia & beyond, we are all interconnected in a way we never dreamed of in the 1970s when I embarked on this dance journey. Dancers now make a living traveling the world teaching & reach worldwide fame from their videos & social media savvy. In comparison my little career was small potatoes.

Current Photos by Michelle Niellose

   But the 1960s, 70s & 80s were a million times more magical & mysterious than the world we now live in. The music, the fashion, the free feeling that anything was possible, & everything was allowed. What sticks with me most are the things that haunt me. A memory of driving away nightly from a Hollywood club with the windows rolled down through the empty streets - blasting Elvis Costello's Get Happy in a drunken depression, longing for a far away love. The laughs the dancers shared - ducking low in the dressing room while a riot broke out. Hot tubs & cocktails in the snow while on the road & silly inside jokes to pass the monotony. Smells, feelings, hazy dusty memories, with no photos or videos evoke such melancholy longing for something I'm not even sure really existed. And in retrospect what happened off stage meant more to me than the actual dancing. In retrospect it was a lonely life.

   As much as it seems I'm pining away for bygone times like some modern day Norma Desmond, I'm actually a modernist who loves the trendy & the innovative. I think Belly Dance is more beautiful now than ever. I love finding new music & I search the net & consume workshops for inspiration, because now I'm a teacher, a mentor, a sort of life coach of Belly Dance. If you stick around long enough you eventually accrue some notoriety & respectability, but truth is I'm only a legend in LA - outside of the perimeters of this depressing city I'm known to no one except maybe the thousands of "belly" fetishists who drool over my "Man with Bogart's Face" Youtube video.

  I will continue to blog about current issues. I hope to raise some questions, & perhaps the ire of others with some controversial opinions. I hope the current dancers don't forget that us old timers are a living history. We've seen so many changes, trends & styles that we have a unique & well informed take on the business. We've been the "know it all" youngsters, the "It" girls & the "work horses". We may have danced differently, had little contact with dancers in other countries & had little training outside of nightly Middle Eastern club on the job training, but I think all of us 1970s Belly Dancers would agree we wouldn't trade our experience for anything. For that little moment in time Belly Dance was a glamorous, lucrative career. It was my intention with this blog to paint a picture of the world we inhabited. I hope it means something to someone eventually, even if not in my lifetime. So "My case is closed, my case is packed".

Reflections on the times 1990s - early 2000s

I'm winding down my memories. The Flowers of the Desert did their 10th anniversary show in 2005. The cast was completely different, and it was The Flowers in name only. It was hard to teach the old routines to new dancers. There was something about the original troupe that felt organic & true. The new dancers were young and beautiful, many had been my students, but it was hard to recreate the charisma of the original troupe. "Cirque des Fleurs" was our swan song. None of the original members would return for the anniversary show.

After the dust had cleared and the Flowers were disbanded (dancer Dolphina likened it to the Bellydance equivalent of the Beatles breakup) I realized the sea change in the business was cataclysmic & irreversible. It was something I bucked against, but I was too old & from a different era to be listened to.  With the advent of the troupe era, theater productions and charity shows I was an unwilling accomplice to the end of making a good living as a performing soloist. The mentality was different - the new dancers were willing to dance for free at any chance possible. I gave in to the unpaid shows, I broke my own cardinal rule of always being paid, because I wanted to do the fun shows & I was at the end of my performing career. If you can't beat 'em, join 'em. This paved the way for the "pay to play" era that exists to this day. Coupled with the dearth of clubs & the glut of Bellydancers, there wasn't enough opportunity for all the dancers in Los Angeles who wanted to make this their career. So maybe I shouldn't feel guilty, maybe the new dancers saw the writing on the wall.

Truth was that I was totally focused on being a mom of a preteen who was very active in gymnastics, dance & an all around hard working student & great kid. I was teaching, & even still dancing at Burger Continental & a few other random places. But being a mom trumped it all, & my own wants & needs were transferred to being a mother who put her kid first, knowing it was a fleeting & magical moment that I could never again recapture.

