In the town square in Normal, Illinois in the mid-90s of the last century was erected “The Normal Family,” a statue celebrating the name of the town and the “normal” American family. The artist, Sheila Oettinger, proposed to render what was the American family in that decade: a woman and her children.
The absence of a man outraged the burghers of Normal who demanded, and got, a man. Not only did she add a man, she had the man embrace the woman, which explained the children. The “Normal Family” then provoked the gay community to march on it under the sign “Death to the American Family.”
My own guide to the square, David Franks, professor of surrealism at the University of Illinois in Normal, explained the statue to me as a descent of the American mind from idealism to realism. He bemoaned its placement and surrender to complaint.
“Statistics show that the American family is mostly a woman raising children on her own. That’s realism. Ideally, there would be a man, but since when has anything been ideal?”
“Never,” I admitted. “Or normal.”
For contrast, David pointed up to the statue of a man wearing a sailor’s cap, perched tenuously on the roof of the tallest building in Normal, in the process of jumping to his death, with one foot already off the ledge.
“This is also realism,” said David, “but it’s so close to another world, we can overlook the conceit.”
For someone like me who thought that civic sculpture was a man on a horse, this was educational. I had heard that if the horse had one foot in the air the rider was wounded in war, and if it had two feet in the air, the rider was dead. That was apocryphal, but I liked it, and short of melting down all the men on horses in city squares everywhere, that is comforting. Controversies swirl around statues like mini-tornadoes launched by politicians to wake up the pitchforks.
In my opinion, the horses should stay on display, but all the men riding them should be melted. The horses are the real heroes of those wars. They have no idea why they are there, but they look great.
Still discussing statuary, David’s next destination on his tour of Normal took us to the furniture section of a department store on the main street. The place was crowded and David had to raise his voice to get the attention of a salesman in the process of turning upside down a chair to enlighten a young couple to its made-for-watching-TV underbelly.
“I bought a couch here,” David stated, “and took it home.”
“Well,” the salesman laughed, “where else would you take it, Professor? To your office?”
And then, David continued, “the weight cracked my parquet.”
The salesman started to look worried. He gestured Wait to the would-be chair purchasers, and said, “Is there something we can help with?”
“The couch had termites. After it had cracked my parquet, the termites started chewing up the floor.” David’s voice was louder now, and the whole store was listening. “The termites ate through the floor! The couch collapsed through the ceiling of the apartment below and crashed on a normal family eating dinner! It brought the chandelier along with it on top of the roast and the family. An American family!”
David’s voice now reached Catullian heights.
Customers and salesmen were frozen in poses Sheila Oettinger would have loved, if she hadn’t abandoned realism shortly after mounting the American Family in the town square. Here was the American family in her later abstract style:
We walked out, heads held high, like war horses, and we walked fast because the manager called the police.
“Did you ever see normal?” David asked over our second whiskey in a dive far from downtown.
“Never,” I admitted.
“There are many varieties of abnormal, but there is no normal,” said David.
I agreed with that too, but never in my life had I suspected what degrees of abnormality the future had in store. David died too soon. I lived to experience Donald Trump.
