Shu Shubat’s family always belittled her dreams of becoming a performer. Years later she found out why: “My father had a cousin who was an acrobatic dancer in a strip club.”
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The family was so scandalized that to this day they don’t talk much about this relative. But when Shubat wanted to take dance lessons in the first grade, her father was clearly frightened, telling her that she was too old. When that didn’t dissuade her, Shubat’s father and grandmother filled her head with all kinds of ideas about the horrors that lay in store for anyone in the arts–drug addictions, poverty, despair.
But Shubat soon grasped that she was living vicariously through him. “I realized it was making me miserable. If I didn’t try to see if I could do it on my own, I felt I would literally become ill.”
–Jack Helbig
