The Spotlight on Joyce Oliver

My next interviewee was an obvious choice for me.  This woman brings a fire and passion to the dance that few others possess.  Think of swirling veils, a multitude of undulating movements and the occasional sword and your thoughts may also turn to her – Joyce Oliver.

I’ve called Joyce a friend for several years now, and her blonde hair, ready smile, and warm hugs are always a welcoming sight.  The setting for this interview is Panera Bread in Evans and it's evening. As my thoughts turn to Joyce prior to this interview, I am struck by several things. Here is a woman was multiple talents. Not only does she dance, and dance well, but she also sews. I know that there is a pretty killer skirt going around the CSRA that has her name on it. How many of us have a “Joyce” skirt (aka - bracelet skirt)? Or have learned to make a “Joyce” skirt? Lol, it is every seamstresses dream to have something named after them. Kudos to you, Joyce!

I spot Joyce at Panera and we sit down together to enjoy a nice meal.

 Let’s learn a little about “Joyce”.  Where did you grow up?  I grew up in the upstate of South Carolina.  My parents were older when I was born, they were cotton mill workers.  They had been sharecroppers.  They were born 1912 & 1914.  They got married and my mom had three children, one year apart, and then 21 years later, when she was 44, I showed up.  In fact, my brother, who was 21, was married on Saturday night and I was born on Sunday night.  That’s what I like to tell people about my daughters.  Victoria is 23 and Annalee is 12.  God has a sense of humor because I got to experience it from this side of the fence too.  Big Sister and Big surprise.  But it was great.  We lived way out in the country on the farm.  We grew all our own food.  I mean, we went to the grocery store and got our flour and stuff like that, but all the vegetables and canning and stuff like that, we did ourselves.  We had a hog that we would eat for the winter, we would kill that, and, you know, it was true farm, it was a working farm.  My life at that point was running around out in the woods and riding horses.  It was pretty cool.  It was pretty magical, very different from anything my children could ever imagine.  Both my parents are gone.  I have a brother and sister that are still living.  And they’re all still living in the upstate of South Carolina, Clemson area.  Ancestry is Scotch-Irish and Cherokee.  My uncle used to like to tell a story about my Great Grandmother having to hide under the house for the Cherokee Trail of Tears, when they took them to Oklahoma.  Of course, he lied a lot, so I don’t know if it’s true.  (laughs)  He was a storyteller. 

 Tell me a bit about your family.  Well, I’m married to Jim, who is pretty much the love of my life.  We celebrated 30 years of marriage.  In fact, my daughter, Victoria, was two weeks old on our 10^th Wedding Anniversary.  So I waited a looooong time to have kids.  It was fun, though, because when we got married it was the first time I’d really had funds to do anything, like money of my own, so we went snow skiing with our best friends every year.  We skied every slope in Colorado, quite a few on the east coast, and just had a grand old time.  We’ve always had a shared vision of building a Victorian farm house, owning some land and having some horses, which is pretty much what we’ve ended up doing.  My oldest daughter, Victoria, has graduated college.  She’s also a dancer and was on the USC Aiken dance team.  The last two years, she was a captain on the dance team there. So dance has been a fabulous blessing in her life as well.  She’s living in Columbia, loving her job, and dating a great guy, who I like a lot (wink, wink).  Annalee, the Big Surprise in the family, she reminds me a lot of my mom.  She’s kind of an old soul but she’s also got this artistic vent to her that’s really interesting.  She also dances.  She loves bellydance.  She’s also good at hip hop, which is kind of surprising.  She takes ballet, jazz, hip hop, tap, and modern dance, also.  They love school.  I’ve been blessed with my kids, they’re good kids. 

