Suzanne Mateo of Milan, NY, tells a horrific story about being swindled out of her retirement savings. It happened this summer shortly after she was widowed and retired from a long career as a nurse and hospital administrator. Scams preying on the vulnerable and elderly are on the rise and according to Gino Cortesi, a softwear designer and student of AI, they are likely to get more sophisticated and hard to resist. Mateo is trying to get past shame and embarrassment to warn others.Suzanne Mateo of Milan, NY, was a nurse and hospital administrator for more than 30 years in a variety of health care settings. She served as vice president for Patient Care Services at Putnam Hospital after a diverse career including stints as a educational administrator and family therapist.Gino Cortesi of Boston is now retired after a career in softwear engineering centered on design for easier user experiences, a field in which he hold all or part of seven patents. He is fascinated by the development of AI and its impact on society, including its implication for hacking.

Rosemary chats with Anthony-Bourdain like chef and international tour guide Ric Orlando on the shores of the Ionian Sea about phallic cannoli, why there is little hummus in chickpea-rich Sicily, and the connections between cheese and bulls and eating veal.

Ric Orlando is a renowned chef, restauranteur, musician, writer, food marketer and tour guide through Italy and Sicily. He was. a pioneer of Hudson Valley farm-to-table movement, ran beloved restaurants in Saugerties, Woodstock and Albany, produced and starred in the PBS series Ric Orlando’s TV Kitchen; beat Bobby Flay and won Chopped — not once but twice — on The Food Network.

He written books and does a Substack newsletter on food, maintains a social media presence on a series of platforms including Facebook and Instagram. He imports and sells specialty Sicilian and his own products and sauces and hosts small group travel around Italy.

Dementia is a family disease that affects not just the afflicted person but everyone who loves, depends on, and cares for her. Alzheimer's and related diseases don't kill off their victims right away but instead drains them over years of their ability to think or do or even really be themselves. Watching that happen is horrifying and tests caregivers. Writer Will Doolittle knows this. Seven and one half years ago his wife Bella was diagnosed with Alzheimer and told she probably had eight years to live. He writes about how the disease has changed their lives. Rosemary's family care for her 98-year-old mother who is slowly disappearing. Ruth Fish is a nurse practitioner who offer support and hope and sees the bright spots for families like Doolittle's and Armao's.

Will Doolittle is 64. He met his wife, Bella, when he was 13 and living in Saranac Lake, and she came over from Lake Placid to see her boyfriend, Dave, who was one of Will's best friends. Bella was 15.

Will worked at the Adirondack Daily Enterprise, his family’s business, as a teenager, and then again after college and some time abroad. In 1986, he was living in Lake Placid,, working on the newspaper there, when he went into the Lake Placid bar P.J. O'Neill's and, after pushing through a crowd, saw a bartender he thought he recognized.

"I think I know you," he said to Bella.

"Yeah? Half the guys in here think they know me," she said.

Before long  they were seeing each other. After several months, Will moved into the apartment in Saranac Lake where Bella lived with her two children, Travis and Ginny, who were 8 and 7. 

Will and Bella got married in April of 1990, and the family moved the next year to Malone, where Will worked as the editor of the local paper, the Telegram. 

Bella commuted to Saranac Lake to continue working as a photographer for the Enterprise, then took a job as a bartender at a notorious biker bar in Malone. 

They moved to Glens Falls in the fall of 1993, where Will had taken a job as an editor at the Post-Star. He worked as night, Sunday, features, editorial page and special projects editor — not all at once — over the next 29 years, retiring in January of 2022 to stay home and take care of Bella full-time. 

Bella worked various jobs and finished her undergraduate degree, then got a master’s and a teaching certificate while she was working full time as a domestic violence counselor at Catholic Charities. 

Will and Bella adopted their son Zo in 1990 and daughter Tam a couple of years later. 

Bella took a job as a teacher and administrator for the Ticonderoga branch campus of North Country Community College but was forced to retire in 2018 after informing the college in 2017 she had been diagnosed with Alzheimers.  

Will was able to keep working for a few years but eventually had to stop. He is now writing a memoir that will include what’s happening with my life now with Bella. He also writes a Substack column about that which you can read here: https://kentingley.substack.com/

Ruth E. Fish is a certified family nurse practitioner with more than 35 years of experience in internal medicine and geriatrics. She is an educator for the Center for Excellence for Alzheimer’s Disease at the Glens Falls NY Hospital. She holds a bachelor’s degree in nursing from SUNY Plattsburgh and a master’s from the Medical College of Virginia at Richmond in Family Nurse Practice and Community Healthy. She has been awarded the Warren County Bar Association’s Liberty Bell prize for work helping adult reach physical and neuron-cognitive wellness. A nurse beloved by patients she also has an extensive volunteer history including helping refugees coming into her community. 

