Dear Grandparenting: Here’s the big family news. My granddaughter is a stripper, and I kid you not. It gets even better, because she was the grandchild our family felt had the brains to go far.

Here’s how far she’s gone to date. Her place of employment is eight miles away in back of some strip malls. Darcy started her job after Labor Day. Two months later she’s still merrily stripping away. She claims she started to bank $1,500 a month, with more than enough left over to pay for everything else.

Darcy once said she owes something like $85,000 in college loans, but I think it’s more. I do know she drives a real nice Jeep Grand Cherokee. All her job offers after college were for minimum wage. If someone puts her on the defensive, Darcy asks them what they make each month. Then she starts to laugh like she’s the smart one.

We all have expenses, but most manage without selling their soul. Darcy is not the least ashamed of herself, unlike myself for the simple fact that I am related to her. It is obviously too late to ponder how and why my smart granddaughter ran off the rails. How do we get her back on track? Lady Blue, San Francisco, California

Dear Lady: If there’s a silver lining in your narrative, it is found in your granddaughter’s announcement she is stockpiling money monthly.

It takes discipline and long-term thinking to save money on a regular basis, and we’ll take it as a sign of her intention to eventually exit the flesh trade, a notoriously dicey business.

While we fully understand your dismay, it’s our best guess that Darcy regards stripping as a rewarding short-term business proposition, the sort of thing that might even strike behavioral economists as a rational decision.

Assuming a smart girl like her goes in with eyes wide open, she’ll get a crash course on the real cost to women who stay on the job for too long where anything goes and the customers aren’t choirboys. Vices can become habits and they land on the edges of society, newly marginalized.

If that doesn’t push your granddaughter into considering a change, close friends and family can help pull her back in. Once you understand what makes people tick, there’s a good job for that somewhere. Feed her dreams.

GRAND REMARK OF THE WEEK

Cindy Cassidy, of Fishkill, New York, is “still as fit as a fiddle at 78” to the amazement of friends and family.

Cindy has a ready reply when asked how she stays in shape. “I get my exercise chasing around after my grandchildren. It’s a workout.”