By KELSEY SWANEKAMP

front of a microphone. In between, it's the everyday tasks that become trying.

"My checkbook is not balanced, and my house isn't always clean," Quinn said one recent summer day, fiddling with a yellow highlighter from behind a glossy wooden desk.

And with good reason. The 42-year-old attorney, who practices at Magavern Magavern Grimm LLP, admitted that she doesn't have much free time between her day job, playing the organ and the bagpipes, teaching a theater class and performing regular gigs as one half of a blues/R&B duo. Still, her husband Jeffrey Santoro, an attorney with Pope Law Firm PC, said that his wife's commitments don't faze him.

"We're always busy, and there's always something to do, but I've never thought of it as too much," he said.

Seeds of talent

At the age of five, Quinn began experimenting with her grandfather's beat-up piano in Wales, outside of East Aurora. "I grew up pretty far out in the sticks and there weren't a lot of kids my age, so I taught myself to read notes and just started playing."

Her parents recognized her immediate interest in the piano, and she began lessons a few years later. As she progressed, Quinn said she never remembers being told to practice. Instead, she always enjoyed sitting down at the bench to play. "We didn't have cable, and so piano was how I passed my time."

As she speaks, she gathers her long, curly brown hair into an imaginary ponytail behind her head, and then lets it fall. She wears unobtrusive, simple framed glasses, but when she pauses to think, she sets them down on her desk, next to an empty bottle of Diet Snapple and a can of macadamia nuts. Her lips, a dark chocolate shade of red, are surrounded by smooth alabaster skin that forms into deep creases when she smiles or laughs.

Throughout elementary and high school, Quinn accompanied school chorus members on the piano during their private vocal lessons. She found herself surrounded by talented instructors teaching students the correct way to sing. By listening to and learning from these lessons, she established her own technique.

It wasn't long before Quinn started performing in churches. Since she was 16, Quinn has consistently played the pipe organ and sung in church choirs. "My mother had told me years ago that when you have some sort of talent and you're given that as a gift, you have a responsibility to give that back," she said.

Quinn, music director of Lafayette Presbyterian Church, said she doesn't consider herself a member of any specific Christian denomination. She said that through her experience playing in different churches, she has found and appreciated the best that many have to offer. "I have a pretty solid sense of beliefs," she said. "I consider myself to be very spiritual."

Be prepared

Although she works regularly with musicians, the talents she's acquired in her years of writing and performing music rarely enter into her legal work. But some aspects of the two jobs converge.

"I do use my performing skills sometimes. I'm someone who prepares everything. I never walk up on stage and play things off the cuff," she said. Quinn said she uses the same frame of mind and systematic preparation whether she is preparing for a day in court or an evening performance. When planning for a performance, Quinn exchanges notes, music and occasionally YouTube links with the other musicians and arranges for rehearsals when necessary.

On stage at Root Five in Hamburg one July evening, her deliberate preparation is as obvious as her ease in front of the keyboard. She throws her head back and smiles openly as she plays, swaying side to side on the bench as she strokes the keys. After finishing one ballad, she jokes with the audience, "I hate tunes with a sad ending." Motioning to the balcony overlooking Lake Erie, she says, "Don't jump!"

Whether she's working as a lawyer or a musician, Quinn interacts with all the people she encounters the same way. She prefers to be forthcoming in her work and seize any situation to joke around. Confrontational strategies, she said, fail to help her make her point. "I find that really doesn't get me anywhere. I never approach opposition that way; I don't approach people that way in life."

Nashville and NYC

Her years as a full-time musician and songwriter sparked a curiosity in copyright law. Quinn moved to Nashville, Tenn., from Buffalo after she received an offer to work as a songwriter in the early 1990s. Living in Nashville, Quinn said she looked around and found that there weren't very many women over 40 still performing.

"Women had a discernible end to their career when they stopped looking good in leather pants," she recalled. "But I didn't look at the option of going back to graduate school just to do something. It was something really focused. I knew I was going to go to law school for a specific purpose."

Beginning studies at Brooklyn Law School immediately following her 1998 move to New York City, Quinn said it was challenging to adapt to a classroom setting from her nontraditional, musician's lifestyle, but things clicked quickly enough. She found that many other students had come to law school in their 30s through similarly uncommon paths.

"It's so consuming, and you don't do it half-way. You jump in that first year of law school, and there's so much to read, and it's all so interesting that it took a couple days, but then it wasn't odd at all."

Time to move

Until her mid-30s, when she was first hired as an attorney, Quinn had never worked a typical day job. But she didn't plan to give up her life as a musician to pursue a legal career. While the long hours of a new attorney in New York City didn't allow her much time to perform, she played in a large wedding band on weekends.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, Quinn began considering leaving New York City. "Around September 11th, I was dating a New York City fireman, and we lost a lot of friends. And I played just so many funerals. There were months and months and months that I did nothing but play funerals," she said.

As she remembers those months, her speech slows for the first time from its upbeat fast pace. She stops twirling her pen and looks down at her desk. "It just changed the way I felt about the city," she concludes.

She decided to move to Buffalo with her husband after realizing that the city met all of their qualifications: four seasons, an NHL team and a job offer for Santoro.

Now in Buffalo, Quinn maintains a vivacious and challenging musical career and handles an interesting combination of work in different fields as an attorney. "It's hard to dabble now," she said, speaking of her legal practice, "so I'm lucky."

"In Buffalo, I'm able to really have my cake and eat it too," she said. "I have the best job I've ever had in my life, and I have a great life as a musician where I get calls all the time to do really interesting things.

"It's a good mix," she added. "I have a very full life."

Kelsey Swanekamp is an Amherst freelance writer.