What do you do in the “muggle” world?  Well, I’m a Geek, I always have been.  I knew from the time I was a little girl that science was my favorite subject.  I knew I needed to go into healthcare, because, growing up on the farm like I did, anytime an animal was injured, or anything, I’m just gravitating to go help.  If I see a car wreck, I go out and I help.  I’ve always been that way.  So I KNEW I was going to go into healthcare.  In fact, in kindergarten, they published in the local paper what you’re going to be when you grow up, and I was always supposed to be a nurse, because, back then, that was kind of logical.  But when I got into high school, I had an advanced biology class and we did a parasitology series and I loved it so much because I love working with the microscope and identifying things.  It’s kind of like being a medical detective.  So I ended up going into Medical Technology and I managed an Immunology Lab.  Sexually Transmitted Diseases are sort of my favorite, my forte.  Anything in Infectious Disease, but especially STD’s.  Syphilis is my favorite disease.  (laughs – the table next to us joins in the conversation momentarily.  I am unsurprised to see how easily Joyce interacts with anyone and everyone she comes in contact with.  A very social person.)  But I also manage the Specimen Referral Laboratory, which is where we mail stuff out, which sounds like it may be the easiest thing to do, you don’t have to do any testing on the blood, you just mail it out.  But, honestly, it’s the most fascinating and challenging job I’ve ever had.  You ever watch the television show, “House”?  It’s really cool, it’s like a medical mystery thing where you’ve got this crotchety old doctor with all these weird patients that only he can help figure out.  Every day is like that.  Now we have this thing called NMDAR (I will NOT try to spell what she actually said because I don’t think I could), it’s encephalitis.  It happens when women have certain tumors in the ovaries and they end up completely psychotic.  We had a 15 year old girl last year from the upstate of South Carolina.  Straight A student, she was on the swim team, you know, all this great stuff, nothing wrong, no health problems at all.  And all of the sudden, like over a weekend, she becomes just completely psychotic.  No headache, no fever, just she was seeing things, hearing things.  They ended up, eventually, putting her down in Columbia in the mental hospital.  There she became catatonic.  So her doctor realized this is not just psychology, this is some medical thing.  So they sent to us, (GRU/MCG/Whatever) and we ended up diagnosing it.  We ended up sending that blood test out, helping the doctors figure out what to do.  So, it’s really interesting.  So, manage labs, and I love my job.  You know, my mom didn’t work outside the home, she did for a while, in the cotton mill, but she always told me, “Joyce, get a career.  Have your own money.”  She said, “A man may not leave you but they may die on you. So, make sure you can stand on your own two feet.  Have some sort of career.”  I mean, I can’t imagine doing anything else.  I’ve been at MCG for at least 25 years, then four, five, six before that, (before MCG) in the upstate, I worked in Greenville at a private lab, and then we moved to Michigan with my husband.  He’s a Fisheries Biologist.  He worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service.  I actually met him because he was mowing the grass in Clemson and he lived up the street where I grew up and I was riding my horse by.  At the time, I had a horrible crush on John Denver.  So Jim comes up and turns his mower off and he’s like, "I’d love to go horseback riding with you sometime", and he sounded just like John Denver and he told me he was getting ready to go to Colorado on a hunting trip and I’m like, Oh, it must be meant to be! An omen, or whatever.  Anyway, he was transferred with the Fish and Wildlife Service to Michigan.  I really didn’t want to go, because I loved my life and I loved my job in South Carolina, and I told my mom, he can just go and come visit every now and then and it’ll be fine, but my mom said, “No, Joyce, you married that man, you’ve gotta go.”  So, of course, I went and it was one of the best experiences of my life.  I worked up there in an Immunology-like lab that wasn’t medical.  We manufactured products so I got to do some research and make some products and go represent the company in different trade shows around the country.  It was too cold.  Southern girls just don’t do Michigan.  So he applied and got the job in Aiken, SC, which was back in the state, even though I’m 2 ½ hours from family, but we moved in here in ‘85 and I’ve loved it ever since.

