Counting down to Turca Groove

Well, tomorrow night I have my first public bellydance performance in close to a year. My friend Diana and I are performing at a la Turca restaurant for their monthly Turca Groove.

We have three sets planned, each with a duet and two solos. We are going to dance the choreography we learned at the Aziza workshop in November, a karsilama (9/8) we created ourselves to the Turkish standard Rompi Rompi, and a "zill solo" we just finished last week! That one will have no muscial accompaniament....just us on finger cymbals. Which means, of course....no room for error. Diana has showed it (on paper) to to her and Michael's drum teacher, Joe Zeytoonian, and he said he thought it looked good, so hopefully it will be received well. For my solos, I am going to dance to the Hossam Ramzy drum solo I used to use for my gig at the Sawadee (Naima's hip from Sabla Tolo), the first track from Light Rain's Valentine to Eden, and Inanna by the tea party. That last will be my first tribal style dance...I choreographed most of it, but parts of it, and all of the others, will be improvised.

Naturally, things were going pretty smoothly until our rehearsal last night, in which I rediscovered mistakes I thought I had fixed weeks ago, thought up a bunch of new mistakes to add in, and totally lost control of my veil. Argh! Better now than Tuesday I guess.

As for the rest of life....

Michael has been selected for interview at the Petroleum Institute in the United Arab Emirates. He's been posting about it regularly on his blog, so I won't recap too many of the details here, but he has been told informally he's a strong candidate for the position and I think there's a good chance he will get it. Moving there would be quite an experience...sometimes I'm more excited, and sometimes I'm more scared, but either way it would be too interesting an opportunity to pass up. We have been reading up on the area as much as we can, but there is not a lot of UAE-specific info out there as far as travel and etiquette guides go...most focus on places like Saudi Arabia. The UAE is more liberal than a lot of the Middle East...but of course "more liberal" would be a relative term and we're not really sure what to expect. Michael will find out more when he goes, I guess (they're not flying me out with him).

We had a pretty good Christmas and New Years all things considered...about as good as a Christmas in Florida can be. Hung out at home, read our new books, listened to our new CDs, and ate good food mostly.

And that's the highlights of the past couple weeks :)