Women in Comfortable Shoes

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05/03/2003: "Kissing All My Children"

We've been watching All My Children for the past couple of weeks. Why would we submit ourselves to such torture? Mel discovered the show was going to broadcast daytime TV's first lesbian kiss.

The kiss was pretty mild, as kisses go. The characters, Bianca and Lena, gave it a good try, but it's rare when two straight women can convincingly perform a romantic lesbian kiss. (If you want a good example, go see Laurel Canyon. Frances McDormand. Nuf said.)

Now we're watching to see how the writers handle the continuing story line. Why? Train wreck syndrome, I suppose. I fully expect one of them to kill someone or be killed. Nothing good can come out of the relationship. It's doomed to failure. Not because it is a lesbian relationship, but because all relationships on soaps are in dire straits at some time or another. Of course, that's how they suck you in.

I remember my grandmother's devotion to her "stories," as she called them. Every weekday, she spent the early morning getting the kids off to school, used the rest of the morning to bathe and dress, and got downstairs by noon to clean house and start working on putting dinner together.

Pawpaw worked the night shift as a radio engineer at a local station, so she had to have dinner on the table about 4:30 p.m., to give him time to eat before he had to make the long, 40-mile trip out to the repeater station. While she was cooking, though, she would watch her shows--General Hospital and One Life to Live.

My grandmother was one of the sweetest people in the world and she would do anything for you, if she could. But you did NOT interrupt her when she was watching her stories.

In the early years of General Hospital, which first aired in 1963, all the scenes took place inside (surprise) a hospital. The nurse's station was where the action was. Nurse Jesse was HOT. She and Dr. Steve were passionately in love. Most of the time, that is. The melodrama--the passion, jealousy, joy, and heartache--that my grandmother loved hasn't changed at all. They are as strongly woven in the story lines of today as ever before. And the writing hasn't improved one bit.

We've been time-shifting--recording the show during the day and watching it at night. It's the only way to go, in my opinion. Fast-forward through all the storylines you aren't interested in and skip the commercials. Despite these improvements, I'm still not enamored of the soaps. Now I remember why.
The whole premise of soaps was to make the story line progress slowly and have a high degree of redundancy, so that housewives could miss a day or two every now without missing much. But that's what makes them intolerable to me.

There is altogether too much talking. Conversations that would normally take five minutes take weeks. One night's events are spread over days. In fact, on AMC last week, one woman's evening outfit stayed on her for three real-life days, while another's changed at least half a dozen times in the same time period.

The most entertaining bits during these last couple of weeks have been the occasional catfight. The girls really get into it--hitting, scratching, throwing things at each other, and even rolling around on the floor.

Hmm. Maybe I should continue to watch.