A pet-sitter by day is a burlesque dancer at night. (And has many other lives besides.)

by Jess McCuan . photo by Matt Rose

Celeste Ametrine has at least two lives. By day, she’s a housesitter and pet-sitter, looking after Ashevilleans’ sweet Persians and Pomeranians. By night, she does belly and burlesque dancing, which she’s been involved in for about a decade. In her most recent dancing role, with Asheville’s Bombs Away Cabaret this spring, she played Anita BigBrek, an assistant to a dance diva who has secret hidden talents of her own.

But like the cats she looks after, Ametrine, who’s 38, has at least nine more lives. To look at her long, strong body today, you’d never believe that she once weighed 300 pounds. And she doesn’t have any trouble admitting it. A decade ago, she was working in the IT industry in Madison, Wisconsin, not far from Lake Mills, the small Wisconsin town where she grew up. At the end of a 13-year relationship, she was losing weight but struggled daily with her self-image. “I didn’t know who that woman in the mirror was anymore,” she says. A friend encouraged her to take a belly dance class, which Ametrine loved. She started doing folkloric and Middle Eastern dancing at cultural gatherings and festivals around Madison. She shed pounds quickly, and for the first time in years, felt buoyant again.

Then, just as she was getting back on her feet, life took her legs out from under her—literally. In October 2006, on a business trip in Indianapolis, Ametrine was walking across the street in the rain smoking a cigarette. As she raised the cigarette to her lips, she was hit by a full-size pickup truck traveling 25 miles per hour. The cigarette went flying, and so did she. The collision broke her right leg and two front teeth, and her spine and ribs were badly twisted.

By November 2007, she decided to pack up and live on the big island of Kuaii for a year and a half, much of that time in a tent and then a yurt. She had started working with a shaman and traveled from Hawaii to ashrams in India and Thailand.

When she moved to Asheville last fall, she says she finally found a place that felt like home. She took up CrossFit, a rigorous fitness routine that involves weightlifting and gymnastics, and she now easily dead-lifts 145 pounds. Outside of pet-sitting and burlesque, she’s jumped headfirst into civic and social activities like Blue Ridge Toastmasters, a public speaking club, and SheBIZ, a networking group for woman-owned businesses. She teaches belly dance at The Fire Personal Training Studio in East Asheville, and she’s started doing event planning and life coaching. “I love speaking and being on stage,” she says, explaining that wants to share her weight-loss story and personal journey. “I have a lot of heart to offer in a lot of different ways.”