I have a very unusual relationship with a woman named Kathy. It’s unusual in that we have been friends for almost 20 years now, yet we have only seen each other a couple of times.
Let me explain. I went to Harvey Mudd College for awhile, until I got kicked out, but since I had some friends there I went back for Spring Break the next year. I spent some time with my old roommate, Scott Boyd, and through him a met a woman named Amy, who I thought was cute and was a little sweet on.
Kathy was a friend of Amy’s, and I met her briefly during that trip.
(yes, I am getting to the belly dancing part, hold your horses)
Some of the dorm rooms at Mudd were suites, small cell-like bedrooms with a common “den” and bathroom. Each suite had a phone, and one time when I was calling a friend, Kathy answered the phone in that suite.
Now, I am very shy and withdrawn, so I was surprised to find that Kathy and I ended up talking for about two hours, and I thought she was pretty cool.
We managed to keep in touch via postal mail and phone calls after that night, probably once every couple of months or so. Kathy got sick (mono I believe) and ended up leaving Mudd and moving back to Eugene, Oregon. There she met TJ, her husband (we share a birthday, although TJ is a year older, which makes him an extremely old man by my calculations [grin]), got married and had two kids (while we don’t want kids, if we were to have kids I could only hope they would be as amazing as hers).
Meanwhile I moved around, met Andrea, fell in love, got married, bought a farm, etc.
During all this time, we saw each other twice. Once at a
Drinking Man’s Bridge Club in Seattle in either the late 1980s or early 1990s, and two years ago when I was in Oregon for business and Kathy and TJ invited me over to visit on my last night there.
Now Kathy is into Middle Eastern Dance, what we commonly call “belly dancing”, and she is a member of the Middle Eastern Dance Guild of Eugene. She told me a lot about it, how it was mainly for women to perform for other women and it wasn’t until recently that it took on a more sexual and tawdry overtone (but although I have at my fingertips e-mails from her dating back to early 1999, I can’t find the one I am looking for).
The gist of it is that once a year or so I get belly dancing pictures and once I even got a video. Now, I count myself lucky and extremely blessed every time I think about Andrea (especially when I am on business trips like this one), but I also get some giddy pleasure about getting these little care packages from Oregon.
Before you think less of me as a husband, I need to relate a story. We were watching the video that Kathy sent, and the highlight of it was a sword dance (which I have been led to believe is sort of her trademark). She balances a sharp, curved sword on her head while pretty much moving everything below it at a rather rapid pace.
I noticed that the hilt of the sword was, well, backward. I couldn’t see how one would hold the sword with the hilt the way it was, and I spent quite a long time trying to figure it out. Finally I asked Kathy if it was, indeed, backward.
Her reply was short and along the lines of, yes, it is reversed for balance, but here I am dancing my heart out and all you can think about is the stupid sword hilt.
She wrote to me this week, which promoted this blog entry. She was in the local paper, and she had some big news. Rather than paraphrase:
I’m a guest dancer tomorrow night in the show for
“The Bellydance Superstars”. I get to meet Miles Copeland (yep, THE Miles Copeland; Stewart Copeland’s brother, the producer of The Police, IRS records, ARK21 media, etc) and I get to dance in a show with some of the most gorgeous young dancers in the USA. Yeek, I’m a little intimidated. I’m sure I’ll be the oldest one there, and the only one with KIDS. But I have a super-cool double-sword act with a spin at the end that looks like the bellydancing cuisinart of death. (One sword out each side, in a barrel turn, so the blades look like a cuisinart. TJ was impressed.)
I need to write to her and see how it went, but I am sure she did fine. But two swords, sheesh, I’d never know there was a dancer there.
(grin)