Remembering my Aunt Anna at Xmas time

Making those skeletons dance--Anna's Way

WHAT ANNA TAUGHT ME

Because my mother, Anna's older sister, Margaret was the constant reader, writer and thinker in our family I thought that she was my most active life teacher. After all in constant consultation with her brother Joe who was a Christian Brother and taught school all his life, she was always reading to me and taking me to libraries and encouraging me to prize my mind as she prized hers—they cannot take your education away, she often told me. My mother sort of knew that "they" would try to take anything else one had. gathered on life's precarious journey.

Anna, on the other hand, only read the newspaper and style and fashion magazines. Her favorite activities were Shopping, Bingo. Gambling and experimenting with make up and ironing new clothes. She was vain and gossipy and mocking and very funny. What did she have to teach me?

It turns out that she taught very valuable lessons in three areas—loyalty, vanity, and show business.

Let's face the music and dance.--That was her unspoken but constantly enacted performance.

Anna taught me the value of putting on a show. She taught me the heroism of cheerful, uncomplaining show boating.

Many days it would get very difficult to amuse my two sisters who had Down syndrome and were extremely active and restless. When my mother had exhausted all of her and my resources—play store with them, Norma, play hide and go seek. Read to them. She would pull out the last and unfailing stop--

Time to put on a show.

And depending on the time of year and what holiday season we were near we would begin practicing the Carols, or the love songs or the patriotic airs or Irish favorites. Then Margaret would take up her top hat and cane and I would act as Master of Ceremonies.

We would wait until Anna came home from her day job at the Corning Glass Works. And when she came through the door on the second floor on Englewood Avenue—she would see the costumes and the drum, and after a day inspecting glass from a hot furnace, she wold take her turn and do her set pieces—a sailor's hornpipe and a kind of modified can can. We would all join in the uproar and applause and bows--we had made it through another day.
 Years later when my mentor quoted Bernard Shaw's remark--”We all have skeletons in our closet, the trick is to make them dance,” I got it instantly-- wept and laughed copiously—that advice went straight to my heart—with Anna we certainly had made them dance.

Yes, Anna taught me the value of putting on a show. the heroism of cheerful, uncomplaining show boating.