Rakkasah! Also I am trying my damnedest to make a movie but it's not going so well.

As you may know, one of my side projects is acting as the unofficial ameteur videographer for The Squirrel Girls, my dance teacher's ATS troupe. I follow them around to shows, videotaping them, giggling with them, and generally having a good time. It's really fun, and it helps keep me on my toes, since it's raised my status from Squirrel-In-Training to Acorn. Mama Squirrel (teacher) has been paying extra attention in class to my form: "Arms up, Miss A!" "Lift your chest more!" "Relax your hands!"

This weekend I followed the Squirrels to New Brunswick, NJ for the Rakkasah Spring Caravan. The event was pretty big as belly dance conventions go, with lots and lots of cabaret and tribal fusion. I arrived by NJ Transit on Saturday with The Grecian and the Ballerina, as well as one of the other Acorns, M. The former two had to immediately dress for performance, so Acorn M and I did what relative newcomers to any hobby would do and giddily wandered through the sea of vendors.

I got stars in my eyes as I tried on giant antique Kuchi necklaces and Banjara belts adorned with Turkoman buttons and shisha mirrors. I wanted to dive into the piles of coins and bells and cowrie shells like Scrooge McDuck. Hand-Batiked skirts! Carved bone hairsticks! Assuit veils! Kuchi Pendants! Hair flowers and head wraps!

I didn't spend too much money, since I saved a little for this, but I did get some choice gear at reasonable prices! I'll be decked and ready to go for my upcoming performance. I'll be leading some improv!

The docu-promo-video-thingy is coming along too. It's still an amorphous idea right now, but at least I'm collecting footage and ideas. I think I finally figured out how to get the audio to convert properly now too..I'll find out for sure in a little while when I have a chance to look at the files on my Mac. I've been working with some footage from one of those mini-dvd camcorders (don't buy one if you like editing) and the process of converting the weird compression files to a usable format has been wreaking havoc on my brain and eating up my valuable and rare free time. Luckily I really like solving puzzles and figuring out how to solve problems with computery magic! Hopefully this time the spell works... These conversions are taking forever; if I have to try one more codec I'm going to have a tantrum and throw my slow-ass Dell out the window.