By Laurel Stowell
Wanganui Chronicle
July 14 2006

Columnist, performer and author Helen Brown will cook up her own brand of charm on stage tonight with A Slice of Banana Cake.

“It’s really my life story based on a banana cake recipe. The ingredients of the recipe are the ingredients of everyone’s life. Unhappiness, joy, a chance to change,” she said.

Ms Brown, a former New Zealand journalist and scriptwriter who lives in Melbourne, has already toured the 90 minute one woman plus piano show through parts of the North Island, but Hospice Wanganui fundraising co-ordinator John Kimbrey convinced her to do it all over again this year.

 She’s done four nights already. Tonight in Wanganui Collegiate School’s Prince Edward Auditorium will be the fifth. Then she moves on to Wellington and records the show for National Radio.

This version is slightly different from the last. It includes jazz pianist Terry Crayford for example. But it’s proving equally popular.

“Every night people listen really intensely. There are times when you cold hear a pin drop.”

Used to the hush that tells a performer she’s holding her audience, Ms Brown was unnerved to hear a lot of rustling during her Auckland performance.

 But it wasn’t a lack of interest – a woman in the audience had collapsed and was being worked on by paramedics.

Then in Rotorua she had a microphone that didn’t work well. But overall, it had been “a terrific tour”

Brought up in Taranaki, Ms Brown said A Slice of Banana Cake gave her the opportunity to air the narrowness of life in a provincial town in the 1960’s.

“There were people who were homophobic, terrified of the Japanese, anti-Catholic.”

Some aspects of life had improved a lot since then, including people being more comfortable about death and dying. In 1983, when her son Sam died, “No one knew what to say or do.”

She credited the hospice movement for some of this, and was glad to raise money for it though her perfomances.