Now back in the day on the Wisteria Lane of the 60s and 70s, the desperate housewives of Fairfield County, Connecticut were hooped up on all kinds of meds. I’m not sure the FDA even knew half of them existed. Uppers, downers, stabilizers, sleeping pills, anti-depression, anti-anxiety, anti-weight gain and for those nasty once a month cramps …
Muscle Relaxers.
These women would go to their family doctor (the only one in the town) and end up hooked on this Valley of the Dolls to sustain their life. They all took the same stuff so if they ran out (which happened a lot) they’d just go next door and hit the nearest medicine cabinet. Plus every woman had her favorites and her least favorites so it all balanced out.
Except for one pill …
Muscle Relaxers.
They clung tightly to them. So when my mother accidentally left her bottle on the formica kitchen counter and our French Poodle got a hold of ’em, well her muscles were as limp as overcooked spaghetti. And so when she went into the backyard to do number two, it resulted in hundreds of piles of poop. This went on for days. She was frail and could barely walk.
But that was her tough luck according to my mother whose mission was to figure out which medicine cabinet of which neighbor she could snag a bottle of them. Well their cycles weren’t similar but you couldn’t just assume if somebody was having that rainy day. Between the uppers and downers and the empty gin bottles, you couldn’t distinguish a menstrual cycle from a forced mood shift.
Well Janet did the math and got her bottle from somebody’s cabinet (her problem) showing not the least bit of concern that our dog was now reduced to a pile of balsa wood. When she ate you could see the mass of food pass right through her throat, intestines and butt.
So that’s just one of hundreds of oddities in the little town I was raised in. So when my brother started dropping more acid than Jimmi Hendrix, it really went unnoticed. I mean considering the mental balance on any woman on the jury on any given day it was a hung jury to put it mildly.