FRY-ED (AND SOMEWHAT SCRAMBLED) EGGS

Last week, Ed Fry reminisced with www.AnotherWorldToday.com about his days in Bay City. (Read the complete interview here).

This week, The PGP Classic Soaps Blog chats with Ed about his ATWT return, and what he’s been up to between Oakdale visits.

PGP: How have you enjoyed stepping back into Larry’s shoes this time around?
EF: The beauty of it is you get the chance to go back and work with friends you’d worked with in the past. I got the chance to go back and work with Marie Masters (Susan) and Kelley Hensley (Emily). And I got to meet the young actors playing my daughter and, surprise, my son!



PGP: Is this a limited engagement or open-ended?
EF: They didn’t slam the door. They didn’t kill the character. So I’m sure Larry will wander back in at some point. Hi, I’m here to help! We’ll find out he’s actually fathered half of Oakdale.

PGP: Speaking of new fatherhood, you have some personal news on that front, as well.
EF: I have a son. My son is adopted. My wife and I got a phone call from a young girl in the Midwest; she’d been working with a family that backed out on her at the last minute, and she was about to give birth in about a month, and she wanted to talk to us. We talked to her, and five weeks later we were walking in the door of our house with our baby.

PGP: Were you in the delivery room for the birth? What was that like?
EF: Words fail me.... It was just.... I don’t even.... my wife and I were both barely in our bodies. It was the oddest, most magnificent moment in life. There is nothing to prepare you for it. We were just really raw to the experience. Two days after the baby was born, he was ours. We had to stick around for a couple of days while the paperwork was completed, and then we flew home with a seven-day-old baby. We were completely freaked out. We had no idea how a seven-day-old baby was going to react to a pressurized plane. And you know what? It was as smooth as silk.

PGP: How old is your son now?
EF: Luke is two and three quarters. He’s just a miracle, he’s astonishing. I just find him infinitely fascinating. I can’t believe, frankly, that he’s ours. We said our prayers and we prayed, "Please guide us to the child that is right for us and meant for us," and boy.... It had to be. Sometimes things happen to you or through you, but they actually get decided way above your head. And this was one of those things where I think there were so many pieces in play in the universe; I can’t imagine life without him. I remember having days before Luke when I thought I was tired. Now I think: Really? You toad! How could you have thought that was tired? It’s a whole different thing. It’s a different state of exhilaration and a different state of fatigue. It’s both enlivening and exhausting at the same time. The hardest thing for me was adjusting to interrupted sleep cycles.

PGP: So how did you adjust?
EF: What it becomes is a partnership issue. Thankfully, I have a good marriage, and a good partner in my wife. We partner well. When she’s got a lot of stuff bubbling, I can step in and handle things, and when I have a lot of stuff bubbling she can step in and handle things. The two of us are very graceful about dealing with whatever it is. Nobody has issues about I don’t cook or I don’t change diapers, I don’t do this, I don’t do that. We all do whatever we have to do to make the trains run on time. For the most part we’re pretty graceful about it. Except when we get tired. And then we’re, well, bears.

PGP: You have a long history of working with the Muscular Dystrophy Association. How did that come about?
EF: I started working with the Muscular Dystrophy Association just at the tail end of Another World. I used to do press tours for them, I did a lot of fundraising for them, I did events, telethons. My mother had ALS, and one of the neuromuscular diseases that MDA researches, and has a support network for, is ALS patients. The only reason I found that out was because somebody called when I was on AW and asked if I would answer some phones for the Jerry Lewis Telethon. At the telethon, I mentioned that my mother has ALS, and the girl who was doing my make-up said, "You should call them, because MDA helps people who have ALS." I didn’t know that. So after the telethon was over, I wrote them a letter and said, "My mother has ALS and I was wondering if I could volunteer at your office, stuff envelopes, things like that, and you could tell me about ways you might be able to help someone like my mother." Well, I got a call and they said, "Come to our office for lunch." So I came, and they had lunch in this big conference room, and I kept waiting for all the other people to show up. But there were no other people. I was it. They said, "We really want to show you what this organization does and how we think you can help us." They laid the whole thing out in front of me, and I was astonished that there was that kind of help available and I didn’t know it. Which meant a whole lot of other people didn’t know it, either. So I started helping them, and it ended up being a beautiful thing, because they significantly and importantly helped my mother, and for that I was eternally grateful.