Friday, May 20, 2011

Guilty Pleasures: Soap Operas

I've had a love/hate relationship with soaps for over 40 years.

Like many, I started watching the soaps that my mother watched. I remember coming home from school and going down to the basement to say hello. That's where my mother set up her sewing machine and a small black and white TV. I watched Days of Our Lives and General Hospital with her.

My mother. however, wasn't much of a soap fan. She watched soaps because they were the only option in those days--at least until late afternoon when talk shows with Merv Griffin and Mike Douglas aired. We'd laugh about the bizarre coincidences and outlandish plots of soaps.

But then I came back from a family vacation to learn that a friend had discovered that the man who had raised her was not her biological father. Her mother had altered her birth certificate by adding her stepfather's name. My friend only found the truth when her biological father came to claim her after her mother's death.

At that point, I figured that maybe soaps weren't that outlandish after all.



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