2003 From left clockwise Jindra, Emily, Laura Kali, Kamala, Katia, Irani, Princess Farhana, Erica

The new version of the Flowers did have one hell of a crazy job at a giant Mexican nightclub called "El Parral". Four of us would dance several nights a week, providing a diversion while the norteño groups singing their tales of drug kingpins with their oompa bands took a break. We were well compensated for showing up, dressing in a cockroach infested dressing room with a terrible stench & doing a 10 minute schtick with group numbers. The place was jam packed with men in cowboy hats & women squeezed into tiny dresses & teetering on stiletto heels. We looked positively virginal compared to these ladies. So no one watched our show. No one. They would sit with their backs to us, chatting each other up & guzzling beer. One show we went down on our knees during a hair swinging Bandari number & my heel got caught in a cutout in my pink lycra bellbottoms (don't judge). I couldn't get up off the floor. So as my fellow dancers were up & continuing with the choreography, I was still on my knees struggling to figure out why I couldn't get up. The dancers tried to help me up & still I struggled until my foot was finally set free. We must have looked like a bunch of clowns, yet there was zero reaction from the crowd. Another time I had a wardrobe malfunction. I bent forward in the choreography & when I came up the back strap of my bra popped open & I completely flashed the audience with my bra around my neck. Again, not a blink from the crowd. We could have done anything out there. At the end of the evening we would go to the office & collect a good chunk of change & get the hell out. It always felt like some sort of front for a drug ring. Definitely one of my more unusual gigs.

I finally gave up my position as Assistant Director of the Flowers. Laura Crawford was busy with her law career & eventually the Flowers faded into oblivion for the last time.

Student production 2006. The Orchids Al Sahara perform with Joey Dowdy World Groove

I was having fun choreographing shows for my students & coaching them in competitions. I found that most of them went out there won, giving me a ton of satisfaction & pride. As long as I was a full time mom I was in heaven. Nothing else really mattered. But as all good things, the full time job of Mom was soon to be changing as well. I hate change. I don't do well at all with change. And I was about to enter one of the most challenging changes in my life.

The Flowers of the Desert - the bloom comes off the rose

"Ishtar" evening performance for the "Cairo Carnival Festival" 2000

"Drum Chant" Jindra, Laura & Kamala at IAMED's "Rock the Casbah"

For the remainder of the 1990s and into 2000, the Flowers of the Desert were busy creating theater productions. Another Fusion and Fantasy show in 1999 was artistically satisfying & well received. There was a mix of western and Arab audiences & no horror over fusing bellydance, no talk of cultural appropriation. It was fun entertainment. Neena & Veena had officially become the "BellyTwins" with a career of their own, so they left the Flowers. It seemed like a huge hole to fill, but we were blessed with the addition of an accomplished Ballet/Belly dancer named Jindra,  & a full time commitment from Kim Murphy - an all around fabulous dancer/contortionist/actress. We had an audition & added a new dancer named Layla, who unfortunately didn't jive with a few of the other dancers, so she was cut pretty quickly. She ended up starting her own company on which I will not comment. Another extraordinary dancer named Lorinda joined, as did a very young & adorable Jayna. Both Jayna & Lorinda went on to be "Bellydance Superstars".

                                Fusion and Fantasy 1999 at Highways Theater, Santa Monica, CA

Ali Baba Samba from Fusion & Fantasy 1999 backstage at Highways Theater, Santa Monica, CA
Kamala, Kim Murphy, Princess Farhana, Angell Estrada & Marci Johnson (Selena)

We were accustomed to accomplished Bellydancers enthusiastically joining the group, but there was one dancer who politely declined. Jillina was becoming the soloist of choice in the clubs. An extremely ambitious business woman, with all the assets needed for becoming a star, she wisely put her energies into building her own empire. She had a whole different business model, one that is the standard for professional dance companies to this day. Whereas the Flowers were a bit of a ragtag group in the sense that no one matched physically, & our work was quirky & artsy, Jillina assembled a sleek & glamorous  troupe. With the professionalism of a Vegas show - she was the star, supported by young back up girls of a similar look. It was commercial to the max - & they exploded on the club/party scene. Middle Eastern audiences now wanted Jillina's Sahlala Dancers, & only Jillina's Sahlala Dancers. The Flowers had our fare share of glamorous young dancers as well, & one by one they jumped ship & signed on with Jillina. No one could blame them, & I had always been told that a company director (I was assistant director at this point) should never get too attached to a dancer, because they (we) are flaneurs after all, floating away on whatever fair wind that blows - Zay el Hawa.

