The amazing Kate Casey.

Welcome back for another episode of Reality Life with Kate Casey, and welcome back for this Saturday series episode.

My guest today was raised by two of the most dynamic people you could imagine.

Her father went by Tank, 6'3-tatoed, the only man in his country club with ink on his arms. He had a

signature party trick, swim a full lap holding the lit cigarette in his mouth underwater, and then

surfaced on the other side and just keep smoking it. He'd been kicked out of Cornell for a combination

of bad grades, partying, and won too many pranks in the administration. His very Catholic family, he was the

grandson of a New York State Senator, tried to settle him down with an arranged feeling engagement.

Now his response was to announce that God was calling him to the priesthood and he spent two years

in seminary before deciding that wasn't his path either. Eventually he came back, co-founded an insurance company

with a couple of friends, and after a brief engagement to a former Miss New Zealand, met a woman

named Cassie at 34, and it was love at first sight. Cassie was a professional dancer, once photographed

teaching belly dance at the United Nations for Life magazine.

She went on to teach jazzercise, and she would pick her kids up from school in

foliatard and leg warmers. She never stood still, she never wore black, and on every single

phone call, she had one word for her daughter, girly. Frank and Cassie raised my guest in her two brothers in

Bedford, New York. And the night before her wedding, her father pulled her and her husband to be aside

mid-rehearsal dinner and told them something that would end up becoming the entire spine of the book

we're about to talk about today. You don't get to choose the cards you're dealt.

You only get to choose how you play them.

That choice, he told them, determines everything.

My guest is Kate Durgy,

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