Saturday, September 19, 2009
LIGHTS OUT
When I was a kid, everyone listened to the soaps on radio.
Well, not everyone. My mother didn't because she worked from the time my Dad went into the Navy in WWII. Too busy. Too frivolous. I don't imagine she would have listened to them anyway. Improper behavior.
Although back then, the improper behavior was pretty "lite".
My Aunt Flora had the radio on all day. She did laundry for the hotel across the street. I stayed with her since, see above, my mother worked. I heard "Our Gal Sal", "One Man's Family" and many others. We also had, in between, if you can believe it, Paul Harvey who just recently, finally croaked.
When I got a little older, I stayed home by myself. I was a latch key kid. So, I listened to the soaps too. Not all the time. Just a little.
But when teevee came in and soaps went to pictures I watched all the time.
It was a lot more interesting than baseball and shit.
I have found, from gay friends, that most of us listened to the soaps. Another marker like lip synching or going crazy about broadway musicals.
The extension of plots was agonizing. Each show started with a shortish precis of the previous day's action and then there would be today's plot which we would more or less hear/see again tomorrow. Many of these shows were only half an hour and so, what with the commercials, there wasn't a lot new. But it was good to have yesterday's events to chew over again.
I don't know when I quit the soaps. Probably when I was 12 or so. I was alone with them, perhaps, from 8 or so. That is a lifetime for a kid.
I went back to soaps occasionally over the next years before college because of their soft porn value. Very slim for a gay kid. But shirts had started to come off and the guys were getting buffed up. It was a lot better than pro-wrestling or boxing. Swim sports only came along occasionally. So it was the soaps or nothing. Deprived.
Times have changed. These last few years we have had the fist gay kiss, embracing, even a fast fade homo-bed scene or two.
I don't think my mother ever knew I was listening to them. I never told. The beginnings of a double life.
Why am I writing all this? Because The Guiding Light, one of the very shows that I listened to and then watched, gave up the ghost this week.
Gail Collins writes about it.
I would have loved to see that last tear drenched extravaganza or happy resolution. Something always withheld in years, decades, before.
UPDATE:
I remembered, after I wrote this, that The Leading Light was originally about a minister who kept a light in his window for the troubled souls who passed his way.
As I remember, my Aunt thought this to be a devotional program. Her religious fix for the day.
Well, there was a preacher in it until he got in the way of the plot.
Labels: culture