Bellydance a Go Go with Kamala, Jayna, Kim Murphy & Miriam

The Flowers perform on the "Roseanne Barr Show"

After 9/11 it was a grim time for the Middle Eastern community & the dancers. Restaurants stopped their entertainment & places changed their names to say "Mediterranean" rather than Middle Eastern. The Flowers had already produced a lot of charity events, & we presented "Bellydance for Peace". Much of the proceeds from our shows were donated to different worthy causes.

Backstage at Bellydance For Peace
Laura Crawford, Kamala, Dana, Jayna, Princess Farhana, Laura Kali, Lorinda & Miriam 2001

We still had a few regular gigs & some parties, but truth was we were just too eclectic to make it commercially. We tried our damnedest to choreograph fluffy commercial pieces, but they never rang true, like our eccentric stuff did. We did last in some form or another for several more years, & slowly the cast changed & all the old members were gone, mostly replaced by some of my wonderful students - at the time I happened to have some young beauties we could recruit. But it was never the same. The original Flowers of the Desert had a certain alchemy, a magical energy for that fleeting moment in time. Since those days there have been countless copies, & at this point not many even know who we were, & how different it was. Fusion has taken off in a huge way & creativity is thriving. My writing this story is an attempt to educate lovers of fusion Bellydance on what contribution we made. I look back with pride on this troupe. It's interesting to me how many of the original members never mention the Flowers on their resumes - dancers are a fickle lot I suppose, & perhaps to many of them it was just a blip on their roads to success. For me it was more than a blip. It was a saving grace, an opportunity to dance one more time, to be accepted. I had now been in the business for over 20 years & I was beginning to swallow the bitter pill of dancer old age & unattractiveness. Thankfully I had a growing student base & a fun children's dance company to pour my efforts into. And I was a mom - a very active, basically stay at home mom. That's what got me through this transition, as my identity for so long was shifting & fading.

Les Fleurs part Deux - the beginnings of Bellydance Fusion 1998

The "Flowers" often discussed our knowledge of other dance forms & kicked around the idea of fusing other dance genres with Middle Eastern. It was something that just hadn't been done, & especially for pros in the Arabic club world. Fueling the fire of this idea was the current popularity of Algerian Rai music, & the Arabic/Flamenco/Indian fusion trend raq-ing the Arab music market. If the musicians had license to spread their wings & expand their horizons, we felt compelled to follow in their footsteps. 

Veena and Neena were already doing Bollywood in our shows & it went over well with the Middle Eastern cliental. The first fusion piece was co choreographed by Laura,Veena, myself & a hip hop dancer named Indira. It was to Cheb Khaled's popular & often controversial DiDi. 

While these fusion fires were burning, we were discovering just how remarkable our new member Farhana was. With one step firmly in the punk rock LA world & a burgeoning journalistic career, our Pleasant Gehman was a force of nature, a renaissance woman extraordinare. She was organizing punk rock royalty charity events & getting us gigs in the seedy & historic rock & roll nightclubs of LA. To say I was in heaven was a total understatement. At my age, a suburban housewife/mom, chillin' in the green rooms of the Whiskey a Go Go, The Palace and the Roxy with the members of Talking Heads, Duran Duran & Red Hot Chili Peppers & the likes, I felt like I had finally come full circle - all the things I loved merged together. Entertaining first lady Hillary Clinton, rocking the vote, we were all over the place - spreading Bellydance into a new limelight, and bringing new ideas into the Arabic nightclub. We were a hit with both. 

Backstage at the Whisky a Go Go

My respect for Laura Crawford was growing in leaps & bounds. Devoid of pompous ego, talented, possession of a razor sharp mind, uncanny memory & an infectious enthusiasm made for the best dance company director I had known, or have known since. Laura welcomed our ideas with a resounding "YES!" & you could feel the creativity bubbling. 

