The Most Beautiful

by Mayte Garcia

  In 1980, while Prince was touring with Rick James, processing his own dysfunctional childhood into a project that would become Purple Rain and building on the momentum from his first platinum album, Mama and I were keeping up a busy schedule of dance performances and seminars. Throughout that terrible year, I danced, and when I danced, I was untouchable. Dance was my secret power, my doorway to another dimension where there was only beauty, only music, only love.

  The world of belly dancing had a hierarchy of stars, and among them, Ibrahim “Bobby” Farrah reigned supreme. He was tall and moved with a strong yet delicate danger that I liked. Sometimes, he’d start spinning, twirling faster and faster, a mad blur, and then slowly, always teasing the audience with his brown eyes. The women loved him because he was passionate, loud, and funny.

  Then there was Amir, a classically trained master who’d been a principal dancer in the Russian ballet and innovated a sort of tango-belly-ballet fusion, which he performed in a bolero and tight pants that showed off his insane shimmy. Amir was everything. Every. Thing. The name itself means “Prince.” He had a jet-black mustache and eyebrows, and wore a tasteful dash of black eyeliner around his soulful eyes. He had the training and strength to do things women belly dancers couldn’t safely attempt, and he was the only male dancer who could keep his masculinity and not come off as cheesy. It kept me genuinely entertained. He was way ahead of his time with his amazing sense of humor and off-the-chain stomach movements and muscle isolations no woman I knew could do. He’d shimmy this impressive isolated shimmy, then pulsate his stomach muscles to the beat of the drums—and then he’d do this exaggerated stagger and gasp, as if he were out of breath, and we’d go from awe to laughter. Every movement was done with surgical precision; each eyelash told a love story.

  Mama was not about to miss an opportunity for us to take classes from these two legends, so our whole family drove to Atlanta and got a hotel room for the weekend. I arrived with a terrible cold, but I wasn’t about to let that slow me down. All day Saturday, we took classes. I gave it my all and fell asleep exhausted and happy. On Sunday, it was our turn to perform in the student showcases, and the whole place was buzzing because I was going to be dancing with a sword on my head. Some of the older, more established dancers objected furiously to that. I totally get it now. Who wants to have their thunder stolen by an eight-year-old? I would have probably let the adults win and skipped the sword, but with someone like Mama behind me? Oh, you better believe I danced with that sword.

  “You’re dancing with your sword,” she told me. I didn’t hear what she told them, but they were suddenly being much nicer to me.

  The sword I danced with was a gift from a vendor at a previous seminar. I’d been working with it for a while, dancing for hours to the music of George Abdo and his Flames of Araby Orchestra. Most ladies dancing with a sword used a wadded rag or scarf to keep it from slipping off their heads when they did a backbend or turn. I didn’t want to do that, so Dad scored the edge of the blade just enough to give it some traction against my hair. The finale involved spinning the sword forward and gracefully swooping it off. I practiced till I had a bald spot on the crown of my head.

  It’s second nature to me now, but spinning with a sword on your head is a very different skill from the standard pirouette. When a ballerina spins, she “spots” by focusing on some fixed point—a crack in the mirror or the middle seat in the first row of a theater—something immobile that keeps her grounded as she turns. At the last moment, she whips her head around so she’s taking her eyes off that spot for only a split second. But you can’t do that with a sword balanced on the crown of your head. I learned to ground my balance within myself, my eyes fixed on the tip of the sword as the rest of the world turned around me.

  When it was my turn to do my thing, the buzz amplified; Amir and George Abdo showed up to see me dance. The celebrities never came to the student performances. As I waited to go on, I felt the shiver of nervousness I always feel right before I go out onstage. To this day, I want to die just before I go on. I have to turn around and around like Wonder Woman, and somehow this turns me into a fearless, ferocious dancer. Then there’s no stopping me. So I turned, I transformed, and I danced. When all was said and done, George Abdo pronounced me the Eighth Wonder of the World and asked for our information so he could invite me to dance with the Flames of Araby in Boston. Mama was over the moon.

