CAIRO CALLING

Things have been a little nutty in my life lately… but then, what else is new? So many projects, gigs, classes and flights to catch…so little time!

I stare in abject guilt at my computer’s desktop, knowing I need to finish the series of articles on identifying different styles of dance. After five installments I kind of let that fall by the wayside due to my travel schedule and “Bombshell” DVD shoot.

I had planned for Part Six to be about Egyptian Shaabi and Beledy styles, and for Part Seven to be about trance dances (like the Moroccan Guedra and Egyptian Zar) and devotional dances, especially Sufi whirling dervishes and Egyptian Tannoura dancers.

Sadly, those chapters are just going to have to wait until I complete my latest trip…but happily, my next trip is to Egypt! I leave in a day.

For the past few years I have been completely fascinated by Tannoura, it’s history and practice. Every time I see Tannoura dancers I am so moved- even if it’s just at a night club show. I am hoping to get some great pictures of the whirling dervishes to include with the new articles- last year on the Nile Maxim, I saw an incredible young Tannoura dancer who had a costume that lit up with LED lights, and when the lights in the club went off as he whirled and ignited his costume, he looked just like a carnival ride! The year before I saw a group of little boys dancing Tannoura, they were apprentices learning the art. The youngest was about six and the oldest maybe ten or eleven. They were incredible, and had the entire place screaming wildly. It was kind of like seeing a whirling dervish version of The Jackson Five!

I am so very excited to be going to Egypt, and not just because I will be teaching-and learning from the master instructors-at the Ahlan Wa Sahlan Festival, but because of the recent turmoil in Egypt surrounding the revolution and all the social unrest earlier this year.

Like people the world over, I watched the events in Egypt unfolding with dire concern, desperately hoping things would end well. My many friends in Cairo, both Egyptians and ex-pats, were constantly on my mind, and with the internet and phone service down, there was no way to reach them. I feared for their safety, and prayed for the people of Egypt who were fighting for their rights, as well as for the future of the country.

With resignation, my partner Zahra Zuhair and I cancelled our summer Eternal Egypt Tour earlier this year due to the unsettled situation; we didn’t want to bring a group of people who had never been to Egypt into a country that seemed ready to explode at any moment.

After the reality of our cancellation set in, my own somewhat selfish feelings took over.

“ This can’t be happening to MY Egypt,” I thought, panic sweeping through me in nauseating waves.

Suddenly, aside from what I’d been seeing on the news, the reality hit me in a personal way and I was afraid I might never again be able to visit this beautiful country that I loved so much, this place that, for the last two decades, I have almost taken for granted, thinking carelessly that Egypt would always be “available” to me.

Egypt is a land full of contradictions, a place with many problems and extreme poverty, but undeniably it's one of the world’s richest places in terms of culture. From ancient to modern times, Egypt has always been alive with art. It is a place bursting with incredible music and dance, gorgeous antiquities and people so friendly and welcoming that even a complete stranger would go out of his or her way to help you if you needed anything.

I have had many adventures and certainly many misadventures there, but I have always felt safe there.

When i think of Egypt, I think of laughter: I have probably laughed harder and longer than anywhere else I’ve been, because most of the population-or at least those i have been fortunate enough to meet- seem to have a deliciously crazy sense of humor. Fun is free, and the seemingly universal Egyptian love of fun is one of my favorite things about the country.

I love Cairo with it’s sensory overload of sights, sounds and smells; it’s sizzling nightlife that ends the next day well after the sun has come up; the Nile bridges full of families hanging out at 3:00am and the insane, relentless Kamikaze traffic. Luxor with it’s jingling hantour carriages and the gigantic grand temples of Karnak And Luxor. Cosmopolitan Alexandria with its sea breezes, the green of the Fayoum Oasis in the expanse of the Sahara.

Everywhere in Egypt, the haunting muezzins calls broadcast loudly while any animal within earshot of the mosque- dogs, donkies, camels, goats- begins howling and braying along with the prayer, and cabbies stop dead in the middle of the street, laying down cardboard or rugs to pray on the pavement. Cairo after sunset, where the motor boats decked out in blinking disco lights careen down the Nile blasting Shaabi through distorted speakers while fifty people onboard dance wildly, and the river police try to pull them over. And um, oh yeah… the epitome of Egypt, Giza’s Pyramids and Sphinx, which everyone in Cairo refers to as “ The Svin-kuss”.

While the revolution was taking place, when I was faced with the fear and the reality that maybe things would be changing in an unfavorable way, I was scared I might not be able to go back to Egypt, I started to reflect about the time I’d spent there. Though I never lived there, I'd always felt like Egypt was a huge part of my life.

