Bellydancing Costuming: Self-Acceptance Through Frustration

Somewhere, accidentally, along the way to becoming someone who can slide my hips to one side while keeping my pelvis level, I became someone who needed to own stage makeup.

Somewhere, accidentally, along the way to becoming someone who can undulate like a snake, I became someone who owned a costume that is effectively a velvet bra covered in jingly coins and an accompanying velvet skirt split to the hip.

Somewhere, accidentally, along the way to becoming a scientist, I became a bellydancer.

Oops.

This is all hitting home because in a little over a week, I stop being merely a person who takes bellydancing classes. In a little over a week, I brush on my war paint, strap my breasts into a jingly velvet halter top, wrap my hips with an even more jingly velvet belt, and step out into the harsh stage lights to become, properly, a bellydancer.

The final part of this transformation has not been smooth. It involves a lot of costuming and makeup, each presenting its own set of challenges. Today I’ll tell you about the costumes, because they came first.

Each of us is clad in a different color; though since I was one of the last additions to the performance troupe, I was assigned emerald green instead of my preferred turquoise. The costumes are made in Turkey, which I imagine to be the source of all the world’s tiny jingly coins. Marjan ordered them for Theresa, Carla, and I last fall when we were due to move into the advanced class. She pressed us at length if we would be okay showing our bellies, since none of us ever did so in class. If not, Marjan assured us, it would be okay–we would find other costume options, or we could easily wear sheer stockings over our tummies. Carla said that surely, by February, she would be fine showing her abs. Theresa, having produced at least one child be C-section, said that she would be opting for a stocking. I nodded and smiled, making a mental note to research things to make public nudity feel less like public nudity. I haven’t worn a two-piece bathing suit since I was 6; I wasn’t about to start showing off my pale, fat stomach to strangers who would be staring at me under stage lights.

Our costumes came in December, and I promptly tucked mine away and forgot about it in all the Christmas and travel-to-India hubbub.

Sometime in January, though, I pulled it out to try it on. The top was unfinished–I would need to sew the straps on properly and replace the hook in the back, so I couldn’t properly fit that one yet. But the skirt–that I could do. I slid it on and realized that there was a problem.

A “one-size-fits-all” problem.

I am, as Marjan so sweetly puts it, “hipilicious”. My grandmother would put it, less sweetly, that I have “inherited the ‘Shadoan Family Hippo Butt’”. I have, as Zack terms it (usually while grinning lecherously), a fat ass.

Apparently this is an uncommon trait among belly dancers. At least, it’s uncommon enough that the slits on the costume, which hit the other girls at a relatively modest mid-thigh, hit me right at the bottom of my ass. If my costume creeps up even an inch, I will literally be dancing with my ass hanging out. Further, while the costume claims to stretch to accommodate generously proportioned asses, they fail to remind you that soft flesh will be compressed by elastic. So if my hips were amply proportioned solid muscle, it might look fine. However, my hips are not. Sure, there’s not insignificant muscle there, but it’s surrounded by a hefty layer of soft, squishy fat. Great when you are falling on your butt or trying to sleep on tile floors–less great when trying to wear a skinny woman’s costume. I ended up looking more lumpy than sleek. Not exactly inspiring of confidence.

I set about to remedy this problem. I thought it would be simple–I would replace the waistband with a wider one to distribute the force of the elastic, and wear then whole skirt lower on my hips, solving both the ass-flashing and the lumpiness in one go! Unfortunately, I couldn’t find fabric matching the ridiculous green of my costume. Further, with all the coins and beads and dangly, jingly bits, replacing the waistband would be a delicate operation. So, my mother and I had the idea to order a second, identical skirt, and use it for parts to expand the first skirt to dimensions appropriate to an ass as magnificent as mine.

Except they don’t carry the skirt in emerald green. Emerald green has to be special ordered, and it will take weeks to make and ship from Turkey. It was early February by this time, and I was beginning to get panicky.