  Dad always videotaped the student showcase at an event like this and sold copies to the ladies who’d performed. A group of dancers at the Atlanta event sent the video of their performance to a TV show called That’s Incredible!

  “No thanks,” the producers responded. “But who’s that little girl?”

  The ladies remembered that I was the daughter of the man who’d sold them the video, so the producers were able to track me down, and my parents recognized that it would be a huge opportunity for me.

  Hosted by Cathy Lee Crosby, John Davidson, and Fran Tarkenton, That’s Incredible! was a popular show that ran during prime time on ABC for four years in the early 1980s and reran in syndication for eons after that. Designed (right down to the exclamation point) to capture the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! audience, That’s Incredible! featured all kinds of weirdly fabulous things: intriguing freaks of nature, astonishing feats of strength, amazing performance art, and heartwarming stories that involved fate, family, and bizarre coincidences. You might see a dog who traveled thousands of miles to find its family, a dentist who tattooed teeth, coffin portraits that appeared to blink, or a unicyclist jumping through rings of fire—even a tiny Tiger Woods tapping a flawless putt into a cup—and at the end of the segment, the studio audience would shout in unison, “That’s incredible!” Apparently, the producers felt that a little girl belly dancing with a sword on her head fit right in.

  Mama made me a spectacular costume, and Daddy kept wanting to up my game.

  “You’ve got to play zills,” he said, so I learned to play zills and incorporated them into my act. He’d seen one of the older belly dancers demonstrate the amazing dexterity of her abs by flipping a line of eight quarters on her stomach. Dad said, “Do you think you could do that?”

  “Sure!” I’d never done it, but I did a Turkish drop to the floor, ready to give it a try. My stomach was only wide enough to line up three quarters, but after a couple of hours of fierce concentration interrupted by fits of giggling, I was able to turn each coin neatly from heads to tails and back again in time with the music. This gave Daddy the idea that I should flip the quarters while playing the zills and balancing the sword on my head. I was all over this, up for anything, and spent every waking moment rehearsing with a George Abdo record.

  As we flew into LA, I took in the surrealistic sight of the Hollywood sign below, feeling like someone had polished it up just for me. Everyone at the studio was so kind and welcoming, and the set ran like an on-time train. Everything was in the right place at the right time, including me. I was introduced as “the mystical, magical Princess Mayte, the world’s youngest professional belly dancer,” and at the end, the audience yelled, “That’s incredible!”—which pretty much summed up how I felt. I could have flown home without the airplane.

  The show aired several weeks later, and I experienced my first little taste of fame. This was a highly rated, prime-time network TV show, so just about everyone at school saw it. I went to the mall, and people did double takes. “Hey, are you that belly dancing girl on TV?” I got a lot of positive attention, and my classmates started to be nice to me—a welcome change from the racial slurs and bullying I’d lived with in elementary school. I started thinking, Hey, I could get used to this. The only downside was, because I’d been on television, some of the kids thought I was rich; they’d try to shake me down for my lunch money, so I had to start packing my lunch for school every day.

  Naturally, my appearance on the show sparked a steady stream of booking requests. Mom handled the business side of things, negotiating fees and making sure p
eople paid up. Daddy drove me wherever I needed to go and set up the sound and video equipment when we got there. All I had to do was dance, and I was serious about it. I never had a boyfriend, played sports, or got involved in other extracurricular activities. During the school year, when I wasn’t in ballet class or belly dancing, I was studying. When school was out for holiday breaks, we’d go to Puerto Rico to visit our grandmothers.

  Flying as unaccompanied minors, Jan and I would be dropped off at the gate, where an escort would help us board and sometimes bump us up to first class. Even though Jan was older, she was the one who tended to get nervous.

  “What if the escort doesn’t show up? What if we get lost?”

  I’d roll my eyes and say, “We won’t get lost. C’mon.”

  I always took control, chatted up the escort, and headed for the Jetway.

