Amy Dickinson is surprised anyone in the office staff at Mercy Hospital of Buffalo followed up at all. The author and columnist left what she calls “the weirdest message” a couple of days ago with hospital administrators, a message that went something like this:
“Hi, I’m an advice columnist on a comedy show that’s also a radio show, and I just wanted to offer some tickets to you for this radio show that’s really a comedy.”
She went on for a little while in that vein, and she was a little afraid any staff workers listening might shake their heads, mystified, and simply hit erase.
They did not, much to Dickinson’s gratitude, which is really the whole point. She is a bestselling memoirist whose "Ask Amy" advice column is read around the globe. She will arrive in Buffalo in a few days as a panelist for Thursday’s performance of “Wait Wait ... Don’t Tell Me!,” the well-loved National Public Radio comedy quiz show based on this week's news that has already all but sold out Shea’s Performing Arts Center.
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The syndicated advice columnist, more commonly known as Ask Amy, says she’ll never forget the way Buffalo embraced her during the final days of her father’s
While the show is heard locally on WBFO-FM 88.7 radio, this is the first time in "Wait Wait's" 24-year history that the touring version has landed in Buffalo, according to NPR spokesperson Emma Gordon. Dickinson, host Peter Sagal and friends were supposed to be here in April 2020, but the pandemic put those plans on ice. Buffalo now becomes – after Atlanta – "Wait Wait's" second stop on the road since then, beyond its Chicago home.
Amy Dickinson, during an episode of "Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me!" with Adam Felber, not long before the beginning of the pandemic.
The visit has particular meaning to Dickinson, 62, who writes her columns and books from Freeville in central New York, a community hammered by last week’s will-this-winter-never-end snowstorm. This will be Dickinson's 126th appearance with “Wait Wait,” and she will walk into Shea’s at a moment when the leaves on the maples are finally preparing to come out and the Western New York grass is that specifically vivid shade of early green, all of it underlining how Dickinson feels about the maddening sequence of chilly anticipation she calls "demi-spring," when she says you ache for warm days but do not put away your boots.
“It’s a chance to be in Buffalo at a time when we’re all feeling a little reborn, a chance to reclaim Buffalo in new ways,” she said of a stop whose highlights include what Dickinson and her husband, Bruno Schickel, are planning Friday: It turns out Bruno is the great-grandson of accomplished New York City architect William Schickel, and Dickinson and Bruno make a point, whenever possible, of visiting beautiful landmarks designed by Schickel and his firm.
Amy Dickinson on the "Wait Wait ..." panel with Mo Rocca and Faith Salie.
In Buffalo, that will lead them to the magnificent St. Louis Catholic Church, only a few minutes from Shea’s.
Yet Dickinson’s connection to Buffalo is even closer and more immediate. It intertwines with a growing realization she tries to emphasize both in her daily life and as a columnist: “Compassion, peace, understanding,” said Dickinson, selected years ago by The Chicago Tribune as successor to Ann Landers. “It all starts at home.”
Amy Dickinson, the author and advice columnist, with her family, 1963: Her mother Jane, upper right; Amy, upper left; siblings Rachel, Charlie and Anne, front row, left to right; father Buck, in the center.
Her example becomes the final days of her father, Buck, who died four years ago in Buffalo. “He was the worst father in the world,” Dickinson said, describing Buck as a guy who married six times and walked out on Dickinson’s family when she was 12.
Decades later, he suffered catastrophic injuries in a rollover of his pickup truck. Buck spent five years in assisted living in Smethport, Pa., where Dickinson began a cautious reengagement, until her dad suffered a massive stroke in 2018 that caused him to be airlifted to Buffalo.
He ended up at Mercy, and Dickinson came here to be with him and keep vigil. She was alone. No one knew her. It was all part of a revelation she described, day by day, on Twitter: To her deep surprise, Dickinson was embraced in Buffalo, and the people who lifted her up were not civic big shots conscious of her career or her achievements.
She was comforted, she wrote, by the “orderlies and the nurses and the army of people” involved with intensive care at Mercy," including a warm and supportive guy whom hospital administrators believe was James McDuffie, a beloved environmental services worker who died in 2021 from Covid-19.
Dickinson tweeted about all that support, with quiet awe. She thanked the everyday staff at the Hotel at the Lafayette. She described an encounter with strangers on a downtown street who not only told her about a Buffalo Bisons game at what is now Sahlen Field, but offered a ticket and – as she wrote in a thank-you note to Buffalo – eased her sadness for a night.
She ended her Twitter narrative with this message:
Amy Dickinson takes a 'selfie' at a Buffalo Bisons game during her stay in Buffalo.
"RIP to my father. He led a hair-raising life, but was granted a very gentle death. Bless the army of caregivers at Mercy in Buffalo, N.Y.”
Now, for the first time since Buck died, she is coming back. She is working with the hospital to provide tickets to at least some of those workers as a show of thanks, while her larger thought about the whole community involves a landscape of appreciation that goes something like this:
Dickinson’s column is read by an estimated 20 million people or more. Throughout the pandemic, her mail carried a heavy dose of the fractious and bitter national divide over myriad issues, but she kept her eye on people's more intimate nose-to-nose dealings with one another, and she reaffirmed what to her is a defining commitment.
Amy Dickinson, on the panel of 'Wait Wait ... Don't Tell Me!'
Friends she reveres and respects have told her she needs to be nastier as a columnist, that being “mean” works as both a 21st century writing tool and as a digital magnet for readers. Dickinson listens but chooses a different path. She is trying, she said, to go in the opposite direction.
“This is what I tell readers all the time: As I get older, my compassion has grown and my snarkiness is less,” she said. One of her major steps was removing herself from Facebook, which she said rarely made her feel better about anything but often generated an acidic anger and disdain that did nothing except keep her up at night.
Do not get her wrong: She still has strong opinions, and she still calls people out when she thinks they are being selfish or short-sighted. But in matters of everyday interaction, she said she tries to respond in a way that does not flip into using contempt to invoke humiliation, so often the currency of the day on social media. That week in Buffalo, to her, will always matter in this way:
At 63, John Poleon was beloved for his workplace selflessness, for the way he would always do a little extra to allow his co-workers to stretch out lunch or leave on time.
As a child in Freeville, her father’s abandonment hurt her, and badly. No one would have blamed her – no one, really, even would have been aware – if she declined to be at his side as he died in a city she did not know.
Instead, she chose to be here, and she fell in love with the city. She said Buck even left his body to medical science at the University at Buffalo – a decision that he made long ago, by longshot coincidence. The knowledge that came from Dickinson’s choice to show up was a prelude of what became so evident in the pandemic, of how nurses in soft shoes and hospital workers in their scrubs could emerge – at a time and place when it might seem the world has forgotten you – as the most important and supportive human beings in the world.
“My old man was a terrible person in many ways, a terrible father," said Dickinson, who was joined for the last day or two in Buffalo by her sister Rachel. "But I decided at the end to forgive him, not to relitigate everything, and somehow that is sort of like how Buffalo took me in.”
She brings that gratitude to Shea’s this week, as she awaits true spring.
Sean Kirst is a columnist with The Buffalo News. Email him at skirst@buffnews.com.
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