Madison got it's first all out blizzard today with 15 inches of snow. We knew it was coming yesterday. The school district even called off classes yesterday evening, so everyone knew it would be huge too. I spent the whole night dreaming that the storm completely passed us by and we never got any of the white stuff at all. When I woke up this morning the first thing I did was leap across my husband's side of the bed to the window. That's when the above exclamation came first. I repeated it all day while also thinking, "I want more!" While I've lived longer in the Midwest now than I have in the South, I will never get tired of snow. And I will never get tired of the things that come with it. Namely, icicles, and the joy I experience from the fact that the red SUV up there is not my car.
Begrudgingly putting the topic of our winter wonderland aside, I present to you another holiday bellydance lesson. This time on hip slides. My devious plan is to come up with a small pattern/choreography for the next holiday. Stay tuned!
I can dance half naked in front of hundreds of people. I can paint myself up like a two bit whore (stage make-up) and prance on out bare tummy, and occasionally cleavage, exposed. But I can't for the life of me get up the guts to wear a two piece swimsuit. And even though I'm on several club DVD's in all these wacky costumes, AND have performed for the local cable channel, I'm somehow not ready to expose my belly on a home video.
Weird and shy as I may be sometimes, I still love to teach. So I present to all of you my first Internet-home-video-bellydance-lesson. With background music! :) Although I wasn't aware that the sound of my coin scarf would act as white noise that almost blocks out the music and my voice. Sorry about that.
Merry Yule everyone! And shimmy on! :P
P.S. For those interested in smoke hands, the video is here.
It was the first of these phrases, all of which portend doom, that led me to discover this little horror.
A fellow dancer and I were working on our duet choreography when we had a bit of a mental shut down. Smoke hands are neat and everything, but they can only take you so far into a piece before your audience finally starts to realize the filler. "Hey... I think they've been doing the same move in different directions for three minutes..." So when bellydancers get brain farts we do what every other bored and worn out human being with access to a computer does - we watch Internet videos.
Somehow I got it in my head that typing in the phrase "vampire bellydance" would produce some hilarious results. Oh. And it did. Oh, how it did. Were I to list the things this woman does wrong, I might actually produce a page's worth of ranting. So, leaving aside the fact that she's trying to do veil AND candles, the fact that her music is a mix of everything from folkloric Evanescence to what sounds like German rap, plus the fact that she's wearing contacts and fake vampire teeth, I have chosen my top gripe with this apparent bellydancer: The woman humps everything in sight! The floor! The air! The audience (Thank the gods, from a distance.)! She gets down and dirty with so many objects that I feel sorry for the curtains for getting left out of the action!
For those of you who don't normally see bellydance, this is NOT bellydance. This is a stripper wearing a bellydance costume. ...And I hope you all find it as wonderfully entertaining and hilarious as my friend and I did when we were grasping at our sides and doubled over laughing (At 2:30 when she's flipping her veil up with both arms: "Oh, God! It's a beached whale! Quick! We must help it flail back to the ocean!").
I'll be posting a Yule bellydance move for you guys tomorrow, and I leave you with this piece of advice until then: If I ever see any of you on YouTube, blogs, Myspace, Facebook, Photobucket, etc. dancing like this outside of a spooflah, I will hunt you down and make you watch your own video while professional bellydancers berate you.
...but if anyone is bold enough to spoof this, I have no quips or qualms. :P