So I tried on the skirt again, this time with the body stocking I intended to wear, a white fishnet contraption rigged from professional ballroom dancing tights. Bellydancers swear by this, according to various forums on the internet. The skirt fit better; the fishnet provided sufficient friction that the skirt stayed in place on my hips, happily not exposing my underparts. And I looked almost kinda sleek. It was cool, if not perfectly comfortable.

Finishing the body stocking proved to be more of a challenge than I was up for, however. Generally, you hook such things to your costume, or create straps to go over your shoulders (and under your costume). Straps, however, were out, as my costume is a halter top with very little in the way of fabric to hide additional strappage. I tried hooks, too, but as a result of the halter nature of my costume, the stocking just pulled the back of my costume down.

I struggled with the damn thing for hours, sewing on different hooks and snaps and straps until my fingers were sore and Zack was visibly tired of hooking and unhooking my costume.

Finally, at two am on Monday night, I gave up. I no longer cared if I flashed the audience my underwear. I no longer cared if I had to wear the costume higher than my hips. I no longer cared if I looked fat, or lumpy, or if my stomach jiggled while people looked at me.

And then, in the moment I decided that I just could not scrape together any more energy to care about squishing my body into a more socially accepted shape, I decided that I not only couldn’t care any more, but I shouldn’t care.

Granted, it’s one thing to realize that you shouldn’t care; it’s another thing entirely to do it . We tell people (girls in particular) this all the time. Don’t let the magazines tell you what a good body is. You’re beautiful.  Unfortunately, we’re a culture of seriously mixed messages, and generally while we’re telling girls they’re beautiful, we’re also telling them that if they’re fat, everyone will hate them and they’ll die.

So I don’t think I’m going to successfully remove all “give a fuck” from myself. I will try very hard, of course, to worry more about my shimmy and my expression and the shape of my fingers than what the audience is thinking about my bare stomach, but I don’t expect all of those thoughts to vanish overnight. But I’m doing it as a cultural statement. I’m doing it for all of the people (even the tiny little things in my belly dancing class) who are critical of their bodies. I’m doing it for everyone who says, “I’ll wear something like that, when I lose fifteen (thirty, sixty, a hundred) pounds.” I’m doing it because there’s a chance that someone in the audience will look at me and think, “If that fat dancer is so confident that she can get up in front of a room packed with people, standing next to women whose ab muscles you can see, then what could I do? What opportunities am I cheating myself out of because I am too damn afraid?” I am doing it because it terrifies the ever loving fuck out of me, and I cannot bear to be afraid of the judgment of strangers.

And most importantly, I am doing it because I am unwilling to live as someone who judges my own body to be unworthy. My body is good to me–sure, it has extra fat and somewhat dodgy knees and lots of allergies, but it is strong and resilient, and, yes, beautiful. It deserves at least as much celebration as the bodies of my slimmer compatriots; if I’m not willing to give it that, then who will?

…

Okay, and I’m also doing it because I can’t spend another second of my life sewing snaps onto crazy lycra fishnets.

Recipe: Balsamic Glazed Kale with Butternut Squash and Awesome

I ate this dish all winter long when I lived in Dundee, often served over brown rice and sprinkled with goat cheese. It makes fantastic leftovers. It can be frozen, too, although the butternut squash doesn’t make it out the other side of freezing with quite the same texture. I suspect that if you didn’t cook it to squishiness, it would do better.

