public speaking? scared? me? what? never!

amybiancolli Uncategorized 7 Comments

So, in two days I’m going to stand up at the Egg in front of 1,000 people and tell an extremely personal story, and NO, MY FRIENDS, I AM NOT NERVOUS AT ALL. Nope. Not me. I tell personal stories all the time, right? And people read them, right? It’s all just bidness as usual for me. Ho-hum. La-de-dah. And, you know, it’s not like I’ll be unwinding some unfamiliar and overly convoluted and abstruse story that I’ll be trying desperately to remember, and why the hell am I using the word “abstruse”? Does anyone use it? Isn’t it an ugly thing? And you can just forget trying to say it aloud.

But, no. NO NO NO NO NO. I’m not nervous. I’m NOT! No cause for flop-sweats. I’m not in denial, either. And no, I’m not a liar liar pants on fire. Did I mention that I’m not nervous? I’m. Not. Nervous. Public speaking doesn’t scare me. I’ve public-spoken before. The first time I ever blabbed in front of a large-ish group was my first week in college, back when Hamilton required every poor quaking incoming freshperson to deliver a speech before a group of his or her freshpeers plus one terrifying-beyond-description public speaking professor, a ferociously bearded presence named Professor Wright who thundered his critique in stentorian tones and called everyone MR. THIS and MS. THAT.

Or did I hallucinate the beard? He wore one. I’m sure of it. If he didn’t, he should have.

I don’t remember what I said in my sad and feeble efforts at oration, but I do remember that I had bangs, which I almost always had, and that I spent much of my time studying the floor and declaiming to my feet, which I almost always did, and that Professor Wright scared the proverbial penne pasta out of me telling me not to. “Young woman! Young woman! You must LOOK UP and get that HAIR out of your EYES!”

Here’s what I’m going to do Saturday night at the Egg. I’m going to tell my extremely personal story in front of 1,000 people. I’m not going to crack up with fear, because I AM NOT NERVOUS AT ALL. And in memory of Professor Wright’s all-powerful voice and beard, which together spent 34 years terrifying undergraduates out of their worst rhetorical habits, I’m not going to stare at the floor.

And, hey. At least I don’t have bangs.

do i know you?

amybiancolli Albany 7 Comments

bumper sticker
I never was someone who knew everyone. For the longest time, I was an outsider: the child of Queens who settled in Connecticut, then the Connecticut kid who went to college in central New York, then the noisy American in Edinburgh, then the New York City J-school grad in St. Lawrence County, then the North Country reporter who moved to Boston, then the Beantown resident who married a fella in Albany.

But that was 1991. After all these years in the City of Insiders, I find that I’ve become one. I didn’t plan on it. It just happened. My late husband and I bought a house. We had kids. We put them through city schools. We stayed put. And, simply by virtue of not going anywhere, I find that I’m on a first-name basis with pretty much all 97,000 residents except for Andrew Cuomo, but he doesn’t count, because he doesn’t seem to spend any of his free time at any of my hang-outs. (Hey, Andy! You getting two scoops of Adirondack Bear Paw? Me, too!)

When I first arrived here, I used to laugh about it – this back-slapping, name-dropping, weirdly tribal interconnectedness that makes Albany feel less like a small city than a really big Elks Lodge. And the more I noticed it, the more the old Democratic political machine made sense to me; how else would politics play out in a place where everyone knows everyone and his brother, his mother, his mechanic and his cat, not to mention his mechanic’s brother, mother and cat, and did he tell you his mechanic’s uncle was married by a priest who grew up on your street? Also, he knows the mayor. But then, everyone knows the mayor.

I am now one of these people. I am an Elk. (No, not literally.) I know every last resident of this city, and if I don’t, it’s a safe bet that I know their mother’s cousin’s uncle’s dentist’s baby sitter. Or the priest that married her. Or the priest’s elementary school alto sax teacher, who, by the way, goes to church with the sister of my daughter’s high school buddy’s ex-boyfriend, whose pediatrician owns a bichon frise she bought from the mayor’s sister-in-law’s masseuse, and here I confess that I’ve completely lost track of possessives and pronouns.

In fact, I am now so much an Elk that, whenever some colleague of mine at the Times Union mentions an interview with people named Whoozits and Whingnutz, my response is: Oh, sure! I’ve known Whoozits and Whingnutz forever! Their priest’s cat baptized my goldfish!

