Sonny shot Dante!!

I have a confession to make.....I love soap operas. I realize how much I just emasculated myself, but damn it I love them! Where else can you find the most beautiful people on the planet play filthy rich people who allegedly have day jobs while sleeping with each other until the find out their bed mate is their sister/brother and then have 3 months of angst because they slept with their sibling!?

I know...it's trashy, trite, totally unbelievable and altogether predictable, but I can't stay away from them. Over the last 15 years, I have been an avid viewer of several soap operas, including, but not limited to, All My Children, One Life To Live, General Hospital, Days of Our Lives, The Young and the Restless and that's just naming a few. This doesn't even include cancelled shows like Sunset Beach, Another World and the short lived but well liked Spider Games on MTV.

Perhaps it's the appeal of living vicariously through these fictitious characters to achieve lives we will probably never know. Or maybe it's because I want to find out how the writers and actors will portray another random person being added to the family tree because of one freak drunken encounter 25 years ago that they were too afraid to be honest about and have been covering up by paying off the mother to keep her quiet and help them maintain some semblance of normalcy in their everyday lives. I don't know, but something makes me watch, and often.

As a person who went to school for the craft of acting, I respect completely the art form that is the Soap Opera. I mean think about it this way: In 7-10 days, a show like Glee or Grey's Anatomy will film 1 episode. In that same time span, a soap opera will film up to 10 episodes, perhaps more. Crew members also have to take down and put up each set, every single time they move to a new scene location involving new characters, or even one repeating character in a different location. It's crazy!

From the acting perspective, if you are involved in a central storyline, you could be on 5 days a week for several weeks and could therefore have up to 100 pages of dialogue to learn OVERNIGHT! And sometimes the day before that your call time could have been 5 am, and you might be there until 12 or 1 am. So in 4 hours, you have to learn 100 pages of dialogue. I'm sorry what!? Which is why ladies and gentleman, soap operas are blocked the way they are, with a lot of over the shoulder shots and not too often with 2 people in the same shot facing each other. This is to make it easier for the actors to literally read their lines off of cue cards. Hence the reason I respect them so much, because you have to act WHILE you read, and most of the time cry while you read.

Oh! Also, in a series weekly drama, you could get 7, 10, 50 or even 100 takes for one moment. With the soaps, you get 3 tries. If it isn't right on the third try, they edit together the best of the 3 tries to make the finished product. There just isn't enough money in soap operas to be wasting precious film.

Wow, I feel so much better for getting that out there. Now I have to go watch GH, because on friday Sonny shot Dante for being an undercover cop working to have him arrested for his ex-wife Claudia's murder, and he doesn't know that Dominic (the name he is going by) is really Dante, the son he never knew he had by Olivia, a woman he slept with 25 years ago before Brenda, Carly, Kate, Alexis and Claudia ever came into the picture.

May these shows never go off the air...cuz if they do...I.Might.Die.

That is all.