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The Melting Pot. All over the country, belly clubs have never been bigger, especially in Detroit, Boston and Chicago, and even in small towns; one of the best dancers, a Turkish girl named Semra, works at a roadhouse outside Bristol, Conn. The girls are kept booked and moving by several agents, notably voluble, black-bearded Murat Somay, a Manhattan Turk who is the Sol Hurok of the central abdomen. He can offer nine Turkish girls, plans to import at least 15 more. But a great many of the dancers are more or less native. Sometimes they get their initial experience in church haflis, conducted by Lebanese and Syrians in the U.S., where they dance with just as few veils across their bodies as in nightclubs.
As the girls come to belly dancing from this and other origins, the melting pot has never bubbled more intriguingly. Some Manhattan examples:
¶ Jemela (surname: Gerby), 23, seems Hong Kong Oriental but has a Spanish father and an Indian mother, was born in America and educated at Holy Cross Academy and Textile High School, says she learned belly dancing at family picnics.
¶ Serené (Mrs. Wilson), 23, was born in Budapest and raised in Manhattan. Daughter of a gypsy mother who taught her to dance, she is one of the few really beautiful girls in the New York casbah, with dark eyes and dark, waist-length hair, the face of an adolescent patrician and a lithe, glimmering body. Many belly dancers are married, but Serene is one of the few who will admit it.
¶ Marlene (surname: Adamo), 25, a Brazilian divorcee who learned the dance from Arabic friends in Paris, now lives on Manhattan's West Side, is about the best belly dancer working the casbah, loves it so much that she dances on her day off. She has the small, highly developed body of a prime athlete, and holds in contempt the "girls who just move sex."
¶ Leila (Malia Phillips), 25, is a Greenwich Village painter of Persianesque miniatures who has red hair that cascades almost to her ankles. A graduate of Hollywood High School, she likes to imagine herself, as she takes the floor, "a village girl coming in to a festival."
¶ Gloria (surname: Ziraldo), circa 30, who was born in Italy and once did "chorus work" in Toronto, has been around longer than most of the others, wistfully remembers the old days when "we used to get the seamen from the ships, you know, with big turtleneck sweaters and handkerchiefs and all. But the ships are very slow now, and we don't get so many sailors any more." The uptown crowd has moved in, and what girl worth her seventh veil would trade a turtleneck sweater for a button-down collar?