the end of something
All My Children is my soap, for whatever that’s worth. I am prone toward believing that everyone has a soap opera. Maybe that’s kind of false, but I am prone toward believing. Maybe you had a soap and you didn’t realize it. Some arc on Bold and the Beautiful that really could have sung for you in the nineties, but you missed it…
I have a friend who was born the same day as a character on Guiding Light. It had been her mom’s soap, and then it became hers and she had her character - who predictably aged at a very different rate than she did. Characters on soaps can age however they please, it’s awesome. So my friend and her character, they lived their respective lives and then Guiding Light was canceled. She was bummed, but it was more than that, something had really ended. Something that happened in her family, and on TV, and that had been a part of her life from the beginning.
So many of our mothers watched soaps when they were pregnant with us, I think about that a lot. While they were waiting on us they were watching the same characters in the same rooms having the same conversations. Every day for a hour in the afternoon. Luke and Laura. I don’t know much about General Hospital, but I am aware that those two were a pretty big deal. The invention of the Supercouple.
Though I don’t identify as a big soap fan, I do understand watching soaps as significant to being a woman in America in the time that I’ve been a woman in America. Something that could be handed down, or not. Something that was yours, that was private, but could be anybody else’s too.
I remember peeping bits of soaps as a kid sometimes - disinterested in the mock sexuality of the steamy plots - but I didn’t start watching All My Children until college. My afternoons were very free then, in a way that they are unlikely to ever be again. I loved the opening sequence, the actors uncredited, one face after another after another - so many characters. And that was it for me, I picked my soap.
I haven’t stuck with it throughout the years like a real deal fan, but I like to check back in when I can. I’ve liked knowing that life in Pine Valley has gone on, at it’s own strange pace. And I think Susan Lucci is a cool weird chick even though I can’t really stand Erica Kane for too long a stretch. I respect the show’s history as well, in 1973 Erica had television’s first legal abortion. AMC is kind of hip.
I really feel for the women who have been watching All My Children for decades, because they are losing something - for better or for worse. Something that has belonged to them is ending, maybe it will still be theirs but now it will be gone. And I feel it, because AMC has been my soap and to a lesser extent, it belonged to me too.
10 months ago • Notes