O.K., I’m going to write about something that I’ve tried to keep hidden most of my life and am loathe to admit. It’s a secret I try to keep under wraps because of the scorn I’ll receive from others if it became known. It’s an affliction that doesn’t discriminate against age, gender or race; it’s shameful and I would like to be rid of it, but the addiction is too powerful. Once I became hooked, even after years of being away from it, sooner or later I always seemed to return to it.

What is this awful thing that I do? Well, I’ve been doing it since I was sixteen years old. I am a devoted fan of...here it is... Guiding Light. Yep, a soap opera, that’s my shameful addiction.

The only way to defend myself is to totally blame my mother. Sorry mom, but you know it‘s true. When I was a teen, Mom worked at home hand-sewing shoes, and everyday when I came home from school, GL would be on. I would toss my books on the kitchen table, turn around to look at the television, and be immediately sucked into the drama unfolding between Roger and Holly or Mike and Ed Bauer and the woman torn between them. It was a relief to forget my problems for an hour and get wrapped up in television-land. And mom never made any attempts to dissuade me from soap opera viewing. In fact, I think she enjoyed that at least one of her six kids would sit and watch with her. We’d even discuss and analyze which direction tomorrow’s episode would go in.

I think, though, I should take a minute here to address the attitudes of anti-soapers. Our biggest critics, of course, are men. They are so quick to dismiss our choices as ‘pure garbage’ and ‘unrealistic’, but have they ever taken the time to think about their choices? If they did they might realize that they‘re even bigger soapers than we are.

The biggest soap opera of all time is one men brag about having seen dozens of times…Star Wars. No way, you men say? Oh, I beg to differ. The entire jist of this movie is a simple story revolving around a central family...which is exactly what the main theme of any great soap opera is...the central family of this movie being, Luke, Leia and Darth Vader. A brother and sister separated at birth, who were fathered by a once good man turned evil. There was even an, ick, factor involving Luke and Leia having a miniscule moment of attraction to one another before anti-hero Han Solo came along to steal Leia’s heart. Dang, if this doesn’t sound exactly like a soap opera to me.

Then there’s football, baseball and basketball. What? I’m crazy you say? Let’s tear it apart. Soap operas keep their viewers tuned in by teasing them along with; What-ifs? Which way will things go? And edge of their seats drama. Sports do the exact same thing. They get us hooked on a team and its players; we stay tuned each week to see if our team can make it through the next game, then the next one after that and so on and so on, until the dramatic climax known as; The Super Bowl, The World Series or The Playoffs, comes along. Sounds like a soap to me.

So, it’s time for all soapers to come out of the closet, to shout out our devotion, to be proud of who we are. Someday our time will come; a time when we’ll be accepted for who we are. And when that time comes, there’ll be no more watching our daytime soaps with the curtains closed.

I sometimes wonder if a support group should be formed for soapers...we could call it; Devoted, Intelligent, Soapers Come Out or DISCO for short. Umm…on second thought maybe not; DISCO conjures up thoughts of another shameful affliction that nobody wants to admit to liking.