Raymond Nahmad, was born to Henry and Vicky Nahmad in 1954 Panama City, Panama. He was the youngest of four sons, by eleven years, and grew up in a very traditional Sephardic Jewish community, with many families hailing from Aleppo, Syria. With his brothers away, studying and living in the U.S., quite uncommon for the community, my father was left to his own devices. He had family Shabbat dinners every Friday, filled with all the kibbe, lahmajun, and sambusak he could eat, and attended the Albert Einstein Institute, a Jewish day school, from first to twelfth grade, but lived a bit of a double life. Â
When he was 17, my father met his first girlfriend at a jukebox, as he attempted to put a coin in with an arm broken from a soccer game. Though he didn’t believe her at first, her name was Navidad.
Every weekend, my father and Navi would go out dancing. It was the time of Carlos Santana, and the pair went to a discotheque called The Unicorn and stayed dancing through the night. Through his relationship with Navi, my father got to do a a lot of things that most people in the Jewish community just didn’t do, including going to the Union Club and being in the court of Panama’s 1971 Carnaval.
included three months of constant traveling and partying, going to the embassy to prepare, and getting dance lessons. Every week the group had another costume and would go dancing in different locations around the country. It was all a big tourist promotion for Panama and the court was treated like royalty.
A year later, my father took part in another carnival,
when he went off to school at Tulane in New Orleans, Louisiana.
Though he didn’t read music, he joined the marching band and got to play tenor drum in the superdome from the 50 yard line. While in Panama it had been a very big deal to be in the band, he later found out that at Tulane only the geeks played in the marching band.
My father’s girlfriend in college was named Kitty Frey. Her family was wealthy, of “FREY” meat fortune, and had a house like the one in Gone with the Wind. She had fifteen brothers and sisters, who my dad was often invited to join for dinner, her uncle was the Bishop of the Diocese of Lafayette, Louisiana, and she never knew my father was Jewish, and my father could never bring himself to tell her. He wasn’t there to get married, he was just having a good time, going out disco dancing.
Working at his brother Maurice’s office in Panama since he was fourteen, my father knew for a while that he wanted to be a dentist. At the time, Emory Dental School, where he had set his sights during an interview, stated that they didn’t accept foreign students and he received a letter of rejection. In the same year, three days before dental school started, he got a call from Mrs. Shores, and a letter of acceptance, from Emory saying that there was a spot for him, as long as he could be there by Monday for class. He packed up, strapped his mattress to the top of his old car, and headed off to Atlanta. My father’s first roommate in dental school was Gary McCord, another late addition, from North Carolina. The two, along with another Gary Michaels and two others, became known as
Together, on McCord’s small plane, they would fly back to New Orleans for Mardi Gras.
In dental school, my father’s girlfriend was Emily, originally from Gatson, Alabama. She was a shopper for Neiman Marcus and a competition ballroom dancer. It was the time of the Bee Gees and when you went to a dance studio, you didn’t just go to pick up people, you went to dance.
My father would go out dancing with his girlfriend and friends, Michaels and McCord. McCord couldn’t dance. He was an American who was taught to dance by 1,2,3...1,2,3, so my dad taught him a little bit, but he was very good looking so the girls immediately wanted to talk to him. My dad talked his way by dancing, not by being so good looking. They made a good team, Gary couldn’t talk, dad could, but he looked good, so they did it together.
After graduating from dental school in 1980, my father moved to Miami, joining his two oldest brothers. He went dancing, he dated a few girls, and then, seven years after he moved to Miami, he met Patricia, my mother.
My mother was also Jewish, latin, and, though thirteen years younger, growing up listening to some different tunes, she liked to dance.