picture this

Eight women in a wide variety of sizes and shapes [ and in my case wide is the operative word ] standing in the middle of an empty pub at 10 in the freezing cold and rainy morning arrayed in tiered skirts, harem pants, spangles, sequins, lots of dangly jewellery and veils. Yes, I know, not a pretty picture... what on earth would persuade an otherwise sane group of women to agree to potentially make total fools of themselves in front of god-knows-who?
My bellydance class is going to 'appear' if that's the right word, at open-mike night at one of the many fine drinking establishments here in castlemaine, next Friday night.
Well, it sounded like fun. Why don't we all go to The Five Flags and dance on a Friday night? Good practice for appearing in public, right? In the cold light of day, with the prospect of competing with the crowd in the front bar who refuse to turn off the juke box and a dance floor the size of a pocket handkerchief, we're wondering what the hell we've gotten ourselves into :]
Some are bringing their partners and/or kids, others are equally adamantly NOT.
Now y'see I didn't bother to think twice about it. I've been dancing since I was three ... a potentially drunken pub crowd of a couple of dozen can't be any worse than waiting to go on at a dance comp. in front of hundreds of people... can it?.... tell me we'll be fine ... please...
I have this mental picture of all the diehard boozers in the front bar hearing " bellydancers" and stampeding in with a lascivious glint in every eye, only to get one look at us and stampeding back out again in horror. Could be fun at that!
...and so there we were this morning. We wiggled, we jiggled, we gyrated, we twirled our veils for our audience of one [ the bloke cleaning up from last night who happens to be our teacher's hubby which is why we were able to get the keys to the pub ] and in the process we woke up the publican. She was very enthusuastic and started talking about lebanese theme nights with appropriate menu and us. Stay tuned folks. This could be bigger than Ben Hur.

Edited later to add: well it's been raining all day, cold [ 5 degrees is cold for almost-summer ] and windy but no-one is complaining because we need the rain so desperately. I waited all afternoon hoping for a break so I could walk the rubbish bins down to the road but decided about 4pm to just do it. Of course, it stopped raining five minutes later !!!
This is the latest in the year that I've had to light a fire but then I've only been up here 2 years. Still, all the old-hands are saying this isn't usual... and to think only a couple of weeks ago it was in the high 30s [ nearly 100 F ]