Donna seemed to be destined for a life of brilliance and disillusion. 

Years back when she babysat, the Kushes never had to worry about coming home to find her drunk or making out with a boyfriend. Instead, she'd be under the bright reading lamp in a darkened room, listening to their Mahler LPs and reading books by Friedrich Nietzshe, the German philosopher.

Donna's academic career ended abruptly when Princeton refused her doctoral dissertation on Nietzsche and Albert Einstein. 

She had uncovered obscure--in fact seriously disturbing--correspondences between Nietzsche's proto-Nazi Theory of Will to Power, and the Jewish physicist's Theory of Relativity --which was also about power in its own way.

The Philosophy and the Nuclear Physics departments both deemed the idea too hot to handle. Instead of leaving Princeton with two Ph.D.'s, she walked away empty-handed.

Now she was part owner in a number of the many nail salons that dot Newbury Street, and she sang with the local band Slippery When Wet. She called this her "revenge on the stuffy academics who hijacked Feminism."