In a club like this, the dancer comes on at ten or eleven and the singer performs at one in the morning. I’d been up exploring all day, but I was wide awake, dressed to the nines in a gorgeous black sequined dress, down front and center when Amr Diab made his entrance. He took a look at me, brought me up onstage, and asked me to dance. I hesitated because I felt a little overdressed, but the happy crowd cheered me on. My mother always wore a beaded scarf to add a little bling to her outfit. Or so I thought back then. To this day, she actually wears it in hopes that I’ll get up and dance. When I do, she quickly grabs the scarf and places it on my hips. She always has my back, my mama. She could give stage mother lessons to the best of them.
I went up, wearing Mama’s scarf over my sequined birthday dress. Just dancing for myself. Because it was my birthday. I was so happy and grateful to be celebrating in this amazing place. I started dancing at the side of the stage, small at first, but then I did my Wonder Woman turn and gave myself to the music and the moment and the wild response from the audience. I felt myself light up and realized, Okay, it’s on. I’m performing. I didn’t know or care who was watching.
Afterward, I was sitting with my parents, already overdosing on dream-come-true, when the ma?tre d’ approached us and said the general manager of the Heliopolis Sheraton would like me to come in and audition to dance in their spectacular Nubian Tent restaurant.
“Oh. I’m—I’m just here for costumes,” I said. “I wasn’t—”
“What time would you like her to be there?” Mama asked.
The next day was a mad scramble for an Egyptian agent and a borrowed costume. Madame Abla provided the latter, one with fishnet that covered my midsection, which is required by law in Egypt. (I know, right? Crazy.) We arrived just in time at the spectacular hotel northeast of Cairo. The lobby was a towering hall where bright-colored birds screeched from live palm trees and flew freely overhead. The audition went well, and it was agreed that I should come back in June. We picked up my costumes, said good-bye to Madame Abla, and flew home to Germany.
My heart was pounding with the possibilities.
If the hotel offered me a contract, within eighteen months, I could graduate high school, get the necessary work visa, and be back in Cairo to dance alongside some of the most honored artists in the business. For the rest of my career, I’d be able to name my price anywhere in the world. For the rest of my life, I’d be able to teach as a master belly dancer, because working in Cairo at this level—that’s it. You’ve reached the top.
Back home, on a roll, I celebrated by triumphantly scoring my driver’s license. I don’t remember doing a traditional sort of driver’s ed at all. I just got the license. My dad was head of transportation back then. I didn’t ask questions. For the rest of my junior year, by night I danced, and by day I hurried to class, passing a large portrait of Priscilla Presley in the school’s hallway. I remember thinking how cool it was that she had been going to this very same high school when she met Elvis, not even suspecting that my life was about to change in much the same way hers had.
People have tried to tell me, “You lost your childhood to dancing,” but I don’t see it that way at all. If anything, belly dancing allowed me to hang on to my innocence a little longer than most of the girls I knew. When I was sixteen, I was a virgin who’d never tasted alcohol—that’s about as common as a unicorn among present-day sixteen-year-olds. If I can give my daughter one thing, I want to give her what I got from belly dancing: a sense of myself as precious. I respected and reserved myself—for myself, not for a man—and the side effect of that was a beautiful romance with a husband who was my first, and in that moment, my everything.