Dancing for the Mafia

David Sedaris meets Maggie O’Farrell in a lyrical and humorous memoir about becoming a belly dancer for Saudi royalty and the Mafia, a journey from coping with a sociopathic mother to accidentally changing hundreds of lives by teaching people to dance, via psychiatric wards, 1930s Vienna, naked lawn-rolling and a ton of sequins.

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So how does a nice, shy girl from a suburban family end up becoming a belly dancer for Saudi royalty and the Mafia? What childhood weirdness and family dysfunction could produce such an aberration?

This memoir describes how being brought up by a mother who was an alcoholic narcissist can skew a life and send it off in bizarre directions, and how in order to survive the paranoia, anxiety and lack of boundaries, it is possible to create your own sense of normal by dancing.

‘I need to explain to someone in an Italian dance class not to pause with their elbows stuck out. “You look like a pollo congelato – a frozen chicken!” I have spent nights in casinos with diamond dealers, and have danced on the streets of Cairo, but I still have to teach the frozen chicken class. My reputation is at stake here.’

From Tel Aviv, dancing for the Mafia, the book travels back to 1960s suburbia, showing the unpredictability that made childhood a surprisingly wild, wacky and dangerous place, and from there to 1930s Vienna, where my mother was primed to become erratic, charismatic and a total nightmare to live with.

Escaping home as a teenager and young adult in 1970s London I got stoned, flashed at and spiked, until dancing finally saved my sanity. I ended up running dance therapy sessions in psychiatric hospitals, teaching four year olds and eighty four year olds, running huge dance events and intimate dance holidays, and performing in wildly varied and sometimes distinctly dodgy settings.

Occasionally my costume fell off or I tripped over a cable, and oh yes, I did get a diagnosis of a disability which would eventually stop me dancing altogether, but life has been a gas, and I’m not finished yet. Let’s boogy!