Ingredients:

• 1 medium butternut squash (1 – 1.5 lb is fine for 4 servings)
• Curly leafed kale, washed and torn into pieces (Somewhere in the range of 200-400g, but really, you can never have too much kale)
• 6 cloves of garlic (You can use less than this if that’s a lot of garlic to you)
• 8 slices of bacon (I have been using back bacon, which I prefer, but I don’t know if you can get that in the US very easily. Any bacon will do)
• 250 g of cooked white beans (canned is fine)
• Olive oil
• Red pepper flakes (optional)
• Sea salt
• Balsamic vinegar

Directions:

1. Preheat the oven to 375 F.
2. Cut the butternut squash in half, scoop out the seeds, and cut into about a half-inch dice. Don’t worry about peeling it, it will be roasted and then the peel is quite edible.
3. Toss the butternut squash with a half tablespoon or so of olive oil, and a pinch of red pepper flakes. If you like it spicy, add more red pepper flakes. If you don’t, omit those entirely.
4. Arrange the butternut squash chunks in a single layer on a baking sheet and put them in the preheated oven. Those will cook until they are tender, approximately 20-30 minutes. If you feel inclined while the squash is cooking, you can flip the chunks over to encourage even browning. I usually don’t bother.
5. While the squash is cooking, cut the bacon into small pieces. (This is easier if the bacon is very cold. Alternatively, use scissors, which is what I always do.)
6. In a large skillet (think something large enough to accommodate the bacon, kale, beans, and squash), cook the bacon slowly over low or medium-low heat to render out the fat.
7. While the bacon and squash are cooking, peel and finely chop the garlic. (You can save yourself some time here by using a garlic press on the fresh garlic or using jarred garlic).
8. When the bacon is done cooking (ie, is of the crispiness you desire and has been divested of most of its fat), remove it from the skillet with a slotted spoon and set it aside. Now, here you can drain the bacon grease from the skillet if you’d prefer to use a non-saturated fat such as olive oil. If you do not use the bacon grease, add a tablespoon of olive oil to the skillet in its stead.
9. Add the garlic to the skillet with the bacon grease or olive oil, and let it cook for a bit. It’s okay if the garlic gets somewhat golden, but be careful that it doesn’t burn, as it gets bitter and less tasty then.
10. Once the garlic has softened somewhat, add the kale to the skillet. Stir until wilted.
11. When the kale is wilted but still bright green, add a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar to the skillet and stir to coat the kale. You may need a trifle more balsamic vinegar than that, but add it to the skillet incrementally to avoid kale that is soupy with vinegar. Cook the kale and balsamic vinegar until the vinegar has largely evaporated, and what is left is clinging to the kale.
12. Add the cooked beans to the skillet until they are heated through.
13. At this point, the squash should be done. Add both the roasted squash and the bacon into the skillet, stir to combine, and et voila!

India: 29 December 2009 3:15 PM

To say that India is overwhelming is an incredible understatement. For me, someone who prefers the quiet of the countryside, it’s like filling a box with electrified rocks, sticking your head into it, and shaking it vigorously.

The sheer volume of people is staggering, but it’s not obvious on the sidewalks here like I imagine it would be in New York. Instead, the clog the roads, forming a single seething mass of honking, zipping motorbikes and rickshaws. Everything is covered in the dust and soot belched by the millions of two-stroke engines. The trees, which are grand by any measure, are turned from green to dull dray, so coated are they with pollution.

There is turmeric under the fingernails of my right hand, which I have been using to scoop food up in chapatti, just like my hosts. My attempts to use only one hand to eat have been less than perfectly successful, but I am trying, anyway. Soon we will leave for the menhandi, where our hand will be painted with henna. Yesterday’s menhandi, for Neha’s relatives, was done in the Maharashtrian style. Today’s, for Abhinav’s relatives, will be done in the Punjabi style. I am told this involves more music and dancing.

India: 29 December 2011

My arrival in India was not smooth, though at least I had my luggage. The upside to packing all of your clothes in a carry-on and struggling with it on the plane is that the airline has no opportunity to lose it for you. I arrived with all my clothes–if not my sanity–intact. Twenty-three hours shoved in a sardine can hurtling through the atmosphere does take a toll on one.

