She says it took her a long time to realize that the perfect woman portrayed on television and in advertising doesn’t exist. “At first I thought I was too old, and I thought belly dancing was for beautiful, 20-year-old bodies,” she says. “I had to go through a lot of stuff about how I look and who I am.”
	Click here for a 1 Mb movie of Theora practicing For years Theora dieted compulsively, trying to force her body to conform to the ideal. She went on extreme diets of 500 calories a day and watched her weight closely. “I was totally depressed all day if I gained a pound, ecstatic if I lost one,” she recalls. “No matter how thin I was, I thought I was fat. And I told myself I wouldn’t be attractive unless I was skinny.” She says she came to love belly dancing because it taught her to accept the varying sizes of regular women, and it has become a means for her to leave the “size police” behind.
	Theora calls the public performances revolutionary. The audiences are made up of families, old and young people, women and men. They come not to ogle but to join in the celebration. “People are watching women move their bodies in ways that require skill, strength and intelligence. It’s okay to be sexual,” she says.
	At a recent indoor performance, Theora wears one of the many costumes she has designed herself. It is a three-tiered lavender silk skirt that flows to her ankles. A shirt of the same fabric barely covers her breasts, leaving her stomach exposed. Wrapped around her body like a toga is her veil. It looks like a magic carpet; flowers surround a light blue center, and it is shot through with metallic thread. With it, she can fly. During her solo dance she moves with her eyes closed as if dreaming. Her arms are straight at her side; her wrists make delicate circles. A satisfied smile spreads across her face as she sways with the music, back and forth, from right to left, her movements punctuating each drumbeat. She does not hide her body here, not from herself, not from anyone.
	Twenty-seven-year-old Heidi has been belly dancing with Troupe Nubia for a year, and she knows not everyone understands why she does it. She says she has seen the surprised reactions on the faces of her co-workers, both men and women, when she tells them. Some of them seem to think it is degrading for a woman to flaunt her body. She doesn’t care. Since she took her first belly dancing class and later joined Troupe Nubia, she simply feels better about herself: more fit, more powerful, more beautiful. Belly dancing has taught her what her body is capable of. Every muscle in a woman’s body, muscles she didn’t know she had or could move, gets a workout.
	Click here for a 1 Mb movie of Heidi practicing Heidi is a striking woman, with long dark hair, dark almond eyes and a body toned from years of working out at a gym. Still, like many women, she wasn’t always confident about her looks. Sometimes she thought of herself as beautiful, other times she thought of herself as disgusting. She says belly dancing has increased her self esteem, which had plummeted after she left behind friends and a career in California to move with her husband to Oregon. While he pursued a master’s degree, she was unable to find a job in her field of environmental science. She says she spent a lot of time feeling generally disenchanted with her life and not happy with herself.