One of my fondest memories of my misspent youth involves my dear grandmother and her passion: soap operas.
Between noon and 4 P.M every week day, my Grandmother lived in the world sponsored by Proctor & Gamble and other companies and only a real-life blood flowing emergency would make her leave it. She religiously watched and immersed herself in shows such as: The Secret Storm, The Edge of Night, The Guiding Light and Search for Tomorrow. I can still see her standing behind an ironing board, watching her shows, dressed in a frumpy polka-dot dress with her pink apron, ironing our daily laundry.
Sadly, because I was a young lad who thought he knew everything there was to know about life and the world, I always teased her about being so wrapped up with her TV characters. I would laugh out loud when she would yell at a character on TV to watch out because the bad guy was sneaking up behind him. I promised myself that I would never be so involved with a show that it would become the passion with me that her shows were to her.
In short, I promised myself not to turn into my Grandma, but it was a promise I wasn’t destined to keep.
Over the years, I got involved with TV programs like Perry Mason, Have Gun Will Travel, Moonlighting, The Avengers, The Wonder Years, Hill Street Blues, Star Trek:TNG, Ellery Queen (one of the wittiest and smartest shows ever on the tube with a great opening musical theme), St Elsewhere and yes, Justice League. Each one of these programs became a “must stop whatever I’m doing to sit down in front of a TV.”
One might notice that with the exception of Justice League there aren’t many programs on this short list that aired first run after 2000. I don’t know if that’s a comment on my opinion on the state of television screenwriting or the fact that my taste has changed and my soap operas of choice are now found on the comic pages of my daily newspaper.
My local newspaper carries 43 daily comic strips of which two are ones that I MUST read every day:
– For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston. I have followed this strip almost from the beginning and have watched the Patterson kids grow up as I watched my own family grow. I was heartbroken when Farley died saving the youngest child, April. When Elly’s mother, Marian, died I had to reach for a handkerchief at the way her father, Jim, handled the loss. I only hope I do half as well when (if) I’m in that situation. I’m one of the few, I guess, still hoping that Elizabeth will dump her current boyfriend, Paul, and marry her childhood sweetheart, Anthony, before the strip reportedly ends next year.
– Funky Winkerbean by Tom Batiuk. This strip has dealt with so many issues over the last twenty-five years, I’d be hard pressed to recount them all. But any strip where the lead character is a recovering alcoholic; where one character was awarded a violin music scholarship only to lose her right arm in a traffic accident on graduation night can not be a bad one. It’s a strip where my favorite character was pregnant while she was in high school and gave birth to a son who she put up for adoption (but what she doesn’t know, and the long time readers do, is that her infant son was adopted by the principal of the high school where her husband teaches and that her son is now a senior in her husband’s English class).
No, Grandma, I don’t watch the soaps on TV like you did. They haven’t snared me the way they trapped you. But Paul is the wrong man for Elizabeth and I wonder if Darin will ever know that his birth mother’s cancer has returned with a vengeance and that he has a sister named Summer.
I suddenly have the feeling that my Grandmother is looking down on me and laughing and for the life of me I can’t imagine why.