Well, I've been teaching stress management for a good thirty years,
and I have to tell you: People are going insane.
(Laughter)
It's just unbelievable, isn't it?
I mean, I think about my origins.
I'm a Sicilian girl from Brooklyn
and was born into this Italian family with a lot of drama
A lot of drama, I mean, you know, it's like an opera.
You take the garbage out; you got it: "Oh, taking the garbage out, oohhhhh!"
And you have to kiss everybody,
because you might not come back,
who knows? (Laughter)
But the word stress didn't even exist then,
nobody talked about stress.
It was the Depression, it was World War II.
My grandmother had three sons in the army,
and she was always suffering because of that Sicilian martyrdom,
every time I looked at her: "Oh I suffer!"
But we laughed a lot.
You know what else we did? We ate a lot.
We ate, and when we were eating, we practiced to eat again.
We talked about eating all the time.
We had some fun amidst the angst that was going on.
And people just seemed to roll with the punches.
I mean, they accepted the reality
and they had a community of people that helped them.
They were called neighbors. You remember them?
(Laughter)
Nobody comes to your house any more
for a sausage or a meatball (Laughter)
because what if your LDL is too high? (Laughter)
or something might go wrong, you know,
and who are these people, anyway?
You see them coming to the door,
you "Aaaah!" (Laughter)
"I don't want to see any people! I have my show to watch tonight.
The one with neighbors in it.
(Laughter)
I don't ever remember my grandmother standing in front of the sink going:
"Oh, Madonna mia, I'm so stressed!" (Laughter)
I can take it no more. I got to go to my spin class.
Maybe I forgot my kale smoothie this morning (Laughter)
and I don't know where my Fitbit is. (Laughter)
We have gotten to a place
where we don't know how to see humor in our lives
because we don't have those people stopping by --
the characters that were once in my life,
that provided me with historical references
that I could put in my books.
We don't have those meals together like we often did,
where we talked and laughed and shared stories,
and if you acted up, "Huh, lots of luck!"
You got told "What's wrong with you?"
And I went to Catholic school.
I had the Sisters of perpetual mood disorder.
(Laughter)
Trust me, they didn't like you to get away with anything.