I love Albany; I love its smallness, its Smalbany-ness, its tightness and sense of community. (Read Cailin Brown’s mighty fine piece on this very subject.) And yet living here means seeing the humor in it.

Many many moons ago, I made up bumper stickers for Chris’s birthday emblazoned with the legend “Albany. . . I Like It!” He’d always joked that no one would ever start an “I Love Albany” campaign, because no one would ever cop to it; that would go against the region’s woefully understated sense of its own worth. It’s too close to New York City to feel good about itself: imagine a 5’9″ guy living next door 7’6″ Yao Ming. No matter what you say to him (DUDE, YOU’RE SMART AND CUTE AND COOL, AND YOU DON’T HAVE TO DUNK TO BE A MAN!!), he’s always going to feel small.

I like small. I celebrate it. I’m part of it. Does this make me an Albanian? Probably not. Probably only if I’d been born here, and even then I’d have to trace some strand of my family back 14 generations to some pasty little circa-1614 Dutch fur trader with ruff around his neck. Or, short of that, I’d have to trace my lineage back to the Dutch fur trader’s rebel nephew Spike, who ran off with a hot French chick from Schenectady.

You know those two, right? I’m sure you do. They were married by a priest who grew up on your street.

no thinking allowed

amybiancolli Albany, family, friends 3 Comments

Fed up with the cold and holed up inside, I was blathering on the horn with my dad. I blathered about This and That and The Other Thing, and whether This and That and The Other Thing would turn into More Complicated Things, which would then turn into Worse Things and then Worser and Worstest Things, and whether I should stop these Worstest Things from happening before they’d even started.

My dad listened quietly. He’s good at that. When he talks, he talks like nobody’s business — full-on streams of no-shit truthiness — but when he’s not talking, he just clams up and waits while I Blah Blah Blah. He’s done this the whole time I’ve known him, which is pushing 37 years now. (I met him not as a newborn, when I wasn’t yet monologuing, but as a banged and squinty 13-year-old.)

At one point, I paused mid-blather for an inhalation of oxygen and exhalation of carbon dioxide. My dad used this life-maintaining instinct to save me from myself.

“Stop thinking so much, Ames,” he said. “You’re over-thinking everything.”

He was right. I’d been over-analyzing everything, training my high-powered telescoping lens onto every little dust bunny in every little corner of my mind; if only I trained this same critical hyper-zoom on actual dust bunnies, my home might land on the cover of House Beautiful. But the problem: After he said this, I started over-thinking my tendency to over-think everything, leading me into a vast, churning sinkhole of useless solipsism. I became like some sad and deathly pallid Dostoevsky protagonist, except I hadn’t murdered a pawn broker and wasn’t exiled to Siberia, although this ass-freezing Albany winter just might count as such.

Sometimes I wish I could stop thinking altogether. Wouldn’t that be handy! If only I had the cognitive ability of, say, a gallon of milk, I could idle away my time in silent refrigeration without spending one single millisecond worrying about it. I wouldn’t be in a hurry to go anywhere, or do anything, or solve any problems, and when my dad called me on the phone, I’d be like, “Yeah, dude, so I’m in here chillin’ with the Chobanis,” and then he’d be like, “Sounds good, Ames,” and then I’d be like, “And the kosher dills just moved in, and they’re excellent company,” and he’d be like, “Can I come and visit?”

Except there wouldn’t be room for visitors in my fridge. And, lacking sentience, I wouldn’t be having conversations with anyone, my splendiferous non-blood dad included.

So this morning, I aired out my head and went for a walk. That helped, and here’s why: it forced me to a) deposit a shitload of checks that had been piling up; and b) chat with neighbors. One of the mundane, not-so-minor joys about living in the same house for 20 years is the accumulation of time and people — and the widening sense of connection that goes along with them. It always pulls me out of myself and into the world at large.

On my short walk I swapped hellos with the mailman, the young dad, the smiling guy who offered me leaf bags last fall. The bank tellers, the old friend from church, the sweet neighbors’ kid working a shift at Stewart’s. The mom of two who, driving buy, rolled down her window to talk. The woman looking in on her elderly parents. The neighbor scraping slush off the sidewalk.

