I was driving back from a wedding a few weeks back when Spotify played the song, Hot Volcano, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kFE7UvHUAF8, it spoke to me. From that moment, in my driver seat, at 75 mph, I danced, wiggled, really. I envisioned the butt wiggle, the spooky eyes, the ghostly moves, the purple get-up, the look just had to be. My motivation? A late 1800s madame, who refused to be a…
So if you've been following my blog for a while, you know that I'm totally into ATS dance. When I moved to England to teach for a year, the experience was so incredibly difficult that I nearly quit and went home several times. What kept me there, and kept me sane, was the troupe that I fell into. Not only was I continuing my lessons on that side of the pond, they were also getting me into performance -- something that totally changes the game. When you're there in full gear and makeup, there is something profoundly powerful that comes over you. You become more comfortable in your own skin. But that was a gradual process.
I thought I would begin like many of the others. I didn't have my own costume yet, so the day I was supposed to do my first public performance, I showed up at the house of the friend in the tribe who was giving me a lift, ready to change into the costume she promised me. I thought, like others just starting out in the tribe, I was going to get the body stocking that the others wore. But no. All she had for me was a choli.
You need to understand that my weight and I have been at odds my entire life, going up and down as my health improved and deteriorated. I was extremely self-conscious about it (and still am), but my friend, being a very, very British assertive teacher type, practically yanked me out of my clothes and stuck me in the costume.
I was more frightened of going out in public with my belly showing than I was of actually dancing. But I did it. And I survived. And it was AWESOME.
Over the summer, I was in more performances, and gradually began gaining confidence. I was proud of my dancing, and proud of overcoming one of the biggest stumbling blocks of my entire life -- public belly-showing. I bought myself a cute bikini with a skirt. Life was good.
And then came the summer festival, at which I wore this:
I was proud of that costume. That was entirely mine by that point -- I sewed the bra myself, spending hours upon hours of hand sewing (I don't know how to use a machine) to make straps out of velvet, cover the bra in velvet, hand-sew all the shells and beads and coins and trim. We danced, and it was amazingly fun. And then people started coming up to us and asking for photos.
Convention with this type of dance is that when you're not performing, you cover the costume with a shawl or cover up. But the nice man who asked for a photo with me really wanted to see the costume. And I was proud of it. So I said "Of course!"
This was the summer that The Goonies made a resurgence. So I probably shouldn't have been surprised when, the moment the picture was taken, the man practically shoved me away and went, "Yeah! I got a picture with the Truffle Shuffle!" And he ran off, laughing, with his friends.
There have been few times in my life during which I wanted the ground to swallow me whole as much as I did then. I was mortified. I wanted to die. I wanted to shoot myself. I wanted to run after him and bludgeon him senseless with my zills and take his camera back to delete the photo. But all I could do was stand there and cry.
The ladies in my tribe wouldn't let me feel sorry for myself, though. They took me under their collective wings, and gave me alcohol, and threatened bodily harm on him, and made disparaging remarks about the size of his anatomy until I couldn't breathe for the laughing.
And they wouldn't let me stop dancing in that outfit.
And then came Witchfest at the end of the summer -- an overnight camping trip out in the country where a bunch of pagans and their families gather to just kind of.... exist for a weekend. There's a pagan rock group that performs, and they asked the tribe to be the backup dancers. I'm not Wiccan, but I went with the tribe (hey, it was a gig), and at the end of the most stressful summer of my life (it didn't help that at that point I was living off the change in my couch, and exchanging knitted snoods as payment for dance class), it was the most calming experience I have ever had, lying out in the woods in a tent full of dancers making jewellery and just being in nature, and hanging around listening to Damh the Bard singing about Arthur and Albion and the Lady of the Silver Wheel.
So the big performance night came. And we danced. For hours. And let me tell you, as pagan rockers get drunker, they get faster, so by the end of it, we could barely breathe, and it was glorious. And after the performance, as we staggered, exhausted, through the crowd, a woman came up to me. She and her friends were built much like me and the ladies I was with, and she had tears streaming down her face. They complemented the performance, and the dancing, and the lady took me by the hands and said something I will never forget.
"Thank you," she said, "for showing me that someone who looks like me can be beautiful."
And it was like a world shifted. I'm still self-conscious about my weight. But not the way I was. My body and I have made peace with each other, and I'm happy in myself now, and in my dancing. Because you never know what effect you can have on people when you just let go and love what you're doing, and forget about what everyone else thinks. Which is why I'll never stop dancing. There's a magic in it that I've never been able to find anywhere else.