My first trip to Egypt was twenty years ago. Back then, there were no cell phones or Internet, and it took waiting for at least four hours just to get an overseas line, even at the five star hotels. There were no signs in English- anywhere! I arrived in Cairo with the $200.00 I had somehow managed to save and the scribbled address of a decaying hotel off Tahrir Square in my pocket. I didn’t know a soul in the entire country. I had quit my job in Los Angeles, and felt like a new chapter was beginning in my life.

I knew that I needed to make this pilgrimage, because I was absolutely obsessed with belly dancing. I wasn’t entirely sure what I was going to do once I got there, or how I would find what I was looking for, but that didn’t matter, I knew in my heart that things would somehow come together… and the moment I stepped off that plane, I wept. During that trip, crazy as it may sound, I seriously started to wonder about past lives and psychic connections. No matter where I’d been in the world… and I’ve traveled extensively, I’d never had the reaction I did when stepping onto Egyptian soil for the first time. I was crying with joy and overwhelmed with a feeling of coming home. I still feel those emotions every time I go there.

Yes, I am every bit as excited (as I always am ) to go back to this incredible country, but even more so this year! I can’t wait to experience the “new” Egypt.

And now I need to get back to my packing, but rest assured… there will be many, many stories to tell.

Call me "Grandma"!

I am back from my mini-tour of the UK and the shows and workshops in Scotland and England were nothing short of wonderful…but more on the trip later, because the BIG news is…I AM A “GRANDMOTHER”!

Three days before I returned to the US, my kitty Sphinxie had babies- I was actually on the phone trans-Atlantic with my boyfriend Dirty when she went into labor.

In Los Angeles, it was the afternoon, but in the UK, of course , it was nine hours later. I was with my sponsor Charlotte Desorgher of Hipsinc. We were preparing to go to bed, after a full day of workshops, travel and a gourmet meal (with plenty of wine!) cooked by Charlotte’s doll of a husband Paul.

I was in a total panic, and a flurry of intense phone calls ensued- my boyfriend called me after each kitten was born, and I was frantically calling in between each birth to make sure all was well. Both Mama and kittens are all fine and doing great!

Funny, I was trying to “will” Sphinxie to have three kittens… and when I was in London, my Bulgarian friend Irina read my cards on my birthday. She read regular playing cards ( not Tarot) the way her grandmother had taught her as a child. The reading was spookily accurate, and when Irina asked if there was anything else I wanted to know, I asked how many kittens Sphinxie would have. Irina shuffled the cards, then made me pick one. It was the Three Of Spades!

Sphinxie indeed had three babies- each a tabby tiger, and in every tabby-pattern imaginable! She had the litter right on my bed, on a leopard fleece blanket, too, so it’s a symphony of animal-print, almost an optical illusion with all the stripes and spots and dots!

One baby is swirly like Sphinxie, with big whorls on the side of the belly; one has mackerel-tabby stripes, but each stripe is dotted, like a Bengal; and one has stripes on the sides and legs, and a big tabby Kiss/gene Simmons star pattern over the eyes!

They are now four days old, fat, healthy and growing by the minute!

I’m soooo happy!

Spring has sprung here in LA. Though it’s still a bit cool, in my yard there are already honeysuckles and roses blooming, and our avocado and orange trees are already bearing fruit.

A new addition to my private Eden is Sphinxie, a beautiful, noble-looking feral kitty who has become semi-domesticated. She’s a teenager kitty who now sleeps in my house, and is very affectionate but still half-wild. She's capricious;sometimes she will be all lovey-dovey, other times she skitters away spooked. Sphinxie is long and skinny, Abyssinian-red with vibrant tabby swirls in a symmetrical pattern on each side, a ringed tail, a white ruff and white paws. She has a tiny, regal head, and used to be long and soooo skinny…but now she is pregnant! Every time I tried to get her crated up to take to the vet to get fixed, she had such a violent fit, it was impossible, so she is “with children”…and very close to her delivery date, from the looks of things. I am trying to psychically regulate her litter to be three kittens, but she’s massively pregnant.

I am about to go on a two-week tour of the UK, teaching and performing, and I am just hoping she can hold off on her special delivery until I get back. The last time I took in a stray kitty, she already had three kittens with her- but the time before that, I welcomed one into the house and she had SEVEN babies right in my belly dance costumes! I thought to myself, “Now here’s a cat who KNOWS me!”…and I still have one of her babies, he’s fifteen now. I also hope Sphinxie will choose my house over the yard, or, like, under a neighbor’s house or something. My boyfriend is a typical man in that I know he will be overwhelmed with nervousness if she gives birth before I return. Actually, I don’t blame him: not only is our yard full of creatures, I’m sure they’re all about to give birth as well!