Seeing him, I grabbed a shovel and began to scrape my own. Spring is coming. The Worstest of winter is over — and with it, my over-thinking. I think.

blows to the head

amybiancolli family, Uncategorized 7 Comments

Parental love is a form of madness. If you have a kid, you know what I mean. If you don’t have a kid, imagine taking the most powerful love and joy you’ve ever felt, then adding the most powerful fear, than mixing in the most powerful sense of duty and responsibility, then chugging up the entire emotional mish-mash with the most powerful sense of drive and, when necessary, the most powerful, raging thrum of righteous indignation.

Most of the time, parents do a pretty good job of maintaining our day-to-day equilibrium without crumbling to pieces with worry over our children’s well-being. But when something happens to threaten that well-being, the madness kicks in: all the love, all the fear, all the duty, all the drive. And there is not a damn thing anyone can do about it.

Two Fridays ago, my son knocked his head on the ice while skiing. Thank God he was wearing a helmet. (Message to those of you who don’t: start the #$%!@ now.) The first aid peeps checked him over: a headache, but no other sign of concussion. That night: a headache, but no other sign of concussion. The next day: a headache, but no other sign of concussion. The next morning: a headache, but no other sign of concussion.

Then, during a pickup basketball game with his buddies, he took further knocks to the head. And the headache got worse. On Monday I took him to the doctor, and again: a headache, but no other sign of concussion. On Wednesday, when he complained of dizziness, I again took him to the doctor: this time, concussion. A mild one. And over the next few days, the headache abated — a little, but enough — until Saturday, when he slipped on the ice, landed on his arm and once again jarred his poor, bruised, aching, swollen noodle.

His headache flared up once more. On Monday it worsened. On Monday night, I noticed his eyes were red. On Tuesday I took him back to the doctor, who was concerned enough to order a CT scan. The radiation makes it a big deal for a kid; pediatricians don’t order them lightly. But before anything happened, the scan had to be “pre-authorized” by my insurance. This should happen quickly, I was told; the request went out with an “urgent” attached to it, I was told; the folks at imaging should contact me soon, probably within a few hours, I was told.

They didn’t. No one did. So I started phoning people directly, lots of people, people at the pediatrician’s office, the imaging department, the insurance company. Multiple people each place. No one anywhere had received any word of any such request. Thanks to protocol, it had to be routed through a specific person specifically designated in some specific pre-authorization office, but nobody I spoke to seemed to have any of these specifics. Kafka would have less trouble getting a CT scan.

To everyone I said essentially the same thing: My son has a head injury. He took successive blows. His symptoms have worsened. His doctor ordered a scan. It’s been deemed urgent. Urgent. It needs pre-authorization. This needs to happen now. Urgent. My son. We need to know if there’s bleeding on his brain. My son. Urgent. Now. Now. Did I say urgent? Did I say now? URGENT. NOW.

The words tumbled. The ire spiked. The tears flowed. None of it was acting. It all just overcame me, this ferocious maternal surge against the system. Hell hath no fury like a mother on hold.

Finally, I found someone in radiology, a kind and patient someone with a high tolerance for weeping mamas, who laid it all out for me: call the pediatrician’s office; get someone there to call insurance for pre-authorization; then have that same person call imaging with the required number.

Which I did. And they did. And to their credit, they were helpful and apologetic. And within an hour, my son’s head was being zapped by a CT scan, which I wasn’t happy about, because nothing involving a CT scan is ever really happy. But when they sent him home, I said a prayer of thanks and almost toppled from relief and spent adrenaline. Amen amen, my son’s throbbing little bean wasn’t leaking blood inside his skull.

On the drive home, I regarded this fine, brave boy of mine with wonder. He still hurt. Sunlight and sound still caused him pain. But I felt grateful: for him; for this good outcome; for a job that gave me flexibility to make all those phone calls, and for the bosses who understood; for my education and ability to speak my mind persuasively; and for my confidence, which gave me the gumption to advocate for my child.

But then I wondered about parents out there who don’t have those things — but still have a child who needs some treatment urgently. What if their son’s brain is bleeding? What if they can’t advocate for him? What if the red tape takes too long? What if they wait too long? What if he dies?

