SOAPS

Soaps. No, not the kind you wash with… I’m talking about television soap operas, our stay-at-home mom’s favorite pastime. Youngsters sometimes latched on to watching the addictive daytime dramas. How did those soap operas fashion our lives?

In a casual conversation with my friend Marita, we got on the subject of the daytime soaps when I mentioned that at our 1975 wedding, my husband and I requested the band play a theme song from one of the popular daytime soaps. Although unsure today which one it was, I knew that my mother and her dear friend Mildred (See blog post Nearly Sixty Years Between Shows, dated May 21, 2019) also, a stay-at-home mom, faithfully tuned in to the soap with the mesmerizing theme song. I can picture Mildred calling me over to her table at the wedding to give me a nod for having the band play the beloved theme song.

Marita and I had a ball reminiscing about catching bits of the soaps at lunchtime or days we were home from school. Her mother had the same three favorites as my mother did. She readily listed the older ones my mother enjoyed from the start, even listening to some on the radio before they aired on television. The list Marita spouted as I rattled off various plots and characters included Search for Tomorrow, The Guiding Light, and As the World Turns.

Something about the rhythm of the soaps is like learning in elementary school, where one year concentrates on a new subject, and the following year begins with a review of the materials. Likewise, the soaps introduce new plots and go back to reinforce the themes.

On that note, I saw a funny posting on one of the Facebook groups I follow. Someone posted that her grandfather came “up the mountains,” to the Catskills bungalows on summer weekends. As soon as he arrived each week, he rapidly rattled to his wife in Yiddish. The woman who posted about it riotously admitted that she could not understand Yiddish. She said that she found out later her grandfather was recapping for her grandmother what happened on the soap operas during the week.

My brother Al finds it uncanny that our mother never missed anything in her shows during the summer months we spent in the Catskills, sans television reception. On the day school let out each June, we packed up and headed to the country. Come September, back in the apartment in Roselle, New Jersey, the soap opera episodes seemed to start over where they left off.

I recall a hint of arrogance about which soaps one viewed, with my mother’s open disdain for those tuning in to General Hospital broadcast on a station other than CBS. While my mother was a steadfast CBS soaps watcher, if my memory serves me correctly, she tuned to NBC when Search for Tomorrow jumped ship and moved to the other station after being aired on CBS from 1951-1982. It ran for a short four years on NBC.

Getting back to the theme song from a soap opera played at our wedding, Marita started humming the tune as she was sure she knew which one it was from the clues I scraped from my memory. It was, indeed, the lead-in song to The Young and The Restless. I confirmed that with my brother Stu. He said, “Y+R's theme is Nadia's Theme from the Olympics.”* He added, “Love Will Keep Us Together by The Captain and Tennille was the No. 1 song when you married.”

According to information on the internet about the No. 1 song in 1975, “Their first hit single was a cover of Neil Sedaka's and Howard Greenfield's Love Will Keep Us Together. The song went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 singles chart nine weeks after its debut in 1975, and it went on to win the Grammy Award for Record of the Year."

Of the 3,653 comments on that post, I chose the one by Todd Bonin to add here: “If you were alive in ‘75, you couldn’t escape this song. It was on the radio all the time (back when you had 3-4 radio stations to choose from and maybe an 8-track tape deck in your Monte Carlo). It was literally the soundtrack of our lives. The Captain and Tennille were ‘the’ couple, and it was a happy time. RIP Captain. We loved you.”

Those “were” the times of our lives. The music, the soaps, the way they not only entertained but captivated us. The soaps had us believing that the characters and their antics were real. For example, while driving along in my town with my mother in the car, she spotted Jim Rebhorn crossing the street. The multi-talented actor played an incestual rapist ten years earlier on one of the soaps.

At “Back to School Night” for our son’s class that night, my husband could hardly wait to approach Jim and tell him the blasphemous things his mother-in-law had to say about him. Jim was humbled knowing that his acting role had a lingering impact on a viewer a complete decade later.

My mother-in-law worked days but sat knitting while tuned in to the nighttime soap, Peyton Place. My mother insisted she had enough with daytime soaps, and for any evening entertainment, she stuck to news and sitcoms.

My husband hosts the radio show The World of Work with Shep Cohen, where he interviews people about what they do at work. It broadcasts Fridays at 4:00 eastern on WDVR-FM. He interviewed Jim Rebhorn, who went from being a soap opera star to performing other parts on nighttime television, and Broadway. Jim revealed on the air that he originally planned to be a minister.

When Shep, my husband Arnee's middle and stage name, interviewed a soap star who lived in Montclair, New Jersey, he asked me to join him at the station. I questioned the woman from the daytime soap about a plot centered around her twin boys conceived by two different men. She had no idea what I was talking about because “there are new writers all the time,” she said, “and they don’t know what happened before.”

Once walking by “Dr. Rick Bauer,” a star of The Guiding Light, in the Upper Montclair, New Jersey Kings supermarket, I felt like saying, “Hello, Dr. Bauer,” but he seemed to be in a hurry. I controlled myself and left him figuring out which mixer to buy for his drinks. I could have given him a “how do you do” about the episode where he was the father of one of the twins on the show.

While watching the final episode of The Guiding Light with my mother, a fan since its radio days before I was born, I couldn’t help but think of my aunts Cerna and Fannie. They became fans of the soaps after retiring from their day jobs, and both died before getting to the end of the soap opera plot that fixated them. Yes, they were only tv characters, but those actors filled their days, became trusted friends, and kept their interest.

My mother was ready for the show to end when she watched the last episode. I was content to see her enjoy that final episode in her nineties. As silly as it seems, there was a certain sense of closure.

It’s interesting to see how anyone can get hooked. While on vacation in California in the summer of 1980, all the billboards my husband and I saw blazoned around Los Angeles questioned Who shot J.R.? At the time, we wondered who was J.R. 

When we came home to New Jersey, we began to watch the nighttime soap, Dallas, and eventually its spin-off, Knots Landing. “Knots” followed us right into the labor room at Overlook Hospital in Summit, New Jersey, on the Sunday night of our daughter’s birth in 1990— "Breathe,” take a break and see what’s happening with Patrick Duffy playing Bobby Ewing. “Breathe...” What’s the blonde bombshell, played by Donna Mills as Abby Cunningham, up to?...” “Breathe,”… You get the idea.

After that evening, with two children in the house by then, we quickly weaned off the nighttime soaps, Dallas and Knots Landing. They were a fun interlude but did not consume us. The birth of household desktop computers took hold soon after our third child was born in 1994. That was when regularly scheduled tv shows ended for me, day or evening. Who knows, maybe watching soaps fashioned my penchant for writing?

*According to Wikipedia, "Nadia's Theme", originally titled "Cotton's Dream", is a piece of music composed by Barry De Vorzon and Perry Botkin Jr. in 1971. It was originally used as incidental music for the 1971 film Bless the Beasts and Children, and is better known as the theme music to the American television soap opera The Young and the Restless since the series debuted in 1973. "Cotton's Dream" was renamed "Nadia's Theme" after it became associated with Olympic gymnast Nadia Comăneci during and after the 1976 Summer Olympics.