I've been dancing for a long time--longer than many of you have been on this planet. My first memory about dance was when I was barely four years old. My grandfather and grandmother (Papa and Mama, I called them) would take me up to country-dances in Iowa, where I was born. Papa would let me stand on his feet while I held his hands, and we would dance and dance. I loved it and I felt so grown-up and beautiful. I thought people wouldn't notice I was standing on Papa's feet. I imagined they thought "What a good dancer that girl is!"

My mother and father and I moved to Missouri the winter before I was five. But as I grew older, I spent many summers in Iowa visiting Mama and Papa. They always took me to dances on Saturday night where (on my own two feet) I learned to do the two-step, waltz, polka, schottische (a round dance), and square dance.

When I was a teen-ager in St. Louis, I learned to jitterbug, which people on the East Coast called "the Lindy" and now is known as swing-dance.

From there I danced through college at SMS, going to sock hops, any other kind of school dances and a really trashy little bar on Olive Street which has a live band-well, more of a combo really with a couple or three guys and a very raunchy girl singer.

Then I got married, had four children, got divorced, married, got permanently separated (divorced later)--and didn't dance at all. But after my second marriage got on the skids, I discovered a dance that put me on a track I've never regretted. You guessed it--Middle Eastern dance or Danse Orientale, as we liked to call it.

To me, this dance has been a joy, a thrill, and a never-ending source of self-discovery. When I began teaching, only 10 years or so ago, my primary goal was to help other women learn to love and accept themselves for the beautiful human beings they are--and I have tried never to lose sight of that goal. In our dance form today there is so much emphasis on perfecting technique and using set choreography that I fear for the lovely spontaneous spirit of the Middle Eastern dance. Don't get me wrong--I believe in and try to teach the proper technical aspects of not only steps and combinations, transitions and posture, but also how to put together your own choreography and also how to put together your own choreography and present it to an audience. But none of this will fulfill a dancer's dream if she is not able to reach inside herself and find the way to be the real person she is. So you dance first for yourself--then if you choose to dance before and audience, you can give the greatest gift of all to that audience. Give them yourself as you truly are--joyous, beautiful, proud to be a women and not afraid to show it.

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