  On our arrival in Puerto Rico, we’d go to my maternal grandmother, Nelly—maternal in the sense that she is my mother’s mother, not in the sense that she’s at all maternal by nature. Grandma Nelly had a severe view of a woman’s place in the world and a sharp tongue to make sure there were no questions about it. I was grateful for the beautiful dresses she helped make for me, but I cringed, listening to her tear Mama down with verbal abuse about her weight, her hair, her makeup, her dancing, her life choices, and her daughters. The “good hair” that got us beat up at school was never good enough for Grandma Nelly, who subjected her own head to an endless stream of chemical straighteners and dark brown dye. She yelled at Mama for letting me dance, but then she’d turn around and brag to her friends that I’d been on TV.

  We counted the hours, waiting for Daddy’s mother, Grandma Mercedes, to pick us up and take us to her house. Our grandmother Mercedes was warm and affectionate. She was a wonderful cook who could make magic from an empty refrigerator.

  “We were poor when I was growing up,” Daddy told us. “That’s why having meat is such a big deal. Back then we had rice with beans or beans with rice.”

  Everyone was welcome at Mercedes’s home, and whoever came to the table was fed, but Daddy and his brother noticed that sometimes their mother would sit with her coffee and cigarette, engaging in the laughter and conversation but not eating. They figured at the time that she wasn’t hungry, but realized later in their lives that there was not much food, and Mercedes chose to go hungry herself rather than turn someone away.

  Mercedes didn’t have a living room like you’d expect to see in the States; she had a big open area with a tile floor and big gates. At night, the car was parked there and the gates were closed. First thing in the morning, she’d open it up, back the car out, and mop the floor where the car had dripped oil.

  “Stay off this tile until it’s dry,” she’d warn, because this was my dance floor. While the sun baked the tiles dry, I’d stretch, warm up, and tape my feet to protect them from friction burn. When my grandmother finally gave me the go-ahead, I’d dance and dance. Hours would go by. I was happy, lost in my head and in the music.

  Grandma Mercedes loved listening to Puerto Rican radio stations with news and classic boleros, so there was always a lot of that. Jan was into Depeche Mode, Eurythmics, and other artists. I myself was swooning over Puerto Rican teen singing sensation Luis Miguel, who was to Latina girls in the early 1980s everything that Justin Bieber would be to girls in the States thirty years later. With a father who was almost as big a stage mother as Mama, Luis Miguel scored his first hit record—Un Sol—launched his first world tour, and stole my heart, all by the time he was thirteen years old. I loved Menudo, that dreamy boy band from Puerto Rico, but even they could not compare to Luis Miguel.

  Jan and I would be in Puerto Rico for a few weeks on our own, then our parents would arrive for a week of family visits, and then we’d have to head home. While leaving Grandma Nelly’s house was a relief, it was always sad leaving the cool tile floor and rich, spicy aromas of Grandma Mercedes’s place. We dreaded the day of departure, partly because Daddy was in the military and we were able to fly on the cheap if we were willing to wait around for an available seat on a cargo plane. We’d pack our bags the night before and head to the airport before dawn. Sometimes the whole day would drag by without an opportunity to board. Jan and I chased each other around and played Rock, Paper, Scissors. We chatted enthusiastically about Menudo. We hotly debated who was cuter, John Schneider or John Stamos, and argued hard about which one of us liked which one of them better. Having exhausted that topic, we’d make up stupid songs and sing them over and over until the grown-ups got impatient and told us to shut up. Then we’d sit and read or play hangman. If the last flight took off without us, we’d schlep our bags back home and return the next day to try again, but if the stars aligned and there were open seats, we’d strap ourselves into them for the three-hour flight, next to racks of auto parts, boxes of office supplies, cases of powdered eggs, giant mysterious crates of military stuff—anything up to and including a war tank.

  Once we got home, Grandma Nelly redeemed herself. Jan and I were crazy about this strange and wonderful new thing called MTV, and we begged Daddy to get cable so we could watch it, but he didn’t see the necessity for that. So Grandma Nelly would roll VHS tapes, recording hours of MTV, and send them to us. It exposed us to the new stars reshaping the music of the decade—Cyndi Lauper, David Bowie, Prince. We loved Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love” and Irene Cara’s “Fame” and Madonna’s “Lucky Star.” They were creating something that combined music and spectacle the way live performances do, pulling music, dance, fashion, storytelling, cinematography, videography, and theater into a fabulous mash up of art forms.

