There's Hope for My Soap

I have a little confession to make. I'm a soap opera watcher - Guiding Light, specifically (and As the World Turns occassionally). My grandmother listened to Guiding Light when it was on radio, my mother grew up on it and continued to watch, and I, in turn, grew up watching it and got hooked as well. When I was in high school, it came on at 3:00 in the afternoon which was great. I'd get home from school, watch GL and when it finished, I'd go deliver my newspapers (this is back in the day when kids were still able to have paper routes). When I started working full-time, I understandably, had to stop watching though I would catch up on days off or when home sick or something. After I became a stay-at-home mom, I started to watch fairly regularly again.

As is common with the soaps, they all go through periods where they make a bunch of bone-headed moves like getting rid of characters that are fan-favorites and GL is no exception. They have certainly made their fair share of bone-headed firings or lame attempts at keeping favorite actors. The late, great Michael Zaslow comes to mind. He played Roger Thorpe, making that character the.absolute.best bad guy you ever loved to hate.

Over the years, I've been disappointed numerous times by the actors they let go or the characters they killed off but none so much as when they got rid of Grant Aleksander about five years ago; he had played Philip Spaulding for the better part of 22 years(thankfully no one is ever really dead in soapdom). That was, to many GL fans (myself included), the worst move in a long history of bad moves. I continued to watch though (mostly online at night) until a little over a year ago when the storylines became just too boring to take and too many of my favorite actors and characters had disappeared (Jerry ver Dorn as Ross Marler; Paul Anthony Stewart as Danny Santos; Laura Wright as Cassie; Ricky Paul Golden and Beth Ehlers as Gus and Harley and others too). The powers that be over at CBS and Guiding Light were, in my opinion, causing a slow, painful death to my favorite and the longest running soap in daytime history and not doing enough justice to some of my remaining favorites like Ron Raines, Kim Zimmer, Robert Newman, Jordan Clark and others.

BUT, and the point of this entire, likely interesting-only-to-me post, a glimmer of hope has returned to my soap in the long-awaited return of Grant Aleksander. Yes, Philip Spaulding has returned to Springfield and though it's only been two days, I am delighted. I have been looking forward to this week for about a month, and, at least for a little while I think, I'm going to enjoy watching my favorite soap again.

Hope you've had some fun little something to look forward to this week too.

Be blessed.
Melanie