Jane, sometimes Jenny, was born in 1942. She was a member of the Class of 1964 of Vassar College, where she was a Classics major, with a minor in French and Italian, languages she spoke fluently for the rest of her life. She taught Latin at the National Cathedral School in Washington, D.C.; worked as a secretary to the publicity agency of Louise Gore in the Washington area; taught the first dance classes to be offered at the newly co-educational University of Virginia; owned and operated a craft store and gallery in Lexington, Virginia; taught ballet and served as a piano accompanist at the Ballet Center of Charlottesville, Virginia; worked with Portland Ballet as a piano accompanist and in the costume department for more than twenty years.
A gifted and largely self-taught musician, her favorite instruments were the clarinet and the piano. In her youth, she sang in the Vassar Glee Club and in the Cathedral Choral Society of the National Cathedral. She was a talented seamstress with an instinctive sense of the quality of fabrics, and she took great pleasure in making things for others. She loved to make doll clothes as gifts for children and to help raise money for charities and arts organizations. Her life-long love of classical ballet kept her dancing for almost fifty years. She appeared onstage in performances as varied as a tap-on-toe chorus girl in the University of Virginia’s production of Anything Goes and as the grandfather in Portland Ballet’s production of Peter and the Wolf.
By nature she was open, democratic and optimistic, easily relating to a wide variety of people, but most important to her always were the joys of the private life, her family and her closest friends. Her personal style was both elegant and modest, but her greatest elegance was moral. She made high demands on herself, but generously withheld judgment of others. Her interests were anchored in the concrete world, particularly in the arts, where she always preferred the pleasures of sound, shape, color, and movement to abstract ideas and talk about them. Her world was the world in front of her. A lifelong habit of seizing the day and making the most of it helped her to face her long illness with an equanimity that those who knew her will long remember.
She is survived by her husband of nearly fifty years, Patrick James Frank of Portland, and their two daughters, Elizabeth Bryan of Flemington, New Jersey, and Rebecca Frank of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
In lieu of flowers, donations to the Maine Children’s Cancer Program or the Gosnell Memorial Hospice House are welcome.
Friends may call Saturday, July 2, 2016, from 3pm-5pm at Jones-Rich-Hutchins Funeral Home 199 Woodford St. Portland, ME 04103. Honoring Jane’s wishes, there will be no formal services.
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