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A reputation as a bad dancer spreads faster than a wild fire in late November.

If her friends think she can’t top her last party, watch her hire a belly dancer.

"I've been born here. I will live here. I will die here," the dancer and activist tells me in what he calls "macaroni" Italian-English beneath the palm trees of a scruffy Roman park.

The school became a haven for dancers of all backgrounds wanting to learn from the multifaceted performer, who chasséd into the Hollywood scene with her career-defining performance as Lydia Grant in the 1980 musical “Fame.”

That’s when it all became very clear that I was not meant to be a dancer.