Madness.

garbage night blues

amybiancolli "housework", gross stuff 3 Comments

Once again, it’s garbage night on my street. Garbage night! Hurray! By the sound of it, you’d assume it’s a holiday with a bonfire of some sort, like maybe a Wiccan fertility rite or, assuming we’re all in Latvia, Walpurgisnacht (after the 8th-century Saint Walpurga, though it’s hard to believe her mama named her that).

But tonight isn’t a holiday, alas. There are no pagans rubbing themselves with oil outside my window. And once again, I’m shocked by both the swiftness of garbage night’s arrival and the bafflement of my own response: As in: It’s Monday again?! Already? No way, mister! Why, surely it was just yesterday that I dragged my cracked blue recycling bin and stinky gray garbage can to the curb.

But alas, no one kids. The gods of urban garbage collection have whizzed through the week so quickly that I barely registered its passing. This has been happening to me more and more, this loss of whole weeks. Why, two days ago I failed to file a time sheet at work, because my memory of already filing one was fresh as a daisy. Yup. It only took two editors to observe and explain otherwise; apparently my memory was so stale it had begun to grow mold, although they didn’t put it that way, and no one mentioned the horrifying slab of antique pizza that I once found in my refrigerator.

Speaking of things in my kitchen, I’ve also noticed that time has been racing along at my sink with celerity, and doesn’t that sound like a vegetable? I am not going to post a photo of this phenomenon, but tonight, as is often the case, I stood there wondering what exactly happened to create this towering stack of dishes. Surely my kids and I didn’t actually eat on all of them. Something, maybe an evil overlord, must have reached into the past and transported yesterday’s grubby china into the present. That, or the clock itself is obviously up to some mischief, something beyond the mass hypnosis that led us all to set our clocks ahead one hour despite the fact that everyone agrees it’s a really dumbass idea. And the older I get, the dumbassier it seems.

I stood at the sink long enough to ask these and/or similar things of myself, but not too long, because I was holding my breath from fear of exhaling and causing my towering pillar of crockery to topple and crush me. Also, had I stood there any longer, I might actually have unloaded the clean dishes from the dishwasher and re-loaded it with dirty ones.

Instead, I walked away. I had take out the garbage, after all.

i love the smell of email in the evening

amybiancolli Figuring Shit Out (the book), writing 8 Comments

At 6:19 p.m. this evening, I hit “send” on the latest manuscript for my upcoming unhinged memoir, complete with a fresh round of edits/fixes/tweaks/trims/adds. I mention this for two reasons. First, because as Chris always said, “There are so few triumphs in this business, you have to celebrate each small victory along the way.”

And second, because I’m reminded that WRITING IS BLASTED HARD. I wonder sometimes why I do it. It’s not as though it’s gets any easier with practice, like whistling, kissing or algebra; au contraire, in some ways it’s gotten harder, as my standards have risen (and my tolerance for dreck has declined). I would compare the anguish involved to pulling out my own teeth one by one with rusty pliers, except that at some point in the last thirty-plus years I would have run out of teeth.

And writing a book: you have to be nuts to do that. Speaking of comparisons, having a baby is one analogy I’ve heard here and there — but as a woman who has endured both processes on three separate occasions, I can confirm that book-writing takes way longer and hurts way worse. Also, no book is anywhere near as cute as a newborn, although it must be said that a book doesn’t puke on you, either.

All the same, I breathed a big, sighing gulp of relief tonight. I wouldn’t say the manuscript is finished, because that’s up to my editor to say — and no manuscript is ever truly done. You don’t finish writing it. You just stop, satisfied that you’ll never be satisfied. Then you drop in a boneless heap next to your bloody keyboard, spent but triumphant.

the skin of life

amybiancolli gross stuff, loss and grief 5 Comments

Lately I’ve been thinking about scars. I have my share of them, both internal and external, literal and figurative. Some I’ve had since childhood. Such as: that half-inch scar on my chin from the time I fell in front of a roaring fire and said hello to the living-room floor.

Then there’s the faint gray spot on a vein in the palm of my left hand, the imprint of a pencil that I dropped in fourth grade and then, as I reached down to get it, hit the floor eraser-first at a precise 90-degree angle and bounced straight up and stabbed me. (And I ask you, what are the chances?) The school nurse at Washington Primary informed me that, first of all, I was not going to die of acute lead poisoning, as pencils were made out of graphite, thank God, and second, I would bear the scar of this traumatic episode throughout my life. Of course she did not in fact use the phrase “traumatic episode,” but the sight of that school-bus-yellow Number 2 dangling from my innocent appendage stuck with me for perpetuity, along with the scar.

