Tune in tomorrow

After tomorrow they'll be gone forever.

My friends. My family. The people I have come to know so well over so many years. The ones I have come to count on nearly every day of the week.

These are the people that have always been there for me. And I've always been there for them -- well, on my days off, anyways, or days I was home sick.


I've been with them through thick and thin. Engagements. Weddings. Divorces. Reunions. Divorces. Reunions. Births. Deaths.  Back from the deaths. Visits to heaven. Time travel. Switched places. You name it, we've been through it all.

Or so it seems.

I became a lot more loyal once the VCR was invented. Better still with the DVR. And Soapnet. And the Internet (which gives spoilers!)

I'll admit there were times (years) when my interest waned. The 90s mostly. But still I tried to keep up with the comings and the goings, the who-was-doing-what, and who....

And yes, there were times I was jealous. Hey, some of those guys were hot.

Judge me if you want.

Yes I watch soap operas. Daytime dramas. Or, as my beloved Grannie used to call them, "the stories." I have for years. And I have thoroughly enjoyed them too.

Back when our TVs were black and white and there were only four channels to watch (one of them PBS), I first got hooked on the creepy old Dark Shadows, which used to air in the afternoons. I would rush home from school and my brother and I would eat pickles and watch together. Sometimes he would try to scare me by pretending he was a vampire. If you hold a glass of Coke up to the light, it kind of looks like blood.

Then sometime back in the early 1970s, when I'm sure I was home with one of my really bad cases of tonsillitis, I stumbled upon a soap opera. I don't know which came first -- All My Children, One Life to Live, General Hospital or The Edge of Night, but it was one of those.

I distinctly remember Erica Kane polishing her fingernails -- especially her "ring" finger -- because she expected to be getting a ring the next day. Of course I had to tune in tomorrow.

And I distinctly remember the first day I saw Laura and Scotty kissing under the Christmas tree and Laura tearfully (and way over dramatically) wishing on on the star. Then Scotty (who was a hottie!) pulled the ring out of his pocket. Of course I had to tune in tomorrow.

Years (and years) later, when Laura married that rogue Luke, my dorm room at Loyola  -- which had the biggest color TV on the campus -- was filled to capacity with a bunch of female class-cutters. We all screamed when Scotty caught the bouquet.

I used to watch The Edge of Night just because I liked the lady named Raven. And later the only person I had ever seen with a name spelled like mine -- Lori Loughlin. That one bit the dust first.

But my favorite has been One Life to Live. I will never forget the first day I saw it, with Karen Wolek on the witness stand, admitting she was a prostitute. Oh my God. Of course I had to tune in tomorrow -- and the next day, and the next. And many after that. How could I not with Marco Dane, the Buchanan Boys, Clint and Vicki, Bo and Nora, Tina and Cord, Gigi and Rex, Todd Manning and Starr, Dorian And Vicki! 


But last year, they wiped Pine Valley off the map. And tomorrow, the little town of Lanview will disappear too. Forever.

Now all that's left is Port Charles -- the town, not the soap.

I'm not one of those people who will protest or sign petitions. But I am one of those who will watch tomorrow and be sad to see it end.  And I'll watch GH as long as it stays in business, but I think most of us fans can see the writing on the wall. It's time will come too, and I will have to say goodbye to Sonny and Carly and Jason and Sam.

Then what will I tune in to tomorrow?

You have to watch

"You have to watch this," I told my 10-year old daughter. "Just a few minutes."

I have been glued to the TV for hours now -- news junkie that I am -- watching as America celebrates the news of the day. Military forces have killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

She, however, has been watching the Disney Channel in the other room. And is itching to go back to it.


"Why?" she wants to know.

"Because it's history," I replied. "Someday you'll want to tell your children that you saw this."

So she looked. She watched. But she doesn't know.

She was just an infant the day those planes crossed the sky and changed the world forever in the year of her birth.  She has no images in her head of the towers aflame, of the black smoke, of the dust covered people, of the horror-stricken faces. She doesn't remember that punched-in-the-gut feeling we all had.

She has no idea who or what an Osama bin Laden is.

Was.

But it's my job to teach her.  So I made her come into the living room to watch the crowds as they gathered in celebration outside of the White House and at Ground Zero tonight, in the moments after the President announced that bin Laden had been killed. Just as my sister made me come out of my room to watch the moon landing.

"Who killed him?" she wanted to know.

"Our military," I said.

She watched some more, but was really waiting for me to hand over the laptop and let her go.

"Do you know who he was?" I asked her.

"Yeah," she replied. "He was that dude that took some planes or something."

And I realized that she doesn't know.

I gently tried to explain.  But how do you explain it to a young, innocent child who has no concept of such evil? How do you tell her that a human man could fathom such a horrific plan to willingly kill as many people as possible using fuel-loaded jets? Do I want to give her the nightmares we've all had since then? No.

But I want her to understand what this day means to so many.

So I explained that he came up with this idea, to take over some planes and fly them into the buildings.  Then
 I Googled 9/11 attacks. Images. And I showed her.

"Wow," she said, looking at image after image of the flaming buildings and the pluming black smoke. "Where are the planes?"

"They're inside," I said.

But I don't think she got it.

And that's both a good and a bad thing.

Maybe she will remember. Maybe she won't. Maybe she will tell her children. Maybe she won't. But I will. And I did.

Or, I tried.