I’m a huge fan of one certain soap opera, Days of Our Lives. I realize that you’re rolling your eyes at this very moment, swearing on all that is reality TV that you’ll never read my column again. But, hey, back in the day, I was the queen of the soaps. I watched The Young & the Restless when Nikki Newman was a stripper after Paul rescued her from the religious cult. I pined over Rick Springfield’s Dr. Noah Drake character on General Hospital while the rest of you were busy watching Luke & Laura run from the Cassadines. I was absolutely obsessed over the Cruz & Eden relationship on Santa Barbara, but I think I just secretly knew A Martinez was going to be a big thing in the acting world one day. And, way before Anne Heche broke up with Ellen DeGeneres and freaked out about aliens trying to abduct her in Fresno, I was watching her masterfully portray twins Marley/Vicky on Another World. Soaps are the bomb. Alas, they are hanging onto mainstream television by a ghastly prehistoric thread. But, Days is still around. It reminds me of my maternal grandmother, who would phone me daily just to tell me what pain the evil Stefano DiMera was inflicting on the stoic citizens of Salem. Why, today, for instance, Jennifer Devereaux is laid up in a hospital bed recovering from an attack by her brainwashed cousin, Hope. Will Jen recover? Will she succumb? Can she fight through? Can any of us? Life isn’t an hour long television series comprised of 32 minutes of content + commercials where all the scenes end with close ups of darting eyes. Life is a fatal condition.
My peers and I didn’t have the luxury of electronic devices when we were tweens. The Simon Says battery operated color pattern game doesn’t count. There was no text messaging. We invented these things called mash games, or cootie catchers, where we folded notebook paper into connected origami triangles with written secrets inside of them. Our friends would answer complicated questions and we would manipulate their answers to discover things like who they would marry, how many children they would have, or how they would die. Upon being asked how we wanted to die, the masher would convert the answer into a number based on the letters involved: fire meant 4 open & close moves of the paper puzzle while chocolate gave you 9 moves. If only the world was so simple. Jennifer Rose Horton Devereaux knows what she is fighting right now. Twelve year old me understood that 9 clicks after death by chocolate meant I would marry Robby Benson and have 12 kids. Now, we’re all grown up. We understand the fragility of life and we’ve been conditioned to fight against the enemy. Sounds valiant, but what if that’s all wrong?
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