All My Children - No! Don't Leave Us!

All My Mishegas

I can’t believe it! I am reeling from the shock! ABC cancelled All My Children! I followed it on and off for years. I will miss it. It’s like when Johnny Carson retired from The Tonite Show. As much as I love Jay Leno, he ain’t Johnny. And nothing they put on instead of All My Children will beat the heartbreaks, affairs, secrets, weddings, and murders, that I came to cherish so tenderly.

Until I was 30, I never watched a soap opera. They were beneath me, a ridiculous waste of time. I couldn’t understand how anyone with a three digit IQ could allow themselves to be sucked into these stupid shows. But karma has a way of stepping in, doesn’t it? In the summer of that year, my husband and I were in a car accident. The truck blew a stop sign and came straight into the passenger seat breaking 17 bones on my right side, including all my ribs which tore away the bottom half of my lung. And I broke three nails. My husband had two cervical fractures and missed becoming a quadraplegic by a mere two millimeters of bone.

So, there we were, trying to recover at home, side by side in recliners. We both lost a lot of weight because we were too weak to walk to the kitchen and forage. We didn’t have a TV with a remote so we would turn on Good Morning America and leave on ABC all day or until one of us had to get up for something. That’s how we both began watching All My Children. I watched people, always with nice clothes and the women always with hair done and make-up. They had normal sounding conversations and lived in clean houses with no money problems. The men were all handsome and well dressed.

And then I’d look around me, the mess that I couldn’t clean up, I didn’t care about my hair or make-up, and the unshaven man with the metal halo and bolts in his head next to me in his recliner wasn’t looking too good either. Neither of us could maintain any conversation deeper than him saying, “I’ll trade you two vicodans for a percocet.” And me responding, “Keep the vicodans. I’ll give you a percocet if you get up and get the can opener and as many cans of whatever you can find in the kitchen.” I recall us having meals of canned peas.
I have to admit, that under the influence of medication, sleep deprivation, and starvation, everything and everyone on All My Children looked wonderful and made sense. We were hooked.

We talked about what the characters might or might not do, we worried about them, and when Jennie got killed on her jetski on her honeymoon - I didn’t think we’d ever recover! By then my husband had found a blender and was mixing dacqueri’s on the floor next to his recliner and drinking right from the pitcher. I don’t drink, so I don’t know exactly whats in a dacqueri, but if you mix it with vicodan, all pain apparently leaves your body and all worries leave your mind. I have to say, I applaud any chemical mixture that eases the suffering of anyone with bolts in their head attached to struts that go to a large chest piece. It hurt me to look at him. I’d like to say that I didn’t join him in having dacqueris on the basis that I’d never consumed alcohol before and wasn’t going to start then, but that’s not true. We each had our own little side table and he was on my injured side, he knew I couldn’t reach out for a glass and that’s why he thought it was okay to drink out of the pitcher - he didn’t fool me.

It was because of watching All My Children, and learning how devious people can be that led me to believe that he deliberately set up camp on my injured side so he didn’t have to share anything.... he probably was hiding cookies and sandwiches from me by that blender...
“.....and that’s when I shot him, Your Honor”. And in the soap opera world, that would have been justifiable homicide. Jack Montgomery would have defended me and we’d have fallen in love, and all because bolt head couldn’t fork over the oreo’s....