Next to Normal

Exactly one week ago today, I went to see a play with the Broadway Babes, the first one in quite a few months. It was a musical, which is what we usually see – but it was different.

The play? Next to Normal. It was amazing, incredible, touching and funny. I was affected by this play more than I have been by any other in a very long time. I laughed, I cried, and it made me think. During intermission, I stood on a very long line for the ladies room with my friend, Pat, and tears filled my eyes and overflowed onto my face. No reason, other than being touched by the actions on stage.

The play is about a family dealing with mental illness and avoidance of their problems individually and together. Dysfunctional would be a mild description of the family life – filled with an abundance of overmedicating (the wife/ mother has been on meds for almost 18 years), electric shock treatments to help her forget a trauma she can never and shouldn’t be forced to forget. The husband attempts to hold everyone together, but it is too much for him; the daughter throws herself into school with a vengeance and then meets and develops a relationship with a fellow student that becomes toxic in itself. No one in that family can allow themselves to be happy. Spoiler alert: it ends somewhat happily via a strange turn of events -- the woman leaves her husband, still sees her daughter, is going for help and therapy and the family (sans mom) is healing in its own way. The husband, realizing he has avoided facing his demons, seeks therapy.

What was an incredibly touching moment for me was when this troubled woman is looking at a box filled with memories. She looks at them lovingly, remembering and crying. We all have a box of memories that we take out periodically to remember happier times.

In her case, she had never grieved the loss of her infant child and the box of reminders was almost torturous. I, too have a box of reminders filled with cards, flowers from my wedding bouquet (yes over 30 years later), a music box from a trip my soon to be husband took to Austria. Really, I have more than one box of this stuff. The character had to go through the items and grieve the loss. I have to go through these items and keep the memories in my heart rather than cluttering up my home. I had thought I would store these things as reminders to my kids someday that their parents had married for love once upon a time and had been very much in love.

She says at one point to her daughter that she knows her daughter wanted her family to be normal. The daughter replied she would have hoped for next to normal. I’m looking for that too.

So here’s a recipe I was given long ago, back in 1975 – when I lived in Columbia, Missouri and worked in the Animal Husbandry Department of the University of Missouri. The women I worked with were excited that I was newly married and didn’t know how to cook. We would have cooking Fridays when they would bring in recipes and we would prepare lunch. Then I would make that recipe for my husband the following week.

Crazy Cake

Ingredients

1 1/2 cups sifted flour

3 tablespoons cocoa

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 cup sugar

1/2 teaspoon salt

5 tablespoons cooking oil

1 tablespoon vinegar

1 teaspoon vanilla

1 cup cold water

Grease a 9" square pan.

Mix flour with the cocoa, baking soda, sugar and salt. Spoon dry ingredients into the greased pan.

Make 3 holes in the mixture, and pour oil in one, vinegar in the next and vanilla in the last.

Pour cold water over all, and stir until nearly smooth and no flour shows.

Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.

It will resemble a mud pie, but it will turn out fine!

Frosting is optional, ice cream on it is great!