A road trip to Leon, Mexico was a fun but often frustrating excursion for the Flowers & the Al Andalus orchestra. Here, years later I was dancing for the Arab diaspora in Mexico again, but this time with my friends around me, making it enjoyable, mixing touristy things with the work, & goofy antics on the tour bus. 

Our tour bus, in Leon, Mexico

Many professional dancers were knocking on the Flowers' door, wanting to get in on the action, but we were discerning & recruited two seminal members in Marci Johnson (Selena) & Angell Estrada. Marci came in with a ton of dance experience & Angell was a natural who had studied Flamenco & Latin dance extensively. Everything was in place to put something new & creative together, & we decided on another theater production, this time doing it our way, at the edgy Highways Theater in Santa Monica, CA. 

Named "Fusion & Fantasy 1998" so there would be no doubt of our intent, we got to work on an ambitious program. Marci's burlesque partner, the incomparable Kim Murphy was brought in, as well as a few guys to charge it all with a little testosterone. We had Bellydance/Bollywood fusion on pointe, a slightly naughty burlesque number to "Little Egypt", A hippie love-in extravaganza to Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir", authentic Indian Filmy & Ragistani, Khaleegy/Bandari fusion, Flamenco hip/hop fusion, A gothic Bellydance to a Lebanese remix of a Gregorian chant, a Goddess earthy piece, not to mention the obligatory sword, chamadon (candelabra), shaabi, oriental & drum solo pieces. We set out to turn the LA Bellydance world upside down, which we did, with 3 sold out shows. These shows were a scene - characters from all walks of life hanging out backstage - from movie stars to rock stars to bellydancers & counter culture, trendy LA types. Individual dancers had their own groupies, & dancers were calling me to say it was their dream in life to be a "Flower". You have to picture what it was like back then. There were few bellydance theater productions or events out there, no other professional troupes of the same calibre doing fusion. Very few Bellydance showcases or competitions. This made us the toast of the town. We were short, tall, zoftig, petite, old, young & it wasn't our intent to look like a Vegas chorus line or matching Barbies, but to look like a troupe of real women with our own distinct styles & personalities. I would say that it was a blast & artistically satiating.

We were also performing in concerts with the likes of Hakim, Alabina, Cheb Mami, Amr Diab & on & on, not to mention Bellydance jobs of a more conventional variety. Flowers' members were go-go dancing with the Go-Go's, & various other unconventional gigs, high on the groovy scale. The after parties were of a bacchanalian nature. I was not in attendance of many of them, as the mom of a young daughter, but the stories that were regaled would make the most liberal among you's toes curl & your eyes pop! 

We started on plans for a theater show the following year. The enthusiasm was infectious & we were all enjoying the collaboration & friendship, with the exception of a few tiffs between members from time to time (which I could, but won't go into). They were magical, heady times for me, because I had been at this business for so long, & by all accounts should have been hanging up the old coin bra. As we headed into our 4th year together some large changes occurred, but it was out with the old, & in with the new. Nothing was going to stop us - not yet anyway.

Mid 1990s - In with the In Crowd - the beginnings of "The Flowers of the Desert"

So I was now a mom of a toddler. I was working at US Air in Air Freight at LAX, operating forklifts, hauling large boxes, transporting dead bodies in caskets, driving trucks down the airfield alongside the mighty 747s. It was a bad ass man's job & I was straddling two worlds - the masculine & the supreme feminine. I still had weekly dance jobs & for the first time I regularly took Bellydance classes when Suhaila Salimpour was teaching in Hollywood. Suhaila's best friend was in the class, Laura Crawford, & word was she was the new "It" girl in the Arab clubs.