They seem like so sweet and wholesome, Victoria Houston and Dianne Hagan, in love with the outdoors and nature and their families. But both harbor dark souls and foul plots that they pour out in murder mysteries that have evolved into series with recurring characters and locales. Houston has penned the long-running Loon Lake Mystery series and Hagan the Cadence Mystery series . The two authors talk about the fun in murder,  turning their hometowns and some of their friends into characters and why it is that women are such masters of this book genre.

Rosemary podcasts live from New Orleans in this episode pulling members of JAWS, a 50-year-old feminist women's organization away from workshops at their annual Camp to talk about their current diverse assignments, from national politics, to mentoring young women journalists in reporting careers that make a difference, to writing about isolation, disinformation and other indignities of the Covid age.

Two aspiring New York State Senate candidates from the Capital District talk about indignities and inconveniences of a political career, including begging for money, plastering neighborhoods with lawn signs, and coming up with a Plan B in case they lose.

Alvin Gamble  is a Colonie NY Town board member running for the District 43 State Senate seat. He grew up in Colonie, graduating  from Colonie Central High School in 1979. He then went to SUNY Brockport and has worked since 1983 for what is now the National Grid Power Company. He and his wife Abbey, a nurse, have two children. He is a lifelong union member (Electrical workers) and an ordained deacon at his Baptist Church in Albany. He is an advocate of reproductive rights for all, protecting the environment and public education.

Minita Sanghvi is the Commissioner of Finance on the Saratoga Springs NY City Council. She moved with her family to the US from India in 2001 and went on to earn an undergraduate degree in accounting, an MBA and a PhD. She worked first in industry and now is a tenured business professor at Skidmore College. She is also a parent.  She was the first LGBTQ+ member of the Saratoga council and is running to become a state senator from the 44th District. On the city council she helped get new sidewalks, parks and playgrounds. In the senate she hopes to help towns get infrastructure dollars, and supports women’s access to health care and LGBTQ+ rights.

On The Brink of an Election Season

Ted Bridis spent 30 years in journalism working for The Associated Press and Wall Street Journal, including 11 years running AP's Pulitzer-winning investigative team in Washington. He now teaches political and public policy journalism full time at the University of Florida as the Michael and Linda Connelly senior lecturer in investigative reporting. At AP, Bridis was the reporter who first discovered Hillary Clinton's email server in her basement, and his investigative team first exposed illegal foreign lobbying by Donald Trump's campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, who subsequently was indicted by the Justice Department, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to prison until Trump pardoned him.  Bridis was also among six AP journalists whose phone records the FBI seized under the Obama administration in a leaks investigation. In Florida, Bridis founded the Fresh Take Florida news service, which distributes original reporting produced by his students on Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Legislature to more than 100 news organizations across the state.

Casey Seiler is the editor of the Albany NY Times Union. He previously served as managing editor, Capitol Bureau chief and entertainment editor of that newspaper. He is a longtime contributor to WMHT's weekly political roundup "New York Now." Before arriving in Albany in 2000, Seiler worked at the Burlington Free Press in Vermont and the Jackson Hole Guide in Wyoming. A graduate of Northwestern University, Seiler is a Buffalo native who grew up in Louisville, Ky

All five of the Armao sisters in one place is a rare event but we captured just that in this last podcast before OTB takes a three-week summer hiatus. We talk about the validity of birth order research from our perspective, about Justice Altio's wife and his flags, and about the summers we have shared and will share over the next three months. In birth order: Rosemary, Jo-Ann, Kate, Lisa, and Christine

Early in May, On the Brink featured some smart, angry women talking about attacks on American women in the form of legislative fiats and judicial rulings that banned abortion, criminalized miscarriages, inserted government into their bedrooms, and hobbled doctors. Now we are giving men a turn to talk about abortion: what it has to do with them and why they are standing up for and with women. You'll hear no fundamentalist preachers extolling the sanctity of unborn life on this program. You will hear from a public relations expert who watched a brilliant campaign against Roe unfold over the past 50 years, a former newspaper editorial page editor who's seen opinion about abortion swing wildly, and from a long-time Planned Parenthood official who has ideas about fighting back against anti-abortion extremists.