SOAPS IN STRANGE PLACES: TAKE #2

I would come home from school and find her standing at the ironing board, watching “As the World Turns” and just finishing up a basket full of cotton shirts and blouses that now hung at starched attention from the kitchen cupboard handles. Three kids in parochial school meant five shirts or blouses each, plus dad’s cotton shirts for work, mom’s blouses, assorted doilies, table cloths, napkins, hankies, aprons and dresser scarves.

I found myself ironing the other day and I had the TV on in the other room, just for company. “As the World Turns” came on, and I

laughed out loud. There was Bob Hughes, played by the same actor, wearing a white lab coat and working in the same hospital he worked in when I was in grammar school.

OK, he’s chief of surgery now, but he was still saying the same lines with the same furrowed brow and the same soap opera pauses....

I can still hum the theme music from “As the World Turns,” “The Edge of Night,” “The Guiding Light,” “Search for Tomorrow” and “The Secret Storm.” Adam Drake, Mike Karr, Alan Dunbar, Judge Lowell, Ed Bauer, Belle Clemens — why in the world do I remember their names but I can’t remember where I put my car keys?

Entire piece, here.