At almost 70 years of age, Ruth Kanaris can wiggle like a 20-year-old.
She can shimmy.
She can flirt.
She can shake her booty.
As the instructor for the Parks and Rec Senior Belly Dancing class, Kanaris teaches women her age how to feel feminine again.
Even a little sexy.
Walking into the community center at Pioneer Park, Kanaris is bundled up to her neck. Her head is covered with a wooly stocking hat and her long puffy coat covers most of her body.
Her gait is stuttered.
One leg appears a little stiff and she hobbles a bit as she gets set up in a large room with floor length mirrors and ballet bars on the side.
Across the hall, women dig through costumes, finding translucent veils and dangly belts that make a pleasant "ting, ting" sound when they walk.
Kanaris calls them in the room to get started.
At the front of the room she sits and takes off her shoes. That's how she learned to dance. She instructs the other women to keep their shoes on.
The floor is cold and they don't want any falls today.
The only requirement for this class is that you are 55 or older.
Kanaris switches on the CD player and introduces a quick-paced piece.
"Makes you feel like dancing doesn't it?" she asks.
It does.
She begins to move with the music, arms forming animated "S" curves with fluid, sensuous movements. Seamlessly they snake up and down, as if she were suspended in water.
"(Belly dancing) allows me to be who I'm not," she says.
"It allows me to flirt, and be sexy and seductive and very feminine, which I'm not."
Instantly, she sheds the years that classify her as a senior and becomes graceful. She smiles as she dances and her eyes develop a sort of untamed look.
Her pupils follow her lead with a tendency toward awkward more than fluid. This is only their second class. Their movements are jolting and angular.
Sometimes they get stuck in their veils.
But they look like they're having fun.
Watch in the mirror," Kanaris instructs.
"Bend your knees."
Kanaris started dancing about 30 years ago.
Her first teaching job was at F.
E. Warren Air Force Base. Since there were no rooms with long mirrors, she held her first classes in the lounge area of a women's restroom.
That's one of the most important things in belly dancing, she instructs: the mirrors.
Ten years later, she found herself dancing through the flood of 1985 in a building off of Nationway.
Wonderful mirrors, she recalls.
Just beautiful.
During a class, a storm moved in, dumping rain and hail. As the water rose outside the building, the dancers ripped the plastic covers off ballet costumes, stuffing them in the cracks of windows and doors.
After that, there was nowhere to go. They watched a car float away, and then a cement trash bin. They couldn't leave the building and no one could get in.
So Kanaris restarted her music and kept dancing. Every so often, someone would run out to the glass door and mark the water level in red lipstick.
Kanaris says she never really danced until she took up belly dancing.
Her husband, an excellent dancer, could jitterbug and swing. She could not.
"I was such a klutz on the floor," she says.
She says anyone can belly dance.
Many of the women in her class say they signed up because it was good exercise.
Bea Montross says after the first week every part of her body ached.
"I'm doing it for the exercise and I think it's wonderful. I go home totally exhausted, but a very happy exhaustion," she says.
Many of the women in the class say they still feel awkward doing the fluid movements.
"I feel silly, but I'm having a great time," Montross says.
Dorothy Feldman, who says she is "past 80," joined the class to regain some flexibility.
"I'm getting stiff, I'm losing my balance.
I wanted to do something that would help my balance, my flexibility and be fun and I thought this would do it."
Near the end of the class Kanaris pops in a CD of "Lawrence of Arabia" and leads them in a full dance.
While Middle Eastern music is the most popular for belly dancers, she says you can use about any kind of music.
She breaks it down into moves. The fast portions are for standing work: arm moves, hip moves. The slow portions are for floor work: backbends work with veils.
Drum rolls or breaks in the lyrics are reserved for the shimmy.
She sings Pink Floyd's, "Another Brick in the Wall":
"We don't need no education," and then a shimmy.
"We don't need no thought control.
"
"Shimmy!
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