Thing is, people keep coming back. My mother is a dancer. In the '50s, while ensconced at a girls boarding school, my mother and her roommates used to sneak down to the kitchen after lights out, where the kitchen staff, all black men, were listening to the radio. These gentlemen taught my mother and her friends to dance. I can just see my mother in a cardigan that my grandmother knitted for her, in loafers with no socks, her blond pageboy hair pinned away from her face, dancing with a bemused gentleman beside a six-burner stove and a giant stainless steel sink, a gleaming assortment of pots and pans hanging overhead like a chandelier.
Hate is a very strong word.
But it is OK to hate Hitler. Never blow your own horn. As in, I'll do it for you. Elissa Schappell is a columnist for Vanity Fair and co-editor of Tin House. All rights reserved.