 What first peaked your interest in Bellydancing and when? Well, I live in multiple worlds and thinking of it, I don’t remember ever NOT being interested in it.  Because, as a little girl, I must have seen an old Cleopatra movie or something because, I always wanted to do it, always.  I remember when I was probably 9 or 10 years old and my sister, who is 22 years older than me, would bring me cool clothes and stuff.  She gave me this really awesome velvet blue bikini that had these gold rings on the side, and I would take my momma’s curtains off the windows, the white chiffon curtains, and pull them through those rings and just dance!  (The true origin of the “Joyce” skirt!)  I’ve always wanted to do it but it just never worked out.  I always wanted to dance, period, but Middle Eastern dance, particularly, has always resonated with my soul and my heart.  But as a little girl, I ended up getting this falling disease, Legg-Calve-Perthese disease.  And those are the three doctors who basically discovered the disease in the late 1800’s/early 1900’s.  It’s not that common.  It’s where the blood supply to the hip, the femur head, dies, so the bone dies.  The first indication that I had something wrong was I would turn my foot out and limp and I would cry every night with my ankle hurting, my hip never hurt, but I would cry with my ankle hurting.  If they don’t do something about it, the entire hip collapses and you end up in a wheelchair.  At the time, what the treatment was was to put me in this brace that was a metal rod that went down both sides of my leg and takes the weight off my leg.  I could not walk on my leg for 3 years.  And I had on my left foot, to balance it out, what I called my “Frankenstein Shoe”.  It was this ugly, white shoe but on the bottom of it… (Forrest Gump!)  Yea! Yea!  And I was horrified of the whole thing because this was in, like, 4^th or 5^th grade when kids are so mean, they make fun of you and stuff.  In fact, they had to just about hold me down to get the thing on me the first time.  Because I’m like, “I’m not wearing that thing!” but I had to.  But it  ended up being a great life lesson, because, you know, when people are mean, it’s like, “What the heck’s wrong with you?  Why are you making yourself feel better by tearing me down?”  But I did learn to do tricks on my crutches.  In fact, it became a joke when new kid came to school, they’d say, “I bet you can’t beat the crippled girl.”  And I could pretty much outrun everybody on my crutches on that playground.  I could do spins on them and all kinds of amazing things.  I still have my crutches.  They’re in the barn (where we lived for 2 years while our house was being built) hanging up right next to all my old ballet shoes.  So, take that, Life, for what it’s worth.  So, I couldn’t dance because of that, and really we couldn’t afford it anyway.  When I got out of the brace, it took about 2-3 years for me to get my leg strong enough to where I could walk without turning my ankle over a lot.  So as soon as I got out of high school and got a job, I started taking ballet classes.  By then, I was like, 17/18 years old and I’ve got to be in class with 5 year olds.  I said, I didn’t care because I wanted to learn that bad.  So, I did it and I haven’t stopped since!

 Who was your first instructor/where?  For Middle Eastern, it was actually Gale Schultz, she’s in Florida.  She’s from here, I think her family still lives around here.  I cannot for the life of me remember what her dance name was.  But she worked at MCG at the time too in one of the labs and I got to know her.  I was dancing at Augusta Ballet at the time, at Martinez Evans, and when I found out Gale was teaching classes, I went.  I think I had three with her before I found out I was pregnant with Victoria, my first child, and I thought it was probably not the best time to take up bellydance.  I kept up the ballet and everything right up to delivery, so I didn’t really pursue it at that time.  Looking back, I wish I’d had the chance to study more with her.  She’s very folkloric in her style and pays a lot of attention to details and techniques.  So we moved back to Augusta in ’85 and I didn’t get a chance to dance with Gale because I got tied up with all the other dance I was doing – jazz, ballet and modern – and a lot of performing.  I was down at First Friday and I saw Envey dance one night.  They were doing a Shakira piece and I thought THAT looks like fun!  So I started taking Kendra’s class, and that was probably 10-12 years ago.  It’s hard to believe it’s been that long.  Since then, I’ve tried to dance with everyone I could find that I could dance from, including workshops and local dancers. 

How long have you been dancing/bellydancing?  Well, jazz, modern, ballet, tap – all those since I was out of high school, over 20 years.  Bellydance, probably seriously, about 12 years.  O, clogging!   I didn’t tell you about clogging.  Clogging is what I did during high school.  We were the South Carolina State Cloggers.  There was a place in upstate, where I grew up, it was a state park, and every Friday night they had square dancing and clogging.  They would play live Bluegrass bands and all these amazing people would just get up and be organized, kind of like ATS is.  Everyone knew what to do, they would call it out.  But they had cloggers also, and my niece, who was a year younger than I am, started dating one of the lead cloggers.  It didn’t take any time until he wanted to form a clogging team.  We did competitions and festivals all up and down the east coast.  It was all my nieces and family members and lots of friends.  We were First Runner Up for World Champions one year.  I clogged for a long time, probably 5-6 years, and my whole wedding party was actually the clogging team.  The photographer wanted me to clog down the aisle.  He said he would give us the photos for free if I did.  But I didn’t.  I’m like, I’m not clogging down the aisle!  I would Veil Dance down the aisle today, though! 

