I spent all last lying in bed trying to decided what I would do if I was told that starting tomorrow I would be Head Writer of All My Children. Yes, this is what I do as I lay asleep at night. While Scott slumbered peacefully beside me, I worked through various scenarios in which I would deliver the show from its sorry current state and restore it to its past glory as a family-centered show with humor and drama. And yes, I’m sure the phrase “past glory” went through my head.
This is what I do when I can’t sleep. Since Scott moved in, I can no longer do what I used to do when I couldn’t sleep – act out scenes from my own soap opera I hope to produce sometime in the future. I have about two years of story for about 35 different characters stored in my brain. These stories have been honed over the years and whenever I couldn’t fall immediately to sleep, I would pick a favorite scene and act it out, usually in my head but occasionally out loud. This is why I can no longer do that. I think Scott would find it odd if I, all of a sudden in the middle of the night, started rambling to Johanna about how I, Mavis, had found her long lost daughter singing in a blues club in Portland, Oregon but hid the fact because I was mad at her for stealing my husband and shooting my brother. Yeah, I think it’s a safe bet he would find that odd.
See, I love soap opera. I always have. My earliest memory is of Erica Kane and Tom Cudahy on their honeymoon in St. Croix. And I don’t mean that that was my first memory of television. I mean, that’s the earliest thing I can remember. I would always watch the soaps with my mom when I was a kid and, well. I think they kind of warped my brain. They drifted into my subconscious and affected the way I played. My Fisher Price people had extramarital affairs. My Weebles blackmailed each other for controlling interest in Weeble Industries. And my Lego™ people…oh, my Lego™ people. There was nothing they didn’t do.
For a decade, most of my free time was spent playing with my Legos™. But I didn’t build spaceships or monsters. I built gigantic, well-appointed homes with carefully inlaid tile floors or secret passageways leading to the gardeners shed so Sarah, the bored, rich Lego™ wife could have liaisons with Jacques, the Lego™ stable hand. There were Lego™ archvillains and Lego™ heroines and every summer, there was a Lego™ plane crash in my backyard so my Lego™ people could wander around the wilderness and occasionally be presumed dead.
And there were always cliffhangers. Every night, before I went to bed, some catastrophe would befall wherever my Lego™ people lived. There would either by a huge avalanche of pillows on top of their rustic ski lodge or a fire made of construction paper would rip through the carefully laid-out Lego™ town. My favorite were the landslides where I would just shove the entire house I had built off the table and let everyone be buried under rubble. And there was always someone buried under rubble.
So I would go to bed each night not knowing who would live or who would die. I always had a few contract players who couldn’t die, so I’d have them be the rescuers in the morning. Then I would throw the rest of the characters in a bag and draw out three whose contracts would not be renewed. Then after the appropriate funeral and hopeful words from the town matriarch, I would disassemble the Lego™ people and put then back together in new configurations, thus creating new characters to repopulate the town. And if I happened to recreate a Lego™ person who looked exactly like a character I had recently killed off, then I would have to figure out a story for how they had survived being buried alive by the rock slide (gravel in the backyard) and have them return to town, usually to find their spouses remarried and their children rapidly aged. (There are no Lego™ babies, so it was necessary).
And my characters, I loved my characters. Some had been with me from my first Lego™ Town Set. There was Paul Crusafin, the dark-haired man with a business suit painted in white on his blue torso. He started out as my hero, but after a while became a nasty archvillain, always working on some dastardly plan to wrest control of the McCafferty family’s business and fortune. There was young Mariah McCafferty, the headstrong young daughter who set out to thwart Paul at every turn. And managed to be married 12 times, but to only 5 different men. There was a lot of coming back from the dead.
My Lego™ people were my friends when I needed them. They were a world I could retreat to when school was difficult or my parents were annoying me. And they allowed me to experiment with storytelling as I could go back and tell a particularly good plot over again if I wasn’t fully satisfied with the outcome.
I tried to show Scott the family tree I had created for my Lego™ people the other night but he resisted a bit. I don’t think he really wants to know how deep my neurosis goes. But when people ask me why I continue to watch soaps or why, in my heart of hearts, they are really what I want to be writing, I have to explain to them that I have been writing them my entire life. They are a part of me. Which is why I get so annoyed when they start sucking uncontrollably. And why I can’t sleep some nights until I figure out exactly the best way to bring All My Children back to its prime.
Also, I may be just a little bit crazy.