But anway, Mumbai. I was surprised to find that at 1:30 am, three days after Christmas, they were piping smooth jazz Christmas carols into the Mumbai passport control area. A little Christmas saxophone while you fill out the customs forms. I noticed a plant arrangement in the entrance to the passport control area that was surrounded by tiny red clay (maybe) balls that I had originally made seen in planters in the Frankfurt airport. (Yes, I was the crazy lady in Frankfurt, shoving her hands into the planters to figure out what the weird balls were.) They are light, about the size of marbles, and very (if not perfectly) round. They are red like Oklahoma, or like Mars, depending on your context. I wondered if there was some kind of airport supply catalog that one could order them from, as they were a really neat textural element.

I wrote this while I stood in line.

“I am in Mumbai, standing in a passport control line that appears to go on forever. I am too hot, in my layers made for Oklahoma winter, and the sweat coats my skin. I have been awake for more than 24 hours, and I swear if the kid behind me bumps into me one more time, I will shank him. It is taking every ounce of willpower in my body not to turn around, box his ears, and give him a culturally inappropriate, if not downright racist, lecture on personal space. It occurs to me that my hatred of crowds might make this trip problematic for me. I am desperate for a shower. The music piped in is Christmas carols on the saxophone. Purgatory. I have four hours in a taxi to look forward to.”

After about the tenth time that the kid behind me bumped into me, his father, no doubt alarmed by the glares I directed at his child, moved the poor kid behind him in line, so as not to annoy the overstimulated, cranky American.

As it turned out, a kid bumping into me over and over again in line was going to be the least of my arrival-time woes.

Meal Plan 16 Jan 2012

It has been a while since I have managed to make a meal plan and follow it. I just got back from two weeks in India, where I did no cooking at all. Before that, I spent the holidays with my family, where I didn’t cook. Before that, I had finals, and before that, there was the week I was out with horrific food poisoning (or whatever), and before that I spent a month living in the lab, spending ten or twelve hours a day thesising. Suffice to say, I am out of practice, and this meal plan took forever. (Two and a half hours start to finish. Eegad.) I’ve learned a lot, in the semester since I’ve started this. I discovered that I often don’t have the energy to cook seven nights a week–so Zack started cooking on Tuesdays, when I have bellydancing. This semester, Brian is taking over Thursdays. Hopefully, I will be able to impart some cooking skills to him that way. (This week I’ve chosen their recipes for them–usually they chose their own).

I’ve discovered that it’s hard for me to strike the right balance of new meals or complicated cooking and old favorites and easy recipes. I try not to plan complicated food on days when I know I am going to be tired. Then there are considerations like preference: Zack doesn’t do mushrooms or coconut milk, Brian can’t eat ginger. Both of them do not consider a bowl of roasted cauliflower to be an appropriate dinner (much to my despair).

I’ve also discovered that I am an incredibly utilitarian cook. I lean heavily towards one-pot meals. The food I make is rarely pretty–I avoid recipes with drizzly sauces or garnishes and the like. (I make exceptions for some of the things Heidi Swanson makes, but I do those rarely.) I cook for efficiency–the most nutritional bang for my time, money, and caloric buck.

I have a hard time balancing various considerations, too. Nutrition, cost-effectiveness, and ecological-friendliness are the big ones that trip me up. Chicken breasts, for instance, are a fabulous lean protein, but they’re meat, and the meat industry in America is deeply problematic from an environmental standpoint. I can buy local, happy chicken, but it’s incredibly expensive. Fish is as bad. It’s really nutritious! However, corporate fishing practices suck. We’re really damaging biodiversity in the ocean–tuna is becoming an endangered species. Farmed fish has its own slew of problems. Occasionally, I can afford to buy the kind of fish that the Monterey Bay Seafood Watch recommends, but not generally. So we don’t eat much fish. It ends up that we eat largely vegetarian, accented with bacon (which gives you a lot of flavor per ounce of meat). But getting the recommended amount of protein is not easy. Beans, incidentally, do not have nearly as much protein as one might think. Cottage cheese is my go-to protein source (after beans), but I wonder if I’m just supporting one bad farming practice (corporate dairy farming) over another bad farming practice (meat farming). I agonize over that kind of thing. I really need to come up with a system to deal with those considerations.