How did you feel during your first performance or when you were first able to make sense of the dance?  Oh, it was absolutely amazing, because it was kind of like getting your medal of honor and I finally had a sparkly, jingly bra!  (LOL!)  And I was so excited about it.  I felt like life had finally come into what it was supposed to be, you know, a dream had come true!  So I loved it.  By then, I wasn’t shy at all.  That’s the other thing.  I was extremely shy as a child, I don’t know that I could have danced as a kid, I was so shy. 

Where do you get your costumes?  I know you make them, but do you buy any?  Yes, but some of the purchased costumes, they don’t fit as well, especially the bras.  They’re also a little cheesy, quite frankly, especially the cabaret ones.  The tribal ones I love without fail, but the cabaret ones, some of them are quite cheesy-looking.  So I prefer making my costumes.  That’s one of my other passions anyway.  I love doing it.  There’s something so zen about creating something, it’s another creative outlet.  (By the way, you call them the “Bracelets”, we all call them the “Joyce” skirts.)  (laughs) Yea, they’re the easiest skirt to make and flatter just about everyone.  (And we are so thankful for you sharing them with us.) 

Let’s talk “Music”.  What music inspires you?  Any music that has emotion.  It doesn’t have to be a certain genre, but any music that elicits some sort of feeling.  I like music that speaks to my soul.  My iPod has mostly Middle Eastern music, but I’ve got country, hard rock, I love hard rock. I used to be a metal-head, I forgot to tell you that.  I used to hang out backstage with Jackal, Aerosmith, White Snake, Bad Company.  I was sort of a groupie back in the day, you know, for Cinderella.  I love heavy metal music also, especially the ballads.  I love classical music, anything that speaks of emotion.  Not any particular genre.

So then, what IS on your iPod?  A lot of Middle Eastern, I also love Dubstep.  And Pandora, of course, Bellydance Radio. Techno too.

For choreographies that you have created, where do you find your inspiration?  It’s usually the song.  I call it my dashboard muse.  One of my friends from Tip Toes and Taps, she coined that term, and it’s so true.  To choreograph, I like to just put on some music in the car and just drive, not try to think of any movement at all just drive and let it happen.  Just do that over and over and eventually it just comes to you.  And for inspiration, I love YouTube, of course.  One of my favorite things is in the morning to have my coffee, go to YouTube, and search for bellydance and look for things that have been uploaded today.  Because you see some really bad stuff, but you also see some really awesome stuff.  One of my favorite tools to use with this is, and I’ll give you two YouTube videos to do it with, is to pull up two tabs.  Pull up the dance you really like and then pull up the song you want to dance to in another tab.  A perfect example would be, you know Sedona Soulfire from the Northwest?  I love them.  And they have a fabulous drum solo piece they did at one of the competitions, it might have been Bellydancer of the Universe, or something.  Pull that up and then pull up another YouTube of Lady Marmalade from Moulin Rouge.  Mute the sound on Soulfire’s video but watch it with Moulin Rouge.  It is PERFECT!  It’s absolutely perfect.  Even though the songs are so different.  And that’s one of the things that fascinates me, is the connection between music and math, going back to being the Geek again, and Middle Eastern rhythms, especially, are woven throughout all music.   So that’s why Middle Eastern Dance works so well with something like Moulin Rouge.  I would never take a YouTube video that I like and rip it off, for choreography, but I would take inspiration from it.  Like, say, I love how they did that turn, or I love the formations they used for this or that, and then adapt it with my dashboard muse in my car.  The other thing about choreography is that the best dances ever done, whether I’ve been in ballet, tap or jazz or whatever, is when it’s a group effort, and it’s not just one person’s ideas.  Beverlee Nichols, my friend at Tip Toes and Taps, is the one who first turned me on to this.  She would call assignments, like, you choreograph the first minute, you choreograph the second minute, and because of that, you end up with this rich textured dance that is not one dimensional.  Because it’s hard to not get stuck in a style.  So when you bring different dancers in and let them say, O, let’s try this here or let’s try that there, it works out really amazingly well.  You have to have people that don’t have egos to do that, though, and you also have to have someone with kind of an overriding guidance of the dance so you maintain the whole concept.  I also like to choreograph to the audience keeping in mind what they will see and, honestly, most audiences see the beginning and the ending of a dance so those two need to be really strong.  You want to leave them thinking, Wow, what are they going to do next, that sort of thing.  You also don’t want to tire them out with too much movement.  It’s a fine line, you know, doing what the music says and portraying it for the audience.  Another trick I like to use to create choreographies is I have a set of cards, it’s basically cardstock that I can create in a word document program and I put in certain combos that I like, and I shuffle then and then pull them out and put them together.  It’s what I like to say when I let the dancing spirits, and the forces of nature, guide me . 

