"Do you want to perform with us?" asked Sharon.
"I'd be happy to," I said, "but I've never done bellydance before. I don't know if I'll be good enough to perform."
"I'm not worried," siad Sharon. "There's no such thing as not good enough. It's memory. Bellydance is memory. It's the dance form that's the most natural, with the body. You just have to remind yourself how to do it."

There's another Sharon in the theatre project.

It gets confusing sometimes, but it's ok. Sharon (the other one) is a bellydancing teacher, and she completely fucking rocks. She invited me to join her new class, which started last week. I couldn't make it to the first meeting because I was busy being oriented with the other Fellows (hi, Josh!) but I'll be going this Wednesday, provided I can find the studio.

Sharon the gorgeous Yemini bellydancing teacher isn't the only one of the women I've recruited to teach me things I want to learn. In fact, I've managed to pull together pretty much all the classes I decided I wanted to take this year from women in the theatre group. Sahar, who has been doing much of our Arabic translation for the play, is going to teach a group of seven or so of my and Iris's friends conversational Arabic in our house one night a week. And Mary, a Palestinian woman from Yafo in her early 50s, is going to teach me how to make Palestinian food. In exchange, I am going to teach her how to make Mexican food.

Why Mexican? Well, I told her I wanted to learn how to make Palestinian food and she said, "OK, what kind of food will you teach me to make?" and I said, "I make really good Indian food," and she said, "Are you Indian?" and I said, "No," and she said, "Then why are you going to make Indian food?" and I said, "Well, I'm a vegetarian and I'm from the American South, so--" and she said, "Do you know how to make Mexican food?" and I said "Sure, why not?" and she got really excited. In retrospect, I feel it's possible she mistook "American South" for "South America," or alternatively that I said it wrong in Hebrew, but I'm pretty sure she knows I'm not Mexican and was just really excited about guacamole.

It's nice to have conversations about how to properly make majadarah and vegetarian stuffed grape leaves during breaks, because the subject matter of the play is very heavy. In addition to exploring the idea of veiling, it draws its plot from the true story of a Bedouin family in which something like eight of the sisters were murdered by family members as "honor killings" because they removed their veils or spoke with men. Besides that, we're rehearsing in a bomb shelter, and today the air conditioner was broken and the feeling down there was not entirely unlike a Turkish bath.

It's easy to fall into life here and start taking things for granted, like that a bomb shelter is a perfectly natural place to rehearse a multicultural feminist play about religious, societal, and metaphorical veiling of women. You just have to remind yourself where you came from sometimes.

On the matter of reminding myself where I came from, I should mention that last week I got an unexpected bout of nostalgia for North Carolina. We were out of cooking gas and the guy didn't show up to change our tank when he said he was going to so I was out of luck for making my favorite Southern meal (a.k.a. the only Southern food I really care for at all) of chili, cornbread, and sweet tea. So instead I made a playlist on my ipod of North Carolina or otherwise Southern-themed songs. My favorite, which I've listened to just about every day since then, is the heart-achingly beautiful bluegrass song Wagon Wheel by Old Crow Medicine Show. I like it because it's about someone driving down the coast from New England to my hometown, Raleigh:

Headed down south to the land of the pines
And I'm thumbin' my way into North Caroline
Starin' up the road
Pray to God I see headlights

I made it down the coast in seventeen hours
Pickin' me a bouquet of dogwood flowers
And I'm a hopin' for Raleigh
I can see my baby tonight

So rock me mama like a wagon wheel
Rock me mama anyway you feel
Hey mama rock me
Rock me mama like the wind and the rain
Rock me mama like a south-bound train
Hey mama rock me

And because it's so delicious, here is my first attempt at a video embed. Enjoy.





PS: I have also been having to remind myself that I'm not going back to Hampshire and have been more than just a little homesick for Western Mass. If anyone has a suggestion for a Hampshire College/Western Massachusetts musical cure for the homesick blues equivalent to Wagon Wheel, let's have it.

S