So, the whole meal planning process has been really interesting. I recommend it. Here’s this week’s menu.

Monday dinner: Skillet lasagna
Tuesday lunch: see Monday, dinner
Tuesday dinner: Kale with white beans and bacon on toast
Wednesday lunch: See Tuesday, dinner
Wednesday dinner: in Choctaw. Beet and blood orange salad with fennel.Thursday lunch: Beet, beluga lentil, arugula, and goat cheese sandwiches
Thursday dinner: Whole wheat orchietta with bitter greens and radishes (add chicken)
Friday lunch: See Thursday, dinner
Friday dinner: Cheese tortellini with roasted butternut squash, white beans, sage, and arugula
Saturday lunch: See Friday, dinner
Saturday dinner: Salmon and roasted cauliflower
Sunday dinner: White bean and roasted cauliflower salad (with leftovers for monday)

Evolution of This Semester’s Goals

My initial goals this semester were simple: complete a triathlon, make an A in Network Security, and research, write, and successfully defend my thesis in order to graduate. Apparently this was wildly ambitious, and over the course of the semester things have downgraded. The triathlon, the earliest goal, didn’t happen, for a plethora of reasons. The day before I was supposed to leave, my boss assigned me a new task, due immediately upon my return. That, coupled with six hours of driving (round trip) to get there, and an unfinished costume, made me think that perhaps another year would be better. After all, what fun is doing a triathlon if you aren’t in costume?

So that was one goal down. Truthfully, it was a little bit of a relief–I was sick to death of the bicycling parts of training. I was constantly battling either weather or traffic or both.

Then, Network Security bludgeoned me with a mace. After making a 46% on my midterm exam (worth 20% of my grade), I am going to be delighted if I just pass the damn class.

And now, the thesis. Frankly, I think there is no way in hell that I will get it finished this semester (though my adviser has commanded that I spend all “non-biological time” working on it). I want to finish this semester, I do, I just don’t want to die while doing it. Already I can feel it sapping my will to live. For instance, I had sex last night for the first time in weeks, and I thought, “gee, that was awesome! We should totally do that again soon.” This thought was followed immediately by “THESIS”, at which point I burst into tears (much to my lover’s dismay, the poor dear.) Or, the other day while I was at the gym, I was listening to fun dance music and thought, “I used to have friends. We used to go out and dance and do things! Why do I feel like I don’t have friends anymore?” At which point I realized that I do have friends, I am just not allowed to go out and play with them.

Which is to say, my goals this semester have devolved so far that I will consider the semester a success if I pass Network Security and the erstwhile Mr. Tidwerr graduates. Fortunately, the reading copy of his thesis is due tomorrow, so the hour of his graduation is nigh.

I cannot wait to be done with school.

List: How I Spent Some of My Graduation Money

I received a $50 Target gift card as a graduation gift (for graduating with my MSc in Design Ethnography). I offer this list as evidence that I am almost too practical. (I say almost, as three of the items are primarily used for baking, which I rarely do because I am busy making “real” food, which generally involves more cruciferous vegetables, and less sugar.)

• 1 liter metric and Imperial measuring cup (dishwasher, microwave, and oven safe, though why I would ever need to use it in an oven I am unsure)
• lingerie bag for washing my bras and other delicates, which don’t come as clean when I wash them inside a pillowcase. (I am so tired of unknotting pillowcases, too)
• pastry cutter so that I can try this pie crust recipe (which I doubt will even work, as she is in the Bay Area where it is not constantly stupidly hot and humid. But I’m going to try anyway).
• silicone pastry brush for the same recipe
• silicone baking mat (a more ecologically responsible alternative to parchment paper, which I love)
• expandable file folder to house my postcards and stamps
• two five-pound free weights to round out the low end of my free-weight collections. (Sometimes my triceps just can’t handle eight-pound weights in good form.)