So, what do you absolutely HATE about the dance world?  Well, of course, everyone is going to say the drama, blah, blah, blah.  But I hate that not only in dance, but it’s the one thing I will not tolerate in my home.  I always tell my family, “Save it for the stage, I don’t want it in my house.”  Otherwise, I think, Ego probably would be the thing I hate most, because, I think it smothers the potential that the community has by not having people that are capable of working together because of egos.  And I think we’re blessed in our community, we really do have a very strong dance community in the CSRA, in fact in Georgia and South Carolina. 

What do you absolutely LOVE about the dance world?  The Sisterhood that develops among women.  There's something about women, and men too, that past the age of 15 continue dancing.  There's something in them that there cut from a different fabric or cloth.  It’s a Sisterhood, even though we’re not all the same, we have different interests, there’s a common thread.  There’s, “I’m just strong too.”  I love other dancers.  But for bellydance in particular, I love what it has done for some people who were shy and kind of sheltered and withdrawn and I love to see women like that just blossom and grow!  Nothing else I’ve seen does that.  It uplifts; always, without fail.  I’d still love to do some classes with the CSRA bellydancers at the shelter for the women and the children that are in the homeless shelter.  I just think that would be so much fun to, you know, go down and give them some veils and coin skirts and give them a class.  I’d just love to do that, kind of like a big birthday party for them.  Maybe this summer we could pull that off. 

Are you a soloist or do you dance with others or a troupe?  And which troupes have you danced with previously?  I dance with anyone I can find because I love to dance.  For Middle Eastern Dance, of course, solo stuff, Envey, Dancing Through the Skirt, and Eastern Star.  And I’ve done some stuff with Sho (ShoShannah Estell), in fact, I danced with Sho before EITHER of us were bellydancers.  We did a really cool jazz piece (pictured right).  She did some hiphop and we were in short little black dresses and long black gloves.  We did it for a fundraiser we do every year.  Janet & Lisa from Envey were also in that one. 

Do you teach?  Yes, I have taught and I enjoy teaching.  In fact, I just bought 10 more veils that are silk, but a quality of silk that are not going to tear easily.  My favorite, the guy I get my veils and double veils from, Zondra turned me on to him, AJ in India, I love him!  But I got them because I was going to do a little fitness thing at MCG they were doing at lunch.  Veil work is probably my favorite thing in the world.  The thing about teaching, though, is I found it took a lot of my time, and with working full time, I would rather spend time choreographing and making costumes and going to classes myself than teaching right now.  You have to really put a lot into teaching, I think.  I don’t think you just show up and say, let’s do this, let’s do that.  You know, I would pick out music, I would even write it down.  I can’t get that far away from the Geek. 

Other than bellydancing, what types of dance do you like?  I have to say Ballet is my least favorite form of dance to perform, but it’s probably the most important dance I’ve done because it provides the technique and the sense of balance and the foundation.  It’s just extremely important.  It’s one of my goals when school’s out to take an adult ballet class, maybe if Sho has one, I’ll take some of hers too.  Right now I’m not taking any at Tip Toes and Taps, there’s just not enough time.  I love Ballet.  Ballet’s the only thing I’ve ever broken out in a sweat trying to stand still properly.  The body alignment, and every muscle is engaged just trying to stand still.  And then Jazz, I love Jazz, Clogging, and Modern dance.  That’s probably my favorite form of dance other than Middle Eastern dance because it allows such freedom of movement.  It’s free form.  And I love anything where I get to fling myself down on the floor.  I love the floor.  I love floorwork.  (Have you ever thought of doing an entire choreography of just floorwork?) It’s funny you should say that, I’ve been toying with the idea of that.  Get out of my head, woman!  (laughs)

What types of movement are you drawn to and why?  It depends on the day and the song.  Overall, I prefer big stage performances, lots of entrances and exits, and I guess your solos are where your soul really comes out and what your most natural doing.  I can’t keep Ballet out of it.  I like a lot of elongated, flowy movements.  That’s why I’m not as good at drum solos.  That’s one of my goals, too, it’s like all that little ticky-tocky stuff, it’s beautiful and I love it, it’s just the intricateness of it that’s tough for me.  I LOVE spins.  I love spins, I love turns, and I love falling on the floor. 

