My brief affair with Soaps

 

It seems the age of Soap Operas is finally coming to a close as ABC announced it would not be renewing their remaining soaps this fall due to decline in ratings.

Believe it or not, I was briefly hooked on a soap one summer - All My Children to be exact, which will be ending its 41 year run this September.

It was the summer of 1994, I had just finished the 4th grade and was on summer vacation. My mom regularly watched All My Children, however due to running me around from one thing to another she got in the habit of recording the day's episode and watching it later at night (usually after my sister and I were in bed). But there was going to be a tornado on an upcoming episode and since we live in Illinois where tornadoes sometimes occur in the warmer months, mom wanted me to see the episode just to get some idea how serious a tornado can be and the destruction it can cause.

Of course the actual tornado happened at the end of the episode and in order to see the aftermath I had to watch the next one too...

...and see how it affected the lives of everyone on the show so drastically, I had to keep watching to see how everyone eventually came out the destruction and moved on in their lives.

Plus, one storyline had a girl (Julia) who had a chandelier fall on her during the tornado, badly scarring her face and she ran away soon after. I recall a guy she met on the street (Noah) found her and took her in and they started to fall in love. This was quite controversial though as Noah was a black man and Julia's family would be appalled at her for being in an inter-racial relationship.

This was also one of the seasons where Sarah Michelle Gellar (in her pre-Buffy days) played Erica Kane's long-lost daughter Kendall Hart, who during the tornado got trapped under a fallen beam.

Looking back, I don't remember too much, just that that summer I was hooked following the plotlines that resulted due to the tornado that shook Pine Valley, Pennsylvania.

I think my mom was glad when school started back up in the fall - I don't think she wasn't too thrilled that her 9 year old daughter was hooked on a daytime soap opera, lol...