Of the marks and defects acquired since adulthood, my favorites trace back to my eight years playing soccer and my three rounds of pregnancy and childbirth, as I’ve derived too much joy from both; I’ll never rue the day I earned those scars.

Another flaw I love is the thin white slice on the back of my right hand, below and between the knuckles of my pinky and ring finger. That one I got in the summer of 1991, just before my wedding to Chris, on the day I lugged all my worldly crap out of my triple-decker apartment in Somerville, Mass., and packed it into a U-Haul for the move to Albany.

While woman-handling a file cabinet into submission, a drawer slipped out and gashed my hand. It was deep. The blood spilled out with fulsome gore. But because I was young and cheap and also stupid; because I had paid the one-way rate; because I had to get the damn truck back to damn Boston that same damn night, dammit; and because the clock was already ticking, and I was already late, and did I mention that I was young and cheap and also stupid, I trundled off into the morning and onto the Pike with a plentifully bleeding hand. I grabbed a bottle of rubbing alcohol from my load of worldly crap and spent the trip to Albany dousing it while driving. Don’t ask me how I managed to drive and pour without the acquisition of a third hand. I don’t remember. I just remember pulling up to Chris’s apartment at the intersection of Park and Delaware in shorts soaked with blood and alcohol.

You can see why I love this scar: It marks the beginning of my life with my late husband. I can’t regard it without remembering that day, that man, that life; I look at the closed wound, and the skin that formed around it, and recall our 20 years together.

My biggest scars show no outward trace. But in the the two and a half years since my kids and I absorbed the sudden blow of losing Chris, a rough but healing dermis has formed around that wound, as well. A whole lot of life has occurred between then and now. The grief is still there. We can put our fingers on it, feel the bone beneath it, see the pucker of skin around its glossy ridge. It never fades, not completely — and it can hurt like hell during a flare-up. But our lives have grown around it. And thank God, they just keep growing.

it’s only wafer thin

amybiancolli "housework", gross stuff 3 Comments
no mints for me.

no mints for me.

Some moments, on some days, what I find most baffling in life is exactly what I love about Monty Python: It’s all so surreal, all so reductio ad absurdum, with all its stuff and nonsense taken to the wildest logical extremes.

I often think of that restaurant sketch in “Monty Python’s the Meaning of Life” — when the humongous Mr. Creosote, having gorged and puked through several courses, is approached by a waiter, aka John Cleese, bearing an after-dinner mint. Mr. Creosote grumbles “no.” The waiter insists: “Eet’s only wahffer-theen.”

The scene ends with Mr. Creosote, aka Terry Jones in an inflating fat suit, exploding his voluminous undigested stomach contents around the restaurant while the waiter bolts for cover.

This is life, isn’t it? I don’t know about you, but I’m always one wahffer-theen stressor away from egesta-heaving overcapacity and detonation. Time gets eaten up by work, by my children’s needs, by the scratching and pecking and blogging I do in my “off” hours (ummm…), by calls to the cable guy, by trips to doctor, by making dinner and tidying up (and by “tidying up” I mean “flinging dirty dishes into the sink from across the room, to hell with it if they break”), by paying bills and juggling whatever other sharp objects and obligations rain down upon me in a frenzied whirlwind.

Like, for instance. Anytime any offspring of mine brings home a form for me to fill out and/or sign and/or append with lengthy vaccination records, I know that three things will happen. One, I will panic and say, sometimes inwardly, sometimes aloud, OH CRAP OH CRAP OH CRAP, followed by I DON’T HAVE TIME FOR THIS RIGHT NOW, I’M FIXING THE @#!$%!! DOORKNOBS, followed by STICK IT OVER THERE ON THE TABLE, NEXT TO THE HORSE (and by “horse” I mean “cross-legged equine salt-and-pepper holder purchased at the Schaghticoke Fair”). Two, I will then postpone the filling-out and signing and vaccination-appending of this form until the last stupid minute, i.e., right when we’re all trying to get out the door in the morning. And three, I will spill coffee on it.