Perhaps a year later I got a phone call from Shira (Jane Padgett from the Hajji Baba's days in the '70s) asking if I would be interested in joining a dance troupe that was forming. The idea for the troupe was to join together LA's most popular working dancers. After Arabesque Dance Co I wasn't exactly chomping at the bit to get myself into that kind of commitment again, but I had just been laid off from USAir so I had some free time. When I heard Laura Crawford was starting the troupe I perked up a bit. She was working the hot nightclub at the time Al Andalus, & they were interested in a weekly troupe show with live music. I showed up for the rehearsal & was greeted by a friendly Laura, a young dancer named Miriam, Shira, Veena (one half of Bellytwins fame) & a Turkish girl named Zeyno. Laura was excited about doing a retro show with coin costumes & finger cymbals which in all truth was not something I was even remotely interested in. I wanted the hot Egyptian show with beads & crystals, & the Amcab look was something I had years before left behind with a good riddance. To make matters worse, Laura handed me a fluffy lace skirt to go home & add sequins to. I was rather huffy about this & as I glued one sequin on at a time for hours on end, I cursed myself for being talked into what felt like another troupe debacle. Hallah Mustapha who now has a successful costume business in Cairo made the costumes & she said we looked like flowers when we did what was to be our opening dance with several measures of fast spinning. Laura added "of the Desert" for a bit of a Mid East flare & voila The "Flowers of the Desert" were born. The whole thing sounded a bit too American to me & again I was having flashbacks of Arabesque hokeyness.

Advert for Al Andalus nightclub

So we did the whole enchilada - swords, veils, chamadon, finger cymbals & it turned out Laura was right about her audience. Unlike the Arab audiences in the past, these patrons seemed to get a bang out of the whole thing. A new girl was added to the weekly lineup - a tall elegant woman named Laura Kali who was somehow dubbed "Tall Laura" to differentiate the two. We pared up for the sword number & in rehearsal Laura Kali proved to be an excellent dancer, but it didn't prepare me for the dynamo she became in performance. I quickly realized I had to ratchet my performance value up a few notches to match her intensity. This was going to be fun. And we had live music to boot, & really good live music with none other than Issam Houshan on tabla, who later became probably the most famous Bellydance drummer in the world after his stint with the Bellydance Superstars.

Early Flowers in our retro coin costumes. Veena, Laura, Miriam, Kamala, Neena

Truth was, nearing 40, I was the old lady in the group. I was pretty fortunate that Laura even accepted me into the company, but it didn't change the fact that I didn't do as many paid gigs as the younger girls were doing. A hard pill to swallow, but I had to accept it. My prime time had come & gone. I was really happy to be at an Arab club again, with the hospitality (& great food) that came along with it. Laura & I would drag our young daughters with us to practice. They would hold court in a booth as the owner, musicians & waiters would come by to talk to them & offer Shirley Temples & the likes. My 4 year old daughter was loving every minute of it, & unbeknownst to me was soaking the dancing in, mentally & probably unconsciously taking notes.

                               
                            Early promo video including Rose Parade Al Andalus, Fountain Theater & Arab American TV

Not much later a few more ladies were added. Najwa was a dancer I had worked at Ali Baba's with. Veena brought her sister Neena & they added some Indian Punjabi & Filmy to the mix. Farhana was brought in to do some balancing & was soon integrated into the troupe full time. Of course Farhana eventually became Princess Farhana & the rest is history.

Clockwise from bottom right: Laura kali, Princess Farhana, Neena, Veena, Laura, Najwa, Kamala

We were immediately tapped to produce a show at a snooty theater reserved for more esoteric dance forms. The owner of the Fountain Theater in Hollywood came to Al Andalus & was impressed enough to let us create a theater production. "Dances of the Orient" was a success - filling two nights with enthusiastic audiences. It was really unusual at the time to have a full length Bellydance production & we were even favorably reviewed in the LA Times. The owner thought we were too commercial & was very sour throughout, but we WERE commercial - we were working clubs & parties.

Clockwise from bottom right: Zeyno, Veena, Najwa, Laura, Laura Kali, Kamala,  Farhana. Center Miriam

The Flowers became the toast of the town. I felt very fortunate at my age & at that point in my dance career to be a part of the current "In Crowd"in the LA Bellydance scene. Looking back I really wasn't that old, was I? But to put away my steel toed work boots & take off my suburban mom kit to be a part of a popular working dance troupe was a bonus I really hadn't anticipated. And things were about to get even better...