Tales from the Caravan...
Show: Alche-mámi's Birthday Bash, July 30th, 2005
Fun, fun, FUN!!! I had such a great time celebrating
Alche-mami's birthday with her in her beautiful home!
She fairly glowed with the role of hostess, and was
obviously enjoying entertaining her friends for the
night. I was more than glad to dance for her as she
and Alche-papi are at every one of our local
performances to support us. Every single one. I swear,
they never miss a show and have taken the role of
parents on for all of us as they are the only Alchemy
parents who are local. Dancing at this party was a
given. :)
We arrived in street clothes as the bellydancing was a
surprise for the guests. There were so many friendly
people there, many of whom I've met before at our
quinceañera gigs. After enjoying the party, and the
foood.... oh, the fooooood, for about an hour or so,
we snuck upstairs to get ready. We wore the same
outfits we debuted in Athens for the Run, Faye, Run
set, so gettign ready was pretty easy as we already
knew exactly what we were wearing. Alche-mami even
gave us wonderful bunches of black and silver feathers
to accessorize our costumes with. Thank you! :)
We came downstairs with a rousing zaghareet to get
everyone's attention. It was quite a spectacle! As we
got in place to start the show, we realized... uh-oh,
the iPod isn't working.... What's going on? Come to
find out, we had brought the wrong adapter! Argh and
LOL! :D Thank the gods we are a Tribal group and can
dance to anything on the spur of the moment! We did
have Run, Faye, Run on CD so we got to dance that and
the rest of the night was spent improving to various
songs on CD and our live drummers. Chris was there, of
course, and along with Mari and Alche-papi, kept the
beats coming. We got Alche-mami to dance in her
brand-spanking new coin scarf and she looked GREAT!
With our drummers and zills, we managed to put on a
great performance even after the iPod snafu. :)
Alche-papi had such a great time drumming the Mari and
Alche-mami have decided to get him a drum for his
birthday! Yay! More drummers!
What fun! Check out the gallery for some pics of the
festivities. Happy birthday, Alche-mami!
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This birthday bash was a learning experience and then some for me. It was
set to be our first dance gig where we would use my Ipod and Boss for music
rather than a clunky stereo and tons of CDs. We were set to perform
choreography to Amaya and Run Faye Run and Improve to our I Dream of Jeannie
remix and a Hossam Ramzy number. Well, my Ipod player ended up having the
wrong attachment on it as my sweetie had switched it out to use with his
(different sized) Ipod earlier in the week. Doh! We ended up using the CDs
we had and improving to the sounds of The Sultan and Alche-pápi drumming.
Later on we added zills. I alternated drumming and zill playing. We got the
audience involved and had them up there dancing. We got Alche-mámi with her
birthday gift (a new hip scarf) to dance Improv with Jeannie and even got
one of the men to shake his bon-bon. So, lesson learned, I will from now on
carry to every gig back up CDs AND a stereo, and zills and drums. So, THIS
is why dancers need to learn to play rhythms. . . :D
~Mari
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Alchemy: Transforming the ordinary into the sublime
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