What “style” of bellydance do you most associate yourself with – Cabaret, Tribal, Folkloric, Fusion, Orientale, etc?  Of course you can say “Fusion” because it incorporates everything, but, if I had to rank them, I’d have to call it Fusion first, because it allows me to get away with whatever I’m doing at the moment, then Cabaret, then Tribal, I love Tribal, and it actually grows on me every day.  I really wish we had an ATS instructor here in Augusta.  I’d really like to do more.  (Alison Stratton’s working on it!)  I would so love that!  I would love to dance some more with her (Alison), too.  I didn’t know she was such a Geek too till her interview.  I found that fascinating, I loved that. 

Given the opportunity, if time, money, and distance were not an issue, who would be your “dream” instructor?  With whom would you LOVE to study bellydance?  The first name that comes to mind is Isadora Bushkowsky from Colorado, Izzy is her name.  She’s the one that did that video I just love, "The Language of Life".  I love her style because she manages to incorporate all those elements that appeal to me.  The intricateness of some of the Middle Eastern movements.  She’s very technically accurate.  But she also fuses a lot of modern.  She’s had a lot of modern and ballet and jazz training too.  And I love her costumes and just everything about her.  I also love Saida, I think she’s from Brazil, her and her husband, Emil, they dance together.  I love her style too, she’s just gorgeous. 

We are always faced with challenges in life.  If you were suddenly unable to dance, would you continue in the dance world, somehow, or would you just walk away?  The only thing that will stop me is to be six feet under.  Of course!  I want to do the drumming stuff, it’s just hard to fit it in right now.  Drumming’s an option, making costumes, I love making costumes so much.  And I’m dying to make some costumes for some really young skinny people.  I’m just dying to do some over-the-top cabaret costumes and some of the tribal ones too.  So, I would make costumes, that would be so much fun.  It’s not a hobby, it’s an addiction.  I’m addicted to everything about it.  The people, the pillows!  (Your portable harem.)  Exactly!  We were at Myrtle Beach and we went to one of the Waccamaw’s and I ran right to the stack of pillows.  And Annalee’s like, “Mama, you’re getting perilously close to being a hoarder!” 

What is something fascinating about you that no one, or very few, knows?  Hmmm.  Some of my friends know this, but not many of my dance friends know this, that my other passion is True Crime.  My uncle, who is my daddy’s brother, he would come over, back then we didn’t have the internet, and he would bring over his True Detective Magazine.  And it always had these half naked women on the cover of them with some crime story in there.  He was fascinated with True Crime and he would come talk to me about it.  I always thought that was really cool and I would like to understand the psychology of it.  My husband hates that kind of stuff, he hates murder mysteries, he hates horror movies.  I can’t talk to him about True Crime – he doesn’t want to hear anything about it.  I was watching something one night and he comes down and he says, “You know, the only difference between you and your uncle is you have the internet and television.”  He’s so right!  But, I’m a member of this group, Web Sleuths.  It’s a free internet forum that’s based on True Crime, and besides my dance friends, they’re an amazing group of women and men.  A lot of them are older, retired detectives, a lot are crime victims that are on there, so we’re sort of like victim’s advocates.  My favorite forums are the serial killer forums. I’m fascinated with those.  The one in Long Island hasn’t been solved.  We’ve been blogging about that and trying to look for clues.  But also unidentified bodies.  I love trying to identify dead bodies.  It’s a huge problem and there’s no national database that can match up missing people with unidentified bodies.  One of my goals in retirement, one of my many long list of things to do at retirement, is to do that sort of thing and work on coordinating those kind of databases.  But, like I said, I live in multiple worlds.  There’s the rodeo world, I used to rodeo – barrel racing.  I love cowboys!  I love the way horses smell.  I’ve never not had a horse.  There’s something about the bellydance world that goes hand in hand with those big beautiful animals running across the plains.  We would travel through the Southeast.  It was nothing to travel 300 miles or so for a rodeo, come back home, brush your teeth and go to work in the morning with no sleep, you know.  There’s that side and, of course, the clogging side.  And, honestly, of all the dance forms I’ve ever done – ballet, tap, jazz, modern, Middle Eastern – clogging gets the best response.  It is amazing how much an audience loves it.  I think they’re loud and they’re happy and they’re fun and it’s always upbeat.  (whispers) The costumes are just so tacky.  (laughs)  Those gingham dresses, that never was my style, but that’s what you wore.   Then the crime stuff, especially the cold cases.  I’m a science geek.  I’m a big supporter of Vietnam Vets.  Politically, I’m a Libertarian, but I suppose if you put all the things I support together it’d be more Republican, because I don’t believe you should be just given things.  And Second Amendment rights, I love to shoot.  I qualified for the Combat Pistol shooting thing at Pinetucky.  And I’ve done home defense drills at the house in the middle of the night.  I grew up with guns and shooting and it’s a sport, you know, how good you can be.  And I used to work the gun shows too.  Multiple worlds!  My philosophy is you can rest in the nursing home!

