‘Recovering Lawyer’ Teaches Belly Dance, Hires Covington Partner
A belly dancing instructor who calls herself a “recovering lawyer” isn’t the only one of her ilk to take up the sensuous style of dance.
“The reality of it is that in D.C. there are a lot of belly-dancing lawyers,” says Rachael Galoob Ortega, aka Saphira in the belly-dancing world, the Washington Post reports in its Sunday magazine. Saphira was an associate at Cole, Raywid & Braverman, now Davis Wright Tremaine, before she gave up full-time law practice to run her own dance studio.
Saphira had earned an LLM in international and comparative law from Georgetown, but she wasn’t on the partner track–“not from their perspective or from mine,” she told the Post. Now she teaches other lawyers how to dance, including some who work at the Patent and Trademark Office, an inspector general’s office and the Environmental Protection Agency, the story says.
One of her instructors, Jennifer Johnson, is a partner with Covington & Burling. “There are a lot of high-powered career women who belly dance,” she told the newspaper. “It makes you feel beautiful and feminine.”
Saphira likes that attitude. In class, she tells her students: “We are never going to have the bodies that we want, so let’s feel differently about the bodies that we have. I mean, for God’s sake, life is short! Feel better about yourself.”
