At 87, Rachel Wasser’s knees aren’t what they used to be. But when they start to ache, she keeps moving, right to her next dance class.

“I get so interested in teaching, my knees are the last thing I think about,” says the former dancer with the Cleveland Opera Ballet Company.

Today, not only does Wasser teach tap and line dancing at Vantage House, she also teaches and puts on musicals at another retirement community as well as at the Howard County Center for the Arts in Ellicott City.

Organization is the key, laughs Wasser, whose lively manner and petite frame make her look like she’s in her 60s, not 80s.

“I’ve always loved ballet,” she says. Growing up in Cleveland, “you’d watch and just know this is what you want to do someday.”

Once she married, she says, running a household with three children and holding down a teaching job required organization. Now it has become even more imperative. Wasser is legally blind.

So her collection of ballets and operas on videotapes, more than 200, is carefully marked. She has a place for everything and puts — as the saying goes — everything in its place.

And despite the deteriorating eyes and achy knees, she says “Life is good.”

Wasser’s career as a dance teacher began when her oldest daughter was around 7, and Wasser taught a class at her school. She soon had 250 students and was directing and choreographing performances as school fund-raisers.

Each of her three children has taken up dance or music in one form or another. One daughter teaches band at public schools. Another danced with the Joffrey Ballet in New York and today is a psychotherapist. And Wasser’s son, a retired CPA, is playing the piano once again.

And his mother’s newest project? She’s putting together a cabaret at Vantage House. “I have my kids doing microphone work,” she says of her volunteers learning how to hold and keep the microphone up to their mouths. Her “kids,” she laughs, are 75- to 85-year-olds.