One of my other loves in life, apart from ferrets, is belly dance (aka
raqs sharqi or danse orientale).  I came up with this practice regimen
today, with the help of Pan and Seti.  "Help" being a debatable word...
 
Belly dancing with ferrets
 
Step One: get out dance gear.  Remove ferret from inside of dance
slipper.  Remove other ferret from other slipper.  Repeat until you have
managed to put slippers on your feet.
 
Step Two: attempt to warm up and stretch while ferrets try to remove your
slippers.
 
Step Three: look for wherever ferrets have stashed hip scarf.
 
Step Four: look for veil, which ferrets have stashed while you were
looking for hip scarf.
 
Step Five: with hip scarf tied firmly to body and veil clutched tightly,
fish cds out from under the couch.  This step usually also involves
detaching ferrets from hip scarf and veil.
 
Step Six: put on music and start dancing.  Don t step on the ferrets, no
matter how cleverly they anticipate where your feet will be!
 
Step Seven: detach ferrets from heels.
 
Step Eight: detach ferrets from ends of veil.
 
Steps Nine through Fourteen: repeat steps seven and eight.
 
Step Fifteen: give up on veil dance and start candle dance instead.
 
Step Sixteen: realize that dancing with glass candleholders was not such
a good idea as you try avoid stepping on ferrets and not drop the candle
holders.  Also ferrets prove to have a tendency to try to steal
decorations from hip scarf during floorwork part of choreography.
 
Step Seventeen: put away candleholders and wave around ferrets instead.
Now everybody s having fun!
 
Step Eighteen: put down very riled up ferrets.  Chase them all over the
house to tire them out.  Ferrets go to sleep.
 
Step Nineteen: realize you are too exhausted from chasing ferrets to
attempt to dance.  Resolve to practice tomorrow and mix gin and tonic.
Fall asleep with ferrets.
 
The moral of the story is that I should look into renting studio space
somewhere ;-)
 
Regina Harrison  [log in to unmask] or [log in to unmask]
http://www.channel1.com/users/regina/
blog: http://www.channel1.com/users/regina/zblog.html
 
 Is that my business?  Well, what is my business?  Do I know?  Did I ever
know?  Let s not go into that.  You re not human tonight, Marlowe.  Maybe I
never was or ever will be...  Maybe we all get like this in the cold
half-lit world where always the wrong thing happens and never the right.
--Raymond Chandler, The Little Sister
[Posted in FML issue 3886]