New York City: Missing It's Soaps

 A City Without Soaps

There is a brilliant article in the New York Post regarding the last soap to leave NYC. When OLTL said good bye, a long tradition of daytime actors and crews left "the building" and surrounding bars. The article is full of fun quotes and personal stories. 


Bob Woods: 
“There’s not a time that goes by that you won’t hear gales of laughter from the crew, from everyone,” says Woods. A fan of pranks, he says he particularly liked to mess with actor Phil Carey, who played his father. “I would use black thread from wardrobe — you can’t see it on camera — and I’d tie it to a phone. If the phone rang, it would just float up out of its cradle. Or if someone had to pick something up you could pull it away from them when they’d reach for it. Or I’d drop a rubber chicken into the scene.”

New York soaps afforded actors like Slezak and Woods the unusual opportunity to play the same role for decades in what amounted to a reliable, high-profile profession. “It was a sustainable, valuable job for many actors in Manhattan,” says