My father’s cousin Connie works herself to the bone every year to host a seder. She likes it if you tell her she’s thin enough to put on pointe shoes.
You see, she took ballet passionately as a girl until she contracted whooping cough and pneumonia, two years in a row. She had to give up ballet for a year, and then her parents wouldn’t let her go back to it. Nor did they want her to study journalism and live in then-bohemian Greenwich Village. Parents were like that in those days. So she became a social worker and then a psychologist.
Kept the physicality going, too, running marathons in her sixties.
Along the way, she went to boarding school at the Walnut Hill Academy in Natick, Mass., which ironically enough is now dedicated to the arts, but wasn’t then.
Now, one of her grandchildren is just as immersed in ballet as she was seventy years ago. And her parents don’t mind at all. Nor does Connie!