  In 1983, just before I turned ten, Jan and I saw Flashdance at the movie theater in North Carolina, and it rocked my little world from start to finish. The feverish “Maniac” sequence captured the crazy energy that took over my body when I was dancing, and though I certainly didn’t let Jan see it, I had tears streaming down my face during those final soaring moments when Alex Owens dances her heart out to “What a Feeling.” I didn’t know at the time, of course, that Jennifer Beals had to have three body doubles—one of them a sixteen-year-old dude—in order to get through that number, and I’m glad I didn’t know. Thinking it was all her made me believe I could do it, too.

  I adored Flashdance. I used some of my belly dancing money to buy the Flashdance sound track and couldn’t get enough of it. Dancing like a maniac, maniac on the floor, I wore grooves in the grooves playing the album over and over. Flashdance offered a PG-rated romance that a ten-year-old could embrace, while vividly demonstrating the hours of blood, sweat, and tears that go into a professional dance career. And can we just talk about the iconic Alex Owens style? All the girls were slashing their sweatshirts and incorporating leg warmers into their school wardrobes, but more than anything else, I loved Jennifer Beals’s unapologetically curly hair and her “Are you white or are you black?” skin, the same color as mine. I dreamed of living in my own warehouse apartment with a ballet barre, sassy attitude, and pit bull named Grunt.

  A year later, my little world got rocked again. Jan took Mama and me to see Purple Rain.

    two

  Jan and I were instantly obsessed with Purple Rain, playing the album for months in our room with the sound track blaring. I was always Apollonia—minus the boobs—because I was a girly girl but brave, like Prince’s love interest in the movie. Jan was learning to play guitar, so she wanted to be Wendy (or maybe she had a crush on Wendy and didn’t yet know how to articulate that), but her best friend also wanted to be Wendy, so it often devolved to an argument.

  “I am Wendy!”

  “You’re not Wendy! I am!”

  Eventually, for the sake of world peace, I’d intercept and tell Jan, “You can’t be Wendy. Your hair’s not long enough. Be Lisa. Lisa is just as cool.”

  I funded the sound track purchase with my belly dancing money, and we begged to see the movie again. We loved the music, the power of Prince’s performances, of course, a
nd the style, the style, the style—even an elementary school kid couldn’t miss it. I mean, look at the fashion in this film! Prince’s ruffles, the motorcycle studs, the Wonderbra-convenient leather motorcycle jacket that Apollonia strips off at not–Lake Minnetonka.

  Years later, I would stand in awe of the full costume crew who worked in a large, brightly lit space at Paisley Park. Prince’s office occupied the left wing of the top floor, and Wardrobe occupied the right. Pattern makers and cutters worked on long wooden worktables under broad skylights. Seamstresses and tailors fit clothing on mannequins with Prince’s body size. A stitching tailor perfected the smallest details, and the high priestess overseeing the whole operation tweaked and approved every outfit, making a sleeve half an inch longer or exchanging a silver button for a gold one. You knew you were walking out with something one of a kind and perfectly on point.

  These were Prince’s clothes for every day, not just performing. When I was his wife, I wore his clothes and swiped his custom-made pajamas, and when I was pregnant, Wardrobe made me several cute maternity dresses with the word BABY and an arrow pointing down at my belly. He had hundreds of outfits that were meticulously made, right down to the zipper pulls, which were always special and unique. He had a lot of input in the design process. He’d tear pages from magazines and instruct the designer to re-create the bodice detail from this dress and the cuff from that shirt and a collar from something Errol Flynn wore in Captain Blood. Inspired by the movie Amadeus, he had the wardrobe staff create extravagant performance pieces in velvet and lace. The Philadelphia Story inspired great coats and big-shouldered suits. The wardrobe staff was incredibly talented—an amazing group of people who loved Prince and loved doing what they did. Fabulous clothes were constantly being created and re-created, vamped and revamped, altered, tailored, embroidered, and deconstructed for video shoots, performances, or just moving around in real life.