Who needs a shrink when this grandma will listen for free
Big Apple shrinks got nothing on this little old lady.
An Upper West Side professor is giving his famously neurotic neighbors a chance to kibbitz with his 100-year-old granny — who lives more than 2,800 miles away in Washington state — at a makeshift therapy booth.
Mike Mathews, an adjunct social media professor at NYU, sets up a Skype calls on his laptop at a “Peanuts”-style advice stand in Riverside Park and lets his grandma, Eileen Wilkinson, work her old-timey magic.
“She’s like a lockbox. Anything you tell her is confidential,” said Matthews, 36. “[People] express very deep things.”
In the past three months, New Yorkers have unloaded about everything from dieting to dating, says the spunky senior citizen, who was born in Utah during the Woodrow Wilson administration.
“New Yorkers love talking about themselves,” said Wilkinson, who now lives in Sammamish, Washington. “Nothing seems strange to me anymore.”
Twenty-somethings often ask her how to fix their love lives during the free street sessions.
“Relationship advice — I get a lot of questions about that, especially with young people,” she said, offering examples.
“One man, he loved this girl but she never responded. She said to this him, ‘Let’s just be friends.’ But he’s thinking this is going to be a relationship.”
So she gave it to him straight. “I told him, she’s telling you what she means!’”
The seasoned centenarian has also dished out pearls of wisdom to the ladies.
“I get a lot of girls who ask why they don’t get dates. I always say treat boys like you would girls: Just talk to them. When a girl tries to act coy and silly that doesn’t work,” she said.
The key to doling out good advice is to do more listening than talking, said Wilkinson.
“I love people, I love listening — I learn from them too,” she said.
Dozens of New Yorkers have also asked her for advice on their health, new babies and professional lives, according to the West Side Rag, which was first to report the story.
Wilkinson, who spent much of her life as a housewife and mother, has also begun giving the free chats on Facebook Live.
She has also raked in hundreds of followers on an Instagram account set up by Mathews.
“As we get older we don’t particularly get wiser, we just have more experience. And so if we can be helpful, that’s a good thing,” Wilkinson said.