It’s second nature to me now, but spinning with a sword on your head is a very different skill from the standard pirouette. When a ballerina spins, she “spots” by focusing on some fixed point—a crack in the mirror or the middle seat in the first row of a theater—something immobile that keeps her grounded as she turns. At the last moment, she whips her head around so she’s taking her eyes off that spot for only a split second. But you can’t do that with a sword balanced on the crown of your head. I learned to ground my balance within myself, my eyes fixed on the tip of the sword as the rest of the world turned around me.
When it was my turn to do my thing, the buzz amplified; Amir and George Abdo showed up to see me dance. The celebrities never came to the student performances. As I waited to go on, I felt the shiver of nervousness I always feel right before I go out onstage. To this day, I want to die just before I go on. I have to turn around and around like Wonder Woman, and somehow this turns me into a fearless, ferocious dancer. Then there’s no stopping me. So I turned, I transformed, and I danced. When all was said and done, George Abdo pronounced me the Eighth Wonder of the World and asked for our information so he could invite me to dance with the Flames of Araby in Boston. Mama was over the moon.
Dad always videotaped the student showcase at an event like this and sold copies to the ladies who’d performed. A group of dancers at the Atlanta event sent the video of their performance to a TV show called That’s Incredible!
“No thanks,” the producers responded. “But who’s that little girl?”
The ladies remembered that I was the daughter of the man who’d sold them the video, so the producers were able to track me down, and my parents recognized that it would be a huge opportunity for me.
Hosted by Cathy Lee Crosby, John Davidson, and Fran Tarkenton, That’s Incredible! was a popular show that ran during prime time on ABC for four years in the early 1980s and reran in syndication for eons after that. Designed (right down to the exclamation point) to capture the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! audience, That’s Incredible! featured all kinds of weirdly fabulous things: intriguing freaks of nature, astonishing feats of strength, amazing performance art, and heartwarming stories that involved fate, family, and bizarre coincidences. You might see a dog who traveled thousands of miles to find its family, a dentist who tattooed teeth, coffin portraits that appeared to blink, or a unicyclist jumping through rings of fire—even a tiny Tiger Woods tapping a flawless putt into a cup—and at the end of the segment, the studio audience would shout in unison, “That’s incredible!” Apparently, the producers felt that a little girl belly dancing with a sword on her head fit right in.
Mama made me a spectacular costume, and Daddy kept wanting to up my game.
“You’ve got to play zills,” he said, so I learned to play zills and incorporated them into my act. He’d seen one of the older belly dancers demonstrate the amazing dexterity of her abs by flipping a line of eight quarters on her stomach. Dad said, “Do you think you could do that?”
“Sure!” I’d never done it, but I did a Turkish drop to the floor, ready to give it a try. My stomach was only wide enough to line up three quarters, but after a couple of hours of fierce concentration interrupted by fits of giggling, I was able to turn each coin neatly from heads to tails and back again in time with the music. This gave Daddy the idea that I should flip the quarters while playing the zills and balancing the sword on my head. I was all over this, up for anything, and spent every waking moment rehearsing with a George Abdo record.
As we flew into LA, I took in the surrealistic sight of the Hollywood sign below, feeling like someone had polished it up just for me. Everyone at the studio was so kind and welcoming, and the set ran like an on-time train. Everything was in the right place at the right time, including me. I was introduced as “the mystical, magical Princess Mayte, the world’s youngest professional belly dancer,” and at the end, the audience yelled, “That’s incredible!”—which pretty much summed up how I felt. I could have flown home without the airplane.
The show aired several weeks later, and I experienced my first little taste of fame. This was a highly rated, prime-time network TV show, so just about everyone at school saw it. I went to the mall, and people did double takes. “Hey, are you that belly dancing girl on TV?” I got a lot of positive attention, and my classmates started to be nice to me—a welcome change from the racial slurs and bullying I’d lived with in elementary school. I started thinking, Hey, I could get used to this. The only downside was, because I’d been on television, some of the kids thought I was rich; they’d try to shake me down for my lunch money, so I had to start packing my lunch for school every day.