Everyone wants to die with dignity, but sometimes that's just not possible.
The brutal warrior Attila the Hun is said to have died of a nosebleed. Playwright Tennessee Williams choked on a plastic bottle cap. Reva Shayne, a signature character on the soap opera Guiding Light, went out with a wedgie.
At least, that's what it looked like to the women gathered last Friday for a "Light's Out" party at Joan Peltier's house in South Toledo to watch the show's final episode.
"Oh, that's awful! Going off the air with a wedgie!" one of them shouted as she tried to photograph the television screen as proof.
To these eight women spanning three generations, this was a moment of levity in an afternoon heavy with meaning - and a few tears. It's the kind of thing that can't be summed up in numbers, even though they sound impressive when it comes to Guiding Light: 72 years on the air between radio and television, more than 15,700 episodes, and the longest run of any TV drama ever.
That's not what mattered most to these women. To them, Guiding Light was family.
Joan, 44, started watching with her mom at the age of 8 after she got home from school, and it became something that she talked about with friends in high school. By the time she enrolled at Western Michigan University, her addiction was pretty serious.
"We used to schedule our classes at school around it when we were in college," she said.
The only problem was that the rabbit-ears antennas on Joan's side of the dorm didn't get CBS. Fortunately, in a twist worthy of a soap, she heard the show's opening music coming from a stranger's dorm room one day, knocked on the door, and made a lifelong friend.
As the years went on, so did Joan's devotion to Guiding Light, even going so far as to watch it at home on her computer late at night after work. It wasn't necessarily because she found it to be great television, although it kept her attention. Rather, it was because it was something passed down to her from her mother, a kind of heirloom that tied her to others.
That's something a lot of us should be able to understand, even if we snicker at the thought of doggedly watching a daytime drama with impossible plotlines. After all, how many of us do this in other aspects of our lives - continuing to root for the hapless Detroit Lions because we grew up doing it, sticking with old-fashioned hobbies because they began long ago with mom or dad?
Now, due to low ratings in an era where viewership for all soap operas is down, there is nothing left of Guiding Light but a memory and reruns.
Joan and the others grieved in their own special way. They sipped champagne mixed with rainbow sherbet and raspberries and ate lighthouse-shaped cookies. They shared stories about their love of Guiding Light and reminisced about the good old days, like the time Reva was cloned or the time she lost her memory and became Amish or the time she married ... well, just about everyone at one time or another.
I recognize that soap operas - or "my stories," as Joan and so many others call them - are intensely personal, almost like family. (In my case, that's almost too true. My mother recently told me that the inspiration for my name came from the old soap Ryan's Hope.)
And so I understand why Joan, sitting near her 12-year old daughter and 78-year-old mother-in-law, shed a few tears as "The End" flashed across her TV last week and Reva Shayne - wedgie and all - rode away into the distance and a happy, Hollywood ending.
Contact Ryan E. Smith at:
ryansmith@theblade.com
or 419-724-6103
