Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Once Upon A Time There Was A Guiding Light

One of my favorite short prayers -- Catholics used to call them "ejaculations" --is "Dear Lord, guide me and guard me." That's about it for me and guidance now. I don't do horoscopes, and I don't read self-help books any more. But there was a time when I watched daytime serial dramas, for me "the soaps", for some "my stories", for guidance in how to be a housewife. That sounds truly ridiculous to me now, but I was 20 years old and had no idea about how to run a home, what products to use, how to behave as an executive wife (which wasn't quite my real status) etc. Then I got hooked on the characters and the clothes until, for some reason I've forgotten, I was no longer hooked on Guiding Light or any other soap. I used to say that I stopped watching the soaps when my own life became one, but what that boils down to is that I was a single mother of four who found a job that interfered with my daytime viewing schedule. If only I had foreseen that there would be a market for publications about the "stories," I could have logged a lot more time on the couch and gotten paid for it.

One of the stories that I watched every day was "Guiding Light." Actually, I started listening to it on the radio when I was a child because my mother did. Now I have no idea about the Reva and Josh story lines and even though I've met their players, Kim Zimmer and Robert Newman, a number of times at the Hilton Head Celebrity Golf Tournament, I don't feel any current attraction. That's a good thing for me because the Guiding Light is coming to its conclusion.

Sixty Minutes did a segment last Sunday that reminded me of some things about the show and told me some things I never knew. I was very familiar with the early Bauer clan, whose generations lasted through the decades I watched, but I didn't know that "The original focus was inspirational, featuring a minister whose Guiding Light attracted the down and out, the lonely and the troubled." Was he a Bauer? I will probably never know and I will soon forget to wonder. But I will always smile at the recollection of conversations with friends of the day where we spoke about soap characters as though they were our friends too.

And as a fond final thought about the soaps, here's a memory that is about "Another World," a late-comer in 1964 to the money machine known as daytime drama. Somewhere in the 1970s, my father, who was then about the age I am now, was retired and sitting at his dining room table with his Scotch-laced coffee and calling out to the console tv in the living room: "Don't do it, Iris." This man who had emigrated from Scotland, made a good life for his wife and children, led a union local, and even survived death threats, was giving serious advice to a fictional character. I wonder now whether that was advice he really wanted to give me. Another thing I will not wonder about for long.

Farewell, Guiding Light. No one folded diapers better than I did when I was watching you.

2 comments:

Mad Hatter said...

Good to see you posting again. For me it was the Young and the Restless as I was forced to watch when I came down with the chicken pox. I had to go to my grandmother's house, and she watched that and others too.

"P. B." said...

I have a lot of catching up to do, MH. Life.

I was never a fan of Y&R. I think it started around the time I stopped watching the soaps. Anyway, it doesn't seem as though you became a fan either. :>)