A Sci-Fi Geek Turns Belly Dancer. Mom is Gonna Plotz.
My mother has always worried that she raised a geek daughter. After all, the last time I set a fashion trend was when I was two and wore fairy wings for a month. I go to sci-fi cons, write fanfiction, and have been seen wielding a lightsaber and yelling “Sith Pride!” I have a triple major. I read biographies for fun. My mother has prayed (loudly enough for God and the entire East Coast to hear) that her daughter embrace a different lifestyle, one with prospects beyond spinsterhood.
So, like any good daughter, I respected her will. I put down my books, put on a hip scarf, and learned to shake my junk. This is not the change my mother prayed for. “Who is going to marry a girl who acts like a floozy?” she asks.
I suppose I understand her concerns. It’s amazing how a coin-laden scarf draped around my midriff transforms me from dumpy college bookworm to a sultry object of desire. When I shuffle to belly dancing class in my sweats, I’m roundly ignored. Moments later, when I step out of the studio and jingle through the halls to get a drink of water, I’m greeted with catcalls and exhorted to “shake it.” Don’t get me wrong, it’s certainly flattering. Considering my dating calendar, a girl takes what she can get.
This is all very alien to my mother and her family. It’s not that they’re against dancing, per se. It’s just that at a family wedding, my relatives are more likely to partake in a subdued folk dance behind a mechitzah the size of the Berlin Wall. The women wear scarves on their heads, not their hips, and the men are nowhere to be seen. It’s no place for a girl who wants to wriggle the night away.
Yes, going around shaking my tuchus in a skimpy costume doesn’t exactly make me the nice Jewish girl my mother wishes I would be. And I suppose practicing my groove to the sound of Hasidic crooner Avraham Fried has set me on an irreversible course to Gehenna. Where, of course, I would be welcomed by the residents. Even eternal torment can be brightened up by some well-executed pelvic thrusts.
But don’t worry, Mommy, this isn’t all about the sex appeal. Just 99.99% of it. There’s a code of proper behavior, to make sure we’re treated like ladies when we’re moving our hips. While we undulate like cobras in heat, we must take care to be modest. Or so says my teacher. We practice the etiquette of how to handle overly excited men, what to do when money is thrown at us, how to flirt appropriately… Okay, maybe this isn’t helping.
Belly dancing is great cardio, particularly for my mother. Her heart rate spikes each time she considers my future prospects. She imagines the synagogue ladies gossiping about her daughter’s questionable morals and how they will never let their boys go out with a dancer. “How can I ever show my face in the synagogue again?” she wails. I suggest that I could get a hip scarf with a Star of David on it. The look in her eyes lets me know I’m dancing on thin ice.
I assure my mother that somewhere out there, hopefully in a galaxy not too far away, there is a Prince Charmingberg who won’t mind a belly-dancing sci-fi geek with an overbearing mother. Right?
