Thank you, everyone. I'm fine today now that I've slept, but good gracious, I was very close to physical violence last night. It would have been a low-brained response to a low-brained action, so I'm glad that I gathered myself and just left.
Tushantin, the thing about the dancing is that it's not professional show biz. It's a students/teachers sort of performance. Don't get me wrong, I like the headdresses! They're very pretty, and for artistic or stylistic reasons, I would certainly wear one (and I have considered one with my costume, at least before I realized my short hair was going to be a stumbling block). My resistance, however, is that I would be asked to wear the headdress (or wig) so that I would look more like the traditional bellydancer, as if I can't be a dancer with short hair. This is a gathering of students, teachers, soon-to-be-teachers, and the like. We're not professionals. They supposedly "encourage" creativity and individuality, but I suppose they have their own definitions of those words.
When I'm told to do/not to do something, I get really rebellious sometimes. I sensed way back in December that I might run into problems like these. There had been sort of a pressure on me to "cover my head," and that really brought out rebellion in me, because I interpreted it as being rooted in concepts of religious modesty. The baldness was "incorrect," and an obvious sign of something being wrong. My friends were fine with my bald head, and around them I didn't wear a hat. But out in public, I covered up my head. (Though, there was some practicality in that too, because it was so unimaginably cold walking around without hair!)
There have been very encouraging people, though. I was walking around at the mall one Saturday night, and I was wearing a thick hat. I'd only intended to be in there a few minutes, but I ended up wandering around for a while (I like to walk, heh), and wandered into a store. Finally, it was so hot I had to take off the hat for a little while. My scalp felt like it was crawling with fire ants. As luck would have it, I'd wandered into a sort of goth type store, and the cashiers were telling me how hot I looked, and how much they loved women with bald heads walking around proudly, telling society to go screw its concepts of normalcy. That was an awesome night, heh.