In most major cities, wildlife is something to be seen in a zoo- unless you’re counting pigeons, rats, cockroaches. But in LA, the wealth of stubbornly wild flora and fauna is proof that that nature exists and prevails even in the most urban areas. In the densely populated Hollywood Hills, there are deer sightings, not to mention the mountain lion prowling through Griffith Park. Once I saw a hawk soaring with a snake held in its talons. And the flocks of feral parrots in Silver Lake? They’re not an urban legend- I’ve seen them twice, staring in disbelief at the riot of color in the sky. A neighbor once had a peaceful encounter with a bobcat. The abundance of creatures living among us gives new meaning to the term “urban jungle”. Sometimes we dismiss our urban animals as vermin ridden, disease-carrying pests who destroy gardens and knock over garbage cans. And it’s true; a good number of the “Lost Pet” flyers dotting the Los Angeles canyons can be attributed to coyotes coming down from the hills (often in packs) to prey on our domestic animals. Even though I’m a cat owner and highly aware of the coyotes’ predatory nature, it’s still thrilling to see them once in a while. Think about it: it’s actually us- not them- who are the intruders. They wouldn’t be scarfing our pets if we hadn’t displaced them from their habitat. For every person who disdains wildlife as a nuisance, there’s another who loves these citified communes with nature. I am one of them.

My boyfriend and I live in a Hollywood Hills canyon, mere blocks from Hollywood Boulevard in a Craftsman bungalow built in 1917, with a spectacularly over-grown courtyard. Our three cats Sphinxie, Tab, and Nini love their domain, sharing it with other stray and domestic cats from the ‘hood (including the feral black tomcat we call "The Bum" who I think is Sphinxie’s baby-daddy), two loveable rescue pit bulls Hambone and Petunia, a beagle named Harley and a rescue boxer/pit mix called Monster… as well as lizards, a family of insanely tame squirrels who eat right out of our hands, and three socialized (and HUGE) raccoons- Huey, Dewey and Norman, who will actually come up and bang on our door to get food. There are also opossums, squirrels, a family of skunks and many species of birds. “Our” skunks are so used to humans that they amble by casually while we’re sitting outside, and don’t even bother to raise their tails up in a warning display.

My neighbors and I are tickled that these critters all live here and use the yard as a nursery. We wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s an endlessly fascinating diversion to the stress of every day life. Opossums may not be endearing, but a mother with four fuzzy babies riding marsupial-style on her back observed from just a few feet away is.
A couple of years ago, a humming bird made a nest outside my door. The size of a shot-glass, it was marvelously constructed, but the branch housing it hung dangerously low directly in the middle of a well-traveled concrete path leading from the street to my house and the units in the back house.

Once we discovered the two light blue jelly-bean-sized eggs, our protective instincts kicked in. The landlord cringed at the makeshift barrier we constructed to protect the nest- a tower of dilapidated lawn chairs from Target topped by an upside down trashcan. Situated under the nest, it kept the cats at bay and ensured that no one walking by would bump into it. A sign was posted in pidgin Spanish for our gardeners: MAS PRECAUCION POR FAVOR- ARRIBA ES LA CASA DE LA CHUPAROSA…CON HUEVOS!!!

The dutiful mother hummingbird nested around the clock and it was all so tiny and perfect, it didn’t look real - more a fantasy scene in a sugar Easter Egg or like a decoration from China bought at a 99 Cent Store to hang from your rearview mirror. Mama didn’t budge when the wind tossed her nest around… when the nearby 1920’s era garage was torn down, or when everyone started photographing her with their cell-phones!

All the neighbors in the courtyard was jubilant when the eggs hatched…and like the neurotic grandparents we’d all become, we fretted over the fuzzy gray babies, small as insects. Days went by and the fledglings grew, down becoming feathers, their beaks lengthening. They were so fat and healthy they barely fit in the nest! After days of devotion, Mom vanished; we were beside ourselves with worry, fearing abandonment. My boyfriend wanted to feed the tiny infants himself. Desperate, I cruised the Project Wildlife website for info, finding out everything was going on schedule- the babies no longer needed Mom to regulate their body temperatures, and she was out meticulously gathering fruit flies to feed to them. We all heaved a collective sigh of relief. The gardener even said in broken English, "The babies...soon, they will go!"

Everyone watched in delight as the fledglings took their first tentative, Disney cartoon-like attempts at flight. After an hour, they’d gotten the hang of it. Then, they were gone. They didn’t return to the nest that day, or the next morning.
I phoned my boyfriend to tell him the great news- our babies had grown up, healthy against all odds, mission accomplished! There was silence on the other end of the line.
Finally, his voice breaking, he choked,

“They’re gone? That is… so… fucked up!”

I explained that nature took its course, and we should be happy.

“I know,” he said, “ It’s wonderful. But I’m still sad.”

As I dismantled the tower of lawn chairs and trashcans, I felt my own pangs of empty nest syndrome.

Kids, I thought, shaking my head, they grow up so fast!