Changing Normal: How I Helped My Husband Beat Cancer - Hardcover

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Marilu Henner is a New York Times bestselling author and actor best known for her roles in Taxi and Evening Shade and for her participation in The Celebrity Apprentice. Her life-changing books include Total Memory Makeover, Wear Your Life Well, Marilu Henner’s Total Health Makeover, and Healthy Life Kitchen. She lives in Los Angeles.

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Changing Normal

CHAPTER ONE

Marilu

I grew up in Logan Square on the Northwest Side of Chicago in a typical two-flat, but our family was anything but typical. My mother’s love of dance prompted our father to turn our garage into a dance studio so that she and five of her six kids could teach dancing to two hundred students between the ages of two and eighty, including the nuns from the Catholic church next door who came over for stretch classes. Each week the students showed up to learn ballet, tap, jazz, ballroom, and social dancing. The Friday night teenage classes were particularly popular, with raging hormones and wafting pheromones. I’m sure that most kids in my neighborhood had their first kiss somewhere on our property.

Everyone loved my parents. My dad was the guy you called if you were in trouble; my mom was the mom you called when you had a problem. She always said that he was book smart and she was people smart. It was a winning combination. Because of the popularity of the dancing school, we were the epicenter of the neighborhood and thought of ourselves as the Kennedys of Logan Square. But the dancing school wasn’t enough for my mom. She also ran a beauty shop out of our kitchen, where twenty-five women from the neighborhood would come for cuts, perms, and dye jobs. The kitchen was set up like a hair salon to the point that the refrigerator was on the stairway to the basement, and in its place sat a blue hair-drying chair straight out of Steel Magnolias.

Besides having a dancing school in our garage and a beauty shop in our kitchen, my mother’s brother, our uncle, lived upstairs with ten cats, two dogs, two birds, a skunk, 150 fish, and his boyfriend, Charles. “Uncle,” as everyone in the neighborhood called him, also taught art at the Catholic grammar school next door and held art classes after school while the dancing school and beauty shop were in full swing. He was also the neighborhood astrologist and ran a cat hospital on our roof in a structure that was once a small homemade greenhouse.

Needless to say, my family life was very special and different, and my parents’ and uncle’s creative and entrepreneurial spirits were an integral part of my growing up that continues to inform my life to this day. The Henner house was not only colorful and somewhat eccentric—with six very smart siblings vying for space and time—but it was also academic and highly competitive, thanks to our father’s intelligence and salesmanship. I was also born with an unusual memory—now called HSAM for Highly Superior Autobiographical Memory—that makes it possible for me to remember every day of my life and everything that ever happens to me. So it was never a question of whether or not I would go to college; it was only a question of where.

I FIRST FELL IN LOVE with the University of Chicago on Sunday October 6, 1968, when, as a Madonna High School junior from Chicago’s Northwest Side, I represented my school at a communications event. As soon as I walked on the campus, saw the ivy-covered Gothic buildings, and felt the gravitas of the university’s rich intellectual history, I knew this would be my college. It may have been my first visit to U of C, but the school already held a special place in my heart due to the fact that my father had gone there for a six-week course after serving in the Air Force during World War II.

Being a good student with four scholarships to prove it—including having been named Outstanding Teenager of Illinois—I knew I could probably get into any college upon which I set my sights. But because I also had this burning desire to be an actress—as a teenager I had always been performing in a play somewhere in the city—my choices upon graduation were either to go straight to New York to become a professional actress or to go to the best school in Chicago and continue taking advantage of my community theater contacts. But after my father passed away during Christmas break of my senior year in high school, I knew there wasn’t really a question. I was definitely going to apply to the University of Chicago and stay in my hometown. When the large acceptance packet arrived on Wednesday, April 15, 1970, I felt that my father had arranged it from afar.

My father’s death and the way he died—a heart attack during an argument with one of my brothers at our dancing school Christmas party—was such a shock to all of us that I found myself eating my feelings and putting on a lot of weight, especially during the summer between high school and college. In September 1970, I started my freshman year at the University of Chicago with my weight at an all-time high. I was not anywhere near feeling my best and would catch myself constantly telling people, “This is not what I really look like.”

Never one to feel sorry for myself, until I could get back to looking like the real me—which ended up taking several years—I decided to throw myself into being very colorful and theatrical from the If you can’t hide it, decorate it school of life. I ran around campus during freshman orientation wearing an enormous figure-hiding black-and-rust-colored cape, which somehow, despite my insecurities, landed me on the cover of Women’s Wear Daily. I guess big, dark, and oddball were in that year.

In 1970, the University of Chicago was unlike any other school in the country. My dorm, Woodward Court, was not only one of the first coed dorms in existence, its bathrooms were also coed. You could take a shower with your boyfriend or end up in a stall next to your crush from the down the hall—not my favorite thing about coed dorm life. I found it so uncomfortable, in fact, to use the bathroom next to guys that when my dorm held what they intended to be an anonymous ballot to determine whether or not they needed to make one of the four bathrooms women only, I raised my hand and said, “No need to make the ballots anonymous. You can put that non-coed bathroom right near my room.” And they did. I can’t tell you how many female dorm mates thanked me for what I didn’t even consider a brave move. I’m a girl who loves options, and the idea that I could have my privacy in a stall or go down the hall to shower with my boyfriend in another bathroom seemed like the best of both worlds. I’ve never been one to back off from voicing my opinion, even when it’s not the popular one.

The University of Chicago had several residential halls and, just like Hogwarts, each one seemed to house a different type of student. Woodward Court was located a block from the main part of campus, known as the Quadrangle, and it was divided by six houses: Upper and Lower Flint, Upper and Lower Rickert, and Upper and Lower Wallace. Being the only coed dorm at U of C, with its sterile, modern rooms—cinder-block walls, casement windows, orange-and-green chenille bedspreads—it was inhabited, for the most part, by atypical University of Chicago students. In other words, the fun kids. The unofficial motto of the school at that time was “Where fun goes to die,” but few of us living in Woodward Court acted like it. There was one pretty vivacious blonde named Linda with whom I hit it off immediately because she seemed like someone who would have been my friend no matter how we met. She and I bonded over our outgoing personalities, similar senses of humor, and definite boy craziness. When we first connected, she was very excited about having already met someone the first week of freshman orientation, and she was absolutely crazy about him. When our resident head and his wife invited Linda and me and four of our other dorm...