A 23-Year-Old's Diary Entries From Mid-October, 1974 | Thought Catalog

A 23-Year-Old's Diary Entries From Mid-October, 1974 | Thought Catalog

Confessions of a Soap Opera Addict | Medium

Confessions of a Soap Opera Addict | Medium

Friday Afternoon in Williamsburg: After 41+ Years, Watching the Last Episode of "All My Children"

We were 18 years old and in our first semester at Brooklyn College on Thursday, December 11, 1969 when we read this article in The New York Times:

SOCIAL ACTIVISM GRIPS SOAP OPERA

Heroine on Serial on A.B.C. to Be a Mother for Peace

By George Gent

The daytime serial, or soap opera, is in the process of going activist.

Behind the agonized cries emanating from the traditional themes of troubled marriages, misalliances and fortune-hunting males, a soul engagé is apparently struggling to emerge and, if the signs are right, its time may have come.

The latest indication of what may be a trend comes from the American Broadcasting Company, which has announced that it will televise, starting Jan. 5 at 1 P.M., a new daily daytime series entitled "All My Children," whose heroine will be a peace activist married into a wealthy conservative family.

We were then involved in the antiwar movement, having worked in the New York headquarters of the Vietnam Moratorium in October, and active politically as a volunteer in Mayor John Lindsay's re-election on the Liberal Party line a few weeks before. The week All My Children premiered, we were in the viewing audience most days, except when we had our draft physical and French final.

We also loved soap operas, which had gotten us through some hard times in our teenage years and which we'd be watching for the rest of our life.

After a few weeks, All My Children didn't seem all that radical. A Sunday Arts and Leisure article in the Times dealt with the Vietnam War storyline, but clearly the usual soap opera plots held sway in Pine Valley. That was fine with us, too, and we kept watching -- not totally faithfully, but periodically and sporadically, as we moved into our twenties, thirties, forties and fifties.

Wherever we moved to, whatever our problems, we could turn on ABC at 1 p.m. or 12 p.m. or whatever time All My Children was on in that TV market, and we'd see familiar faces from our past.

Now we're 60 years old and All My Children aired its last TV episode this afternoon. (It will reappear next year as an online serial from Prospect Park (a different one than we've been going to since the 1950s).

Heavy rain and an age-related sports injury (torn gluteal muscle) prevented us from getting up to the Upper West Side to Soap Opera Digest columnist Carolyn Hinsey's farewell viewing party at Blondies Sports Bar, just a few blocks from the apartment where we used to watch the show in the 1980s.

But it was nice to see the finale at home by ourselves, the way we usually watched the show.

Richard Grayson column in Orlando Sentinel on Soap Opera Careers

Richard Grayson has a column in the Orlando Sentinel today (December 6, 1997) on getting career advice from soap operas:

I was a kid when I first noticed that characters in daytime dramas could go from being construction workers to brain surgeons as rapidly as the plots dictated.

Bruce Sterling, a character on the old CBS soap Love of Life, metamorphosed in the space of a decade from high-school principal to paper-company executive to college dean to newspaper editor to the mayor of his city.

If Russ Mathews on Another World could leave town one day as a drugstore clerk and return a few months later as a fully qualified physician, I figured I could pull off career changes just as easily.

I got into my first career as a college English instructor somewhat by accident. I had been working in a library when I was asked to take over the night class of a professor who had died suddenly. I was terrified the first time I faced my students, yet the dread I felt before each class soon turned into sweet anticipation as I became more comfortable as a teacher.

But after a decade as a college English instructor, I began to burn out. At my Florida community college, each year I taught 12 courses and graded about 150 student essays every week.

I didn't want to be doing this for the rest of my working life, but teaching was the only real profession I knew. Could I switch occupations as easily as the folks on As the World Turns did?

Well, not quite. I learned that it was helpful to pick a new career that was somewhat related to the old one. When computers were introduced at our college, I took to them right away. Soon I knew six computer languages and numerous software programs and got a job training public-school teachers to use the new technology.

Training people how to use computers wasn't all that different from teaching students how to write essays, after all. But after several years as a computer trainer, I wanted to try something completely different.

When I watched Trevor on All My Children transform himself from a cop to a lawyer so painlessly, I figured I could do it, too - although I knew that it would take me three years of law school, not the three months in which Trevor went from arresting crooks to defending them in court.

At law school, I met other older students who were downsized by corporations or who left careers in the military or journalism, and we encouraged and supported each other in our transitions.

Since graduation, I've worked as a lawyer involved in education and computer-technology issues. I've been a lawyer for three years now, and, as much as I enjoy legal work, I'm again beginning to get restless - even if I'm no longer so young. Ever since Marty on One Life to Live exchanged her life as a pianist for a new one as a surgeon, I've found myself surfing Web sites of medical schools to learn about their admissions policies.

Richard Grayson's Funhouse column in the Hollywood Sun-Tattler imagines soap operas set in South Florida

Richard Grayson's Funhouse column in the Hollywood Sun-Tattler today (December 20, 1986) creates soap operas set in South Florida.