QUALITY OF LIFE

One Life to Live was never *my* show.

I started off life as a General Hospital fan, and my husband was a lifelong All My Children watcher. Friends joked that our children were destined to be OLTL fans.

Because, you know, ABC had a complete line-up then.

Except for a couple of stories I was really into: the Mary Karr/Mary Vernon baby-switch, the Gabrielle/Max/Steve triangle (I preferred Steve - go figure), Asa and Becky Lee's surprising love match, and David and Jenny (I actually saw Michael Zaslow for the first time as David not Roger; he had me as soon as he sat down at the piano - see clip below), it was never must-watch-TV for me.

But, it was another soap, and I am mourning it's demise as much as I did all the rest.

I moved to New York City in the last week of 1994 to work on SoapLine, a talk-show ABC was developing to promote their entire line-up, produced by Linda Gottlieb, fresh off her stint on OLTL.

SoapLine the half-hour talk show in development quickly morphed into SoapLine, the one minute segments ABC Daytime used to keep fans up to date during the unending preemptions of the OJ Simpson trial in 1995.

As part of the latter, we created stand-alone vignettes, such as snippets of screen-tests for the role of Tina (that ultimately went to Krista Tesrau), a feature on Clint Ritchie's recovery from a horrific tractor accident, Kassie DePaiva talking about her country music singing career, and Catherine Hickland making her Broadway debut as Fantine in Les Miserables.

Also from Linda, I heard stories about her days on OLTL, including her insistence that viewers didn't even realize that Mia Korpf was Asian, so it was no big deal to recast her with a blonde, and about focus groups that just didn't understand how and why Luna was psychic.

Although SoapLine's pilot didn't get picked up, I stayed at ABC Daytime to produce soap segments for the Mike & Matty show, and worked on the first Super Soap Weekend in Florida.

Even though it was never *my* show, OLTL was a huge part of my professional life.

It's killing me to see it go.