[Monica]

At my first studio (Leea Aziz's Belly Dance!, where I studied for about seven years and later taught out of), we used to have guest teachers occasionally instruct the weekly intermediate and advanced classes, including Bert Balladine and Judeen. I knew they were awesome, but not famous. Oh, Kamaal sometimes, too. Bert was my teacher's teacher, and Judeen and Kamaal were former students of Leea's, so if the latter two were in town, or Bert was free and Leea needed to take a night off, that is who she would call. We were lucky, and most of us probably had no idea the caliber of instruction we were getting at our regular old classes, not to mention that these folks were so well known in the larger community.

On a related note, I also did not realize how lucky we were to work with such great musicians. Leea would put on four student nights a year with live music. We had local musicians play for us, but our local musicians just happened to be Susu Papmpanin, Reda Darwish, Mary Ellen Donald, Vince DelGado, Fadil and Nader Shahin, Mimi Spencer, Nazir Latouf...god, so many more. It was an amazing experience for a learning dancer (as I now know!).