Soap Opera Digestion

If you’re like me, your favorite soap opera of all time is “As the Stomach Turns.” For the uninitiated, As the Stomach Turns is the title of a series of sketches that aired on The Carol Burnett Show (and later, on Carol Burnett & Company) back in the sixties and seventies, that took the piss out of CBS’s As the World Turns and others of its ilk in a way that only Carol and company could.

Daytime dramas, as they used to be called by people who found the phrase “soap opera” to be demeaning or disparaging to the art form, were nigh as vital to life as water for many of the women in my life when I was a kid. Both my grandmothers were devoted viewers of the “soaps” and would watch them, one after another, for literally three straight hours every single day.

Perhaps it was because Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood weren’t racy enough for them. Or maybe because Phil Donahue was too political for them. Or maybe they just tuned in so they could stay on top of all the processed foods, household cleaners and other consumer goods that were advertised during their viewing hours. Like fans of Playboy magazine who claim to read it just for the articles, they may have been watching the soaps just for the oh-so educational commercials.

As a teenager, I discovered that the soaps were as important, if not more so, to a surprisingly large number of my junior high and high school friends and their sisters, who would race to their living rooms after getting off the bus to switch on General Hospital or Days of Our Lives—often foregoing a snack until the first commercial break. The most dedicated among these would go so far as to take the phone off the hook to keep it from ringing and ruining the moment at which someone confessed to murder, having an affair, having an abortion, or giving birth to the lovechild of one of the Quartermaines. This was before anyone had a TV in their bedroom, of course. And before there was such a thing as DV-R. And before you could binge anything on Netflix. And before—well, you get the picture.

Most of the soaps that aired in my lifetime have gone the way of the dinosaurs, with only a handful still on the air today. I can’t say I’m surprised. Nor can I say I’m sad. Because while my friends, grandmothers, aunts and neighbors were obsessing about Luke and Laura, Bo and Hope, Frisco and Felicia, and who-knows-who and who-knows-who-else, I was thinking about other things. Like writing skits for The Carol Burnett Show and Saturday Night Live.

Such as, Nine Lives to Live. Set on a lavish estate called Llanfill in the fictional town of Llanville, this parody of One Life to Live would have centered on the life of the rich and saintly Fluffy and her morally questionable alternate personality, Muffy.

Obviously, that was never going to get off the ground back in the seventies. But today, you need only saunter over YouTube and search for “Nine Lives of Our Days” and see that I was ahead of my time.

Other ideas I came up with while my friends and other folks were watching Marlena become possessed by the devil; get brainwashed into believing she was a serial killer; suffer from amnesia; survive a plane crash; and fall into and recover from a four-year coma, include The Shy and Unassuming and The Old and the Listless.

As far as I know, no one has stolen those ideas and taken them to YouTube, although for the life of me, I can’t imagine why.

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My Great Aunt

According to Mark Twain—or at least those who’ve studied him—comedy is tragedy plus time. Having spent decades taming and twisting tragedy, trauma, and personal torment into something funny and less frightening, it’s fair to assume that I would not disagree.

On the other hand, having spent some considerable time trying to write about my beloved Auntie Charlene, who passed away on July 16^th, I’m moved to wonder: how MUCH time exactly? By that I don’t mean “how long before I stop missing her?” but rather, “When will I feel like making people laugh again?”

Don’t think for a moment that Auntie wouldn’t approve. She may have been the person who hoped and prayed the hardest for me to find Jesus, but she was also the one who suggested I attend the church Halloween party dressed as Salome. It was also she who provided the scarves that served as the seven veils for my costume, as well as the Styrofoam wig stand that served as the head of John the Baptist.

Auntie Charlene—aka Cha-Cha and, later, Chachi—may have loved her lord and savior, but she also loved to laugh. It was she who introduced me to Carol Burnett, Erma Bombeck, and the comic strips Peanuts and Ziggy. She also taught me how to craft the groan-inducing puns that pepper this and other publications, and affectionately advised me on the appropriate application of alliteration. (Nailed it!)

When she wasn’t contributing to the development of my sense of humor, Chachi was subtly encouraging me to develop my mind. As the first person in our family—that I know of, anyway—to go to college, she was an anomaly to some, but an inspiration to me. As the only woman I knew—besides my teachers and school nurses—who had a college degree, she was my idol. In the meantime, she introduced me to crossword puzzles, logic problems, and Scrabble, and by her example, taught me to be helpful, considerate, and responsible.

Charlene tried to teach me several other things that, sadly, I couldn’t quite grasp at the time—if ever. For example, as a bird lover, she would scold and chase the cats that that lived on my grandparents farm for having the unmitigated gall to hunt birds the way nature intended. Although from this I did learn that cats are (fortunately) a lot faster than people, I never did learn to give a d@mn about the birds. In my opinion, if they don’t want to get eaten by a cat, they should build their nests higher. So on the matter of birds and cats, Charlene and I had to agree to disagree.

The same was true when it came to the purpose of Bible Camp. Now I may have been young, but I was not entirely stupid. So I fully understood that the mission of the staff at Camp Evergreen was to save my soul from eternal damnation. My question was, did that have to be our ONLY goal? Could we not kill two birds (yes!) with one stone, as it were? Could we not talk about salvation AND develop a killer backhand? Could we not learn about sin AND meet a few cute boys?

Apparently not.

But Charlene loved me, even if we did not see eye to eye on birds or Bible Camp. I know this because she stepped in after my mother died when I was four, and helped my father take care of me and my two baby brothers. Although others stepped up to help as well, Charlene was like the North Star. A constant. A guiding light. She fought for me, and taught me to fight for myself. She taught me how to sew, and that it was bad to lie to get out of trouble but okay to lie to avoid hurting someone’s feelings.  You know—the important stuff.

Charlene worked as a teacher, civil servant, and nursing assistant. She later went back to school to become a registered nurse. When she wasn’t working, she went out of her way to brighten the lives of others by visiting them, taking them to lunch or church, or just sitting down to a cup of coffee, a game of Scrabble, or a few hands of Cribbage. She talked to her sister every day, and called her brothers every weekend. She never married or had her own kids, but she was like a mother to me, my brothers, and to almost every one of my cousins.

Over the last few years, the tables had turned somewhat. Charlene couldn’t get around very well, and was having trouble taking care of herself. She needed help with errands, cleaning her house and getting to and from doctor’s appointments and such. But her friends did what friends do, and took turns picking up her groceries and prescriptions. And family members did what family members do. We drove her to her doctor’s appointments and the family reunion, took her out for lunch, and took her car to get gas or to have it washed. We did all the things Charlene would have done for anyone else had she been able.

Charlene died after a brief stay in a skilled nursing facility. She had fallen at the beginning of June and was learning to stand and walk again. She was in constant pain, but four days before she died she had kicked my you-know-what at Scrabble, and a week or so earlier had beaten my brother John at Cribbage.

I never imagined that those days would be Charlene’s last. Nor did I imagine as I was writing last month about the mock funeral I had helped my best friend plan for her mother, that only days later I’d be planning one very real funeral for the woman I called my second mom. How’s that for timing?

The funeral has since come and gone, and Charlene is no longer in pain or feeling frustrated and helpless.

She was a great aunt. And she is now, as they say, at peace.