But, you know. It goes. The forms find their way to school. I find time to gas with friends, squawk on the violin or watch old episodes of “X-Files” with my son. (We loved that one about the self-elongating mutant who crawls through air ducts and eviscerates people!)

So the whirlwind carries me and all of us day to night to day, and then another night and another day, and somehow, employing some everyday magic of motherly prestidigitation, I and my offpsring make it through the week without exploding. And if anything else falls onto my plate, it’s only wafer thin.

the queen’s (fabulous) new weapon

amybiancolli beauty, random cultural observations, random philosophizing 2 Comments


Art draws joy from the unlikeliest sources, doesn’t it? For all the highfalutin things we say about it, for all the heady postmodern theorizing coughed up on its behalf, the thrill and meaning of art boil down to just this: it mines beauty from the everyday grunge of human existence.

Consider this glorious drawing by Sylvie Kantorovitz, an Albany artist and children’s author/illustrator. Sylvie, an old friend, lives just a couple blocks from me in this homey and humble neighborhood packed with friends. The bunch of us have now spent a couple of decades watching our children get older and wiser while we, curiously, do not. (And yes, as a matter of fact, I’ve ALWAYS been gray.)

Sylvie reads my blog, bless her. She saw my post the other day on plungers, plunger-related tchotchkes and my new, exciting role as Shit Lady. Much to my shock and delight, she responded to it with a plunger-themed drawing on her own blog, where she posts an artwork a day.

This one, “New Weapon,” features one of Sylvie’s recurring characters — a lanky regal sort attended by birds — as she toes up to some unseen onslaught with her plunger at the ready. “Life deals a lot of s*** cards. The Queen attacks and moves on,” says the caption.

I love this. How can I NOT love this? I would love it even if Sylvie weren’t a friend of mine, even if she hadn’t drawn it in response to my blog post, even if I hadn’t written a book with a plunger on the cover, even if I’d never discovered my mid-to-late-life calling as a discombobulated shit-prophet with her head in the stuff. You needn’t be stricken with early widowhood to realize that life will find a way to dump a steaming pile in your path some time or other, be it illness or the pain of divorce or a howling plague of lice and gnats upon the land.

Personally, I have never had to deal with lice. Neither on my land nor on the heads of my progeny; that shit has avoided me so far. (Gnats are another story.)

But Sylvie’s drawing got me thinking, again, about the gift of creation — and the creative urge itself. What better way to cope with the shit we’re given than to make something of it? Something beautiful, affirming, infectious, hilarious, inspiring? Something just a little bit less smelly and repulsive? Anyone who sings the blues knows that shit sounds damn good with flattened thirds. And it should. It’s our most abundant medium, the unrefined ore from which we craft our lives — so we may as well make it interesting. We may as well make it art.

…and all I got was this awesome t-shirt

amybiancolli family, objects and ephemera, spirituality Leave a comment
tell me you don't want one

tell me you don’t want one

Here we have an item that has nothing to do with anything — death, woe, gnashing of teeth, shoveling of snow — other than my lovely daughter Jeanne and her recent, oh-so-fabulous school trip to Italy and Greece. (Yes, she went there. And NO, SADLY. I DID NOT.)

In Rome she ate lots of pizza and visited the Colosseum, the Forum, the Trevi Fountain and the Vatican, where she ooohhhed and aaahhhed at masterworks of the High Renaissance (I wasn’t there to hear her, but it’s a safe bet) and, even better, purchased this t-shirt, which I very much heart. The coolness of Catholicism’s latest pope is a matter much discussed elsewhere, and I won’t go into the specifics of his coolness here except to observe that, you know, it’s kinda nice having a dude in charge who apparently reads the same Gospels I do. (Love and forgiveness! Rock on!) It makes me feel warm and mellow and groovy inside, like all of a sudden I want to wear patchouli and crowd surf at a Phish concert, and I don’t even like Phish.

The point is, in 24 years of being Catholic, I have never owned, much less worn, a pontiff fan t-shirt. I have never before even idly considered such a thing in hypothetical terms, as in, “Oh, my ‘Hard Rock Cafe Vulcan’ T has holes in both armpits. Crud. If only I had a Pope Benedict v-neck to replace it.” But this one? I’ll keep it. And I’ll keep Pope Francis, too.