![]() I was there! Through a selection of our performances in that era, we’ll explore dance and costuming as becoming the object of your own fantasy. This article will focus on the iconic 1970s “ Perfumes of Araby” Belly dance troupe, lead by the almost mythical performer/actress/teacher, Diane Webber, who was also my teacher. I’ve tried to be precise: please forgive me where I’m hazy! It was the ‘70s after all! Please enjoy the links provided at the end of this article for more exciting information to further encourage and stimulate your own creativity as you, dear reader, move our dance form ever further. ![]() Now, as I reach back in my memory of these exciting times to compose this article, I’m grateful for the researched archiving amassed and available in today’s technological world. The sociological change of American society in the 1970s also informed our dance community. We always performed to live music recorded music was rare at dance events. Knowledge had to be directly and carefully mined from academic, ethnic and cultural sources. ![]() The abundance of inspiration in that era was almost beyond understanding yet once upon a time before the Internet, music, imagery and information was less readily available. The Belly dance scene in 1970s Los Angeles: It is difficult to spotlight succinctly even one portion of a vibrant, vast and quickly growing community of Middle Eastern dancers, their enthusiasts, and the ethnic communities, musicians, festivals and supper clubs that supported the dance arts. “I live by a man’s code designed to fit a man’s world, yet at the same time, I always remember that a women’s first job is to choose the right shade of lipstick.”Ĭarol Lombard quote from “Women’s Wit and Wisdom” His daughter sure is."Perfumes of Araby" in the 1970s, Part 1 by Stasha Vlasuk He’d be appalled at this racist name-calling. My dad didn’t have an easy life, but he never responded to his travails with hate or prejudice. He was born dirt poor in Appalachia, and he died well ahead of the life-expectancy charts’ predictions - and ahead of this latest trend of online hate - at age 61, in 1994. He often called himself “poor white trash” (but it probably would have been a bad idea for anybody to sling that back at the career Special Forces soldier). My father, William Webber, was also of English-Irish stock. The Jewish immigrant and the working-class English-Irish-Scotsman would raise four kids in East New York, Brooklyn. Gertrude Wisenfeld met Jack Thrush (whose ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War) at an infirmary during the 1918 Spanish Influenza. Ironically, the story that got the American Nazis up in arms is about another side of our kids’ heritage. ![]() She survived because she immigrated here as a teenager before the war. Glenn is named after his grandmother, Gertrude Wiesenfeld Thrush, who lost her parents and siblings in the Holocaust. That history is not remote to our family. Second, there is so much to know: Hebrew language, midrash, Mel Brooks movies, and the long, sad history of persecution. First, with six million people wiped out two generations ago, Jewish identity shouldn’t be thrown away. I wanted my kids to have a Jewish education for two reasons. opinion My Trump Tweets Earned Me So Many Anti-Semitic Haters That I Bought a Gun.
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