Jen's Column / Belly Dancing

Friday night started out as a typical girls' night out. At about 7 o'clock, some girlfriends and I got together at my friend Jamie's and spent the next hour standing around her kitchen eating calorie-laden food, drinking wine and talking.

We could've happily maintained this position for the next five or six hours. But we didn't. We had to get down to Jamie's basement to shake our groove thangs — with a belly-dancing lesson.

Our instructor was Laura Ehling. Ehling is a stay-at-home mom who just happens to be a belly dancer on the side. She teaches lessons, like the one at Jamie's, for $70 a session.

Promptly at 8 o'clock, we shuffled downstairs and Ehling got straight to business.

"You'll all wear hip scarves," she said, pulling sequined and bead-adorned scarves from a box. "Do you want one that makes a lot of noise or a little noise?"

"A lot of noise!" I answered enthusiastically. If I was going to jiggle, I wanted to jangle, too.

With our hips appropriately adorned, Ehling threw in a CD called — I kid you not — "Turkeylicious" and gave us a backgrounder on belly dancing. I guess I'd always assumed that belly dancing was created for men — as a form of flirtation or seduction. I mean, aside from "I Dream of Jeannie," you don't really see a lot of women hanging out with their friends in belly-dancing garb.

But I was wrong. Belly dancing, Ehling said, is a 5,000- to 6,000-year-old dance traditionally performed by women for women. "Men didn't even see belly dancing for thousands of years," she said. "Women danced for each other. It was a way to celebrate their bodies — to feel beautiful while strengthening those child-bearing muscles."

You understand, don't you, that "celebrating your body" can be a tough concept for a group of women who've not only had babies, but who have also nursed those babies? (Heck, one of my friends nursed her baby during our lesson.) Frankly, "focus on my bare, wiggling stomach" isn't something we're likely to say.

But Ehling put us at ease by stripping off her shirt to reveal a choli — a revealing belly-dancing top — underneath. ("When I started belly dancing, it was for exercise," Ehling told us. "I didn't know I'd eventually be the owner of several sparkly bras!")

She put her hand on her stomach and said with a smile, "It's been a long winter and I like dessert. This body has had three babies. But that's the great thing about belly dancing. You need curves. You need some flesh. You shouldn't be ashamed of that — you should appreciate it."

"Well then," our collective sighs seemed to say. "This is the dance for me."

To the sounds of several Turkeylicious tunes, Ehling taught us how to belly dance, showing us how to isolate the movements of our shoulders or our hips. "Stand straight," she'd call out. "Keep those legs together!" ("There's a name for people who do these dances with their legs open," Ehling said. "They're called strippers.")

There was a lot of laughing — and a few exclamations of, "I don't think my body can do that!" At the same time, it was a formidable workout that left me with a stitch in my side and with my neighbor Bethany saying, "Is it supposed to hurt?"

As we carpooled home, LaNae, Bethany, Lisa and I talked about the night. We threw around words like "empowering" and "inspiring" and "beautiful." We admitted we were struck by Ehling's self-confidence — and her belief that a body doesn't have to be perfect to be beautiful.

I thought I'd come home that night with a few choice moves to impress my husband. But instead I came home with a better body image. Not a bad deal.