What is your biggest fear either in life or in dance? Or Both?  Well, I really don’t fear much, my mom used to tell me ghost stories to get me to go to sleep at night.  I’m not really a scary sort of person.  But the biggest fear is seeing my family suffer in some way.  Especially if it was something I could not somehow fix.  (Something that holds you back then?)  Sometimes I don’t take leaps.  I tend to settle for secure pathways instead of unsecure pathways.  I’m not a risk-taker.  And you have to take risks to get certain things done.

What are your dreams for the future – where do you see yourself in the dance in 3, 5, 10, 20 years?  Well, I’m going to go as long as I can.  You know, you have to costume it a bit different at some point, but that’s just another challenge.  I think, you know, if you rest, you rust.  I have a picture of a 70 year old ballerina from Russia doing Swan Lake on my bulletin board behind me at work.  Like I said, physically, you have to change what you do.  You can't do Turkish Drops when you’re 80, but who knows, if you’ve been doing them every single day, you probably could. I’d stay involved on some level. 

If you were to do something completely shocking or out of character with absolutely no consequences, what would it be?  That’s kind of hard, because anything I would do probably wouldn’t shock most people.  I could say I’d quit my job and become a detective, but that wouldn’t shock anybody.  I’d love to go and arrest pediphiles.  Those are the ones I like to stalk on the internet.  Probably it would be to completely leave my job and run away and join the circus or something.  The reason I say that is that my very best friend from kindergarten all the way through high school, when we all graduated high school, we all went to college or work but she had the nerve to do that, run away and join the circus.  So, it would be kind of fun to run away and join the circus or something, because it’s always kind of appealed to me.  That’s one of the things I like about the bellydance community, it’s a lot of the same kind of people.  I like those artistic, talented people. 

If you were stranded on a desert island, whom would you like to be with and what one thing?    Of course, my family, the problem is my two daughters wouldn’t want to be stuck on a desert island with their mom and dad.  They wouldn’t be happy unless their friends were there.  The one item, at first I thought Snickers bars, because they are the perfect survival food, but then I thought, no, what I would want is one of those cool little survival tools that has like a saw and a compass and a fire starter and fishing line and that way I could make a boat and get off the island with my family. 

What is in your dancers’ bag?  What has to be in there?  Veils!  It’s so full of veils, it’s always busting at the seams, because we’re always going to use them in class and if someone doesn’t have them, then I go, oh, here’s a veil.  Also, knee pads because of the modern dance.  I almost panic if I walk out of the house without my knee pads, because if you’re going to end up doing floorwork, you don’t dance at my age and do floorwork if you don’t rehearse with knee pads.  (laughs)
 

 So, the time comes to end our interview and I think the table next to us may be a little relieved – they were having some sort of meeting.  LOL.  Always happens.  Oh, well.  They were nice, as was the conversation.  As I gather my belongings and prepare to leave, I feel very much as if I’ve only scratched the surface with this wonderful, multifaceted woman.  Even spending an hour with her, Joyce is a little less of a mystery, but still has much more to explore. Haha.  A follow up interview?  Maybe.  In the meantime, I hug this lovely lady and we head our separate ways.  Once again, the food was good but the conversation was much more satisfying.  Until next time….

So, who will The Spotlight shine on next?  Are YOU game?