Super Bowl weekend, a slender young woman steps out of the crowd at Montclair’s Big Game Winter Festival and begins dancing with a hula hoop. She moves into the open space in front of the outdoor stage, where the Montclair-based zydeco band Big Mamou has just begun its set.
She is not on the program. No one invited her, but in a few minutes she has an audience entranced. Everyone has seen kids swing a hula hoop around their hips. This is not that. The music is fast, scintillating. If her body were a loudspeaker, it couldn’t project the band’s sexy, sinuous energy any better.
Between songs, I manage to get her name (Izabelle Dean), age (20) and business e-mail ([email protected], which she later gives me permission to print). The following week I sit down with Dean and her boyfriend, Jon Baretz, a Montclair musician and filmmaker. Over breakfast, she tells me that in addition to doing paid performances with hula hoops of her own creation (including glowing LED models and firestick-equipped ones for night shows), she makes and sells polymer jewelry as well as pants and leggings from materials she upcycles.
Dean grew up in Watertown, New York, the oldest of four children born to one woman and four different fathers, each of whom was soon sent packing. Her mother, Elizabeth, gave her the z from her own name. “So I am a piece of my mother,” Dean says. “My mother was always trying to be different, and I think she gave me that name because she knew I was going to be different. I was the tough kid. I stuck up for my brothers and my sister. I told everybody that I got into gruesome fights. Truth was, I’d never been in a fight in my life. But I had a few uncles, and I saw how they acted, and I used that to protect myself and my siblings.”
Dean often stayed with her mother’s parents, the Deans. “I was living a non-motivated lifestyle,” she admits. “I didn’t have many goals.” One day when she was 18, the next-door neighbor “handed me a hula hoop, and it brightened me up. Shortly after that, I borrowed $10 from my best friend to buy my own hula hoop. I started taking some college classes and hula-hooping every day. I stopped smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol and just started pushing myself forward for the better. And I did pay my friend back.”
Her life, she says, “has been a trip to human discovery. The [hoop] represents the circle of life. You learn and grow and become something. But when you try to be something because you think that’s what someone else likes, you are not yourself. Do whatever you want, please. But be original.”