It's Embarrassing

Embarrassing. As I write that very long word, half a dozen embarrassing scenarios run through my mind. Shall I pick one? Shall I embarrass myself by revealing my embarrassment to a wide audience?

 

It's embarrassing to admit that I used to watch soap operas. In fact, I've lived through two separate addictions to soap operas. The first was in Alabama, when I had three children under four. I remember watching "The Secret Storm" and "The Edge of Night." I would iron my husband's shirts and my daughters' little puffed-sleeve cotton dresses. (There was a right way and a wrong way to do those tiny sleeves, both ways led to burned fingers.)

 

In the living room of that rented house on Buena Vista (pronounced "beeyuna vista"), while the TV fed me its dramatic stories, I stood at the ironing board making my family smooth and cared-for. The three children were scattered around the room in various occupations, depending on their ages. I can picture the scene, but I can't remember any of the characters or stories from those soaps.

 

After we left Alabama, I stopped ironing and stopped watching the soaps. But the early years after I moved to Toronto were very lonely. It took me a long time to begin to make friends, and in the interim I rediscovered soap operas.

 

Our house is the perfect size for two people, the two of us who live here now now. But when we moved into it there were the two of us plus three large teenagers. The only space I could find for sewing was a tiny corner of the almost-unheated, almost-unfinished basement. I spent most afternoons alone, sewing, perfecting my skills by making the same Vogue pattern over and over in different fabrics until I was perfectly familiar with it.

 

As I sewed, I kept the TV on in the one little finished room on the other side of the basement. I couldn't see the TV, but I could hear it. For two years I listened, several afternoons a week, to those stories, without ever knowing what the characters looked like: "All My Children," "One Life to Live," "General Hospital," and "The Young and the Restless." For two winters my hands and feet froze in the unheated basement as I sewed, listening to the disembodied and overwrought voices of soap opera stars.

 

And then I found myself drawn to the basement soaps even when I wasn't sewing. No longer at the sewing maching, now I sat in the room with the TV and was finally able to see the characters whose voices I'd been hearing for two years. To ease my conscience as the soaps eased my loneliness, I knitted.  

 

Eventually, my own life became more interesting and I let go of my soap operas, one after another. It hardly hurt at all, because they were being replaced by the odd sensation of living my own life.

 

But there was one exception. I stayed hooked on "The Young and the Restless," with rich and handsome Victor, pig-faced Nikki, the grande dame Mrs. Chancellor, and Ashley (played at the time by an actress who was rumored to be a man in drag).

 

I watched the Y&R two or three times a week. Because of the glacial speed of soap-opera action, you could miss three days in a row and not feel the slightest confusion the next time you tuned in. Then one day, for no reason, I asked myself why I was watching this junk, and I didn't have an answer. So I stopped, cold turkey.

 

I had always watched the soaps avidly but with a derisive and critical eye, so my quitting wasn't because I suddenly became aware of the vacuous story or the random changes of behaviour designed to fit a new plot (the formerly good guy becomes evil, the sweet teenager turns into a slut). I had tolerated this all along. But one day I just said, "Enough." What a relief that was!!

 

I think that no one can tell just by looking at me now that I was once addicted to soap operas. How embarrassing it is to admit it!

 

 

Copyright 2009 Ann Tudor   

www.anntudor.ca
http://scenesfromthejourney.blogspot.com