Northern Oasis

A few weekends ago, there was a party.  It was the kind of party that I'm used to, which means playing music, bellydancing, eating home-made foole m'damas, and talking about dance belts.  Hells yeah, dawg.  We can throw down some ATS action.

I love going to parties that are mostly one specific social group or purpose, where there are occasionally a few hapless boyfriends and/or husbands and/or unsuspecting roommates lurking in the kitchen by the mulled wine, hoping desperately for someone who knows anything about football to show up.  At work parties with J, it was usually my turn to be the hapless one, as everyone around me plunged into discussions of "packets" and "Linux" and "The Cremation of Sam McGee" (don't ask), while I nodded, smiled, and ate my way through trays of hors d'oeuvres.  (This actually, apropos of nothing, reminds me of a gig that Bernie and I did once; it was a wedding, but they had a CANDY TABLE which they let us raid before we left, which was probably the most epic wedding I have ever danced at for that exact reason)

So this party had the added bonus to being not just an awesome bellydance party with some truly killer live music, but my actual family was there.  This is great.  My family is not exactly like other families in the sense that I was not born with most of them.  My mom was there, yes.

But it's always awesome for me to have big groups of people I love very much all in one place.  And people I've known for fifteen years.  And people I've known for only a few years but think are awesome.  Relationships are neat.  And so are bellydance parties.