On Second Thought....... More thoughts regarding The Book of Mormon

Last night, a friend and I were discussing the musical that we had seen together at Proctor’s Theater, The Book of Mormon.  Interestingly, she was having similar thoughts to my own.  We had been analyzing our initial reaction and comparing it to the feelings that were surfacing after the fact.  Thoughts have been running through our brains and our feelings, in a sense, had been evolving over time.  I guess this is a good thing about the musical.  I didn’t give the other plays I had seen a second thought whereas this play certainly made me think.

I guess I would have to say that I was truly confused by my own reaction and the best way to share what I have been thinking and feeling is just to jot down the thoughts that have come to me.   I’d love to hear the reactions and thoughts of others who have seen the musical.  

Some of the humor in the play was innocent enough but I am sure some of it was shocking and insulting to a lot of folks.  For one thing, every group portrayed in this story is ridiculed in one way or another.    It reminded me of when we were adolescents and young teenagers and we would call each other by the ethnic slang used for each ethnicity.  Whether you were Irish or Italian or Polish or Puerto Rican, there was an insulting nickname for your nationality.  There were also insulting, rude jokes for each and every ethnicity.   Was this funny?  Could it be overlooked? How insulted did we get when your own group was ridiculed? I guess this depended on a lot of things, didn’t it?  

Another memory that came to mind is from an incident that occurred when I was a very young student nurse – probably no more than 18 years of age.     I had to get on the elevator carrying a human leg to the morgue.  The leg, which was wrapped somewhat like a large roast beef, was heavy both physically and mentally.  I stood in the back corner of the elevator, facing the front and tried my best not to make eye contact with anyone who entered the elevator.    It was a horrible feeling holding that leg.  There were other more horrible situations that occurred during these three years of nurses’ training and we had to come up with a way to let off steam and deal with the shocking feelings that surfaced from painful realities that we were facing us on a regular basis.   Things like very old people (probably the age I am now) yelling out for their mothers long after their mothers were gone; psychiatric patients repeating silly phrases over and over again, things like, “Miss Murphy, I’m a coffee hound”; and so on and so on.   These were heartbreaking realities; these were certainly not things to be laughed about.  But what did we do?  We sat in the nurses’ cafeteria over lunch or dinner or midnight snack and we made silly, stupid, irreverent jokes about these situations and then we laughed and laughed until we couldn’t catch our breaths and almost peed in our pants.    Sometimes, we just need to be “irreverent” and we just need to laugh so as not to cry.   Sometimes, we just need to lighten up.