One ancient Roman poet described it as “lascivious loins in practiced writhings,” but we call the age-old art form “belly dancing.”
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Like the visitors to the world’s fair, Cargill was bewitched the first time she saw a belly dancer 30 years ago. “It was in a Greek nightclub on Rush Street,” she says. “The movement was beyond anything I had seen before, so fluid and so essentially feminine and mysterious. There was no way in my body I could imitate that movement.” Cargill began combing Greek night spots searching for a teacher, but the dancers either didn’t speak English or refused. “They thought it was a closely guarded secret and didn’t want to pass it on. They didn’t want the competition,” she says.
Cargill finally found her teacher five years later in a YMCA. She attended classes several times a week and within a year hit the stage at the Athenian Fireside in Elmhurst, where she performed with a live band. But the Greek music frustrated her, because she found it was either too fast or too slow. Another teacher turned her on to Arabic music, and Cargill started dancing in Arabian clubs, doing two or three shows three or four nights a week. “I quit my job as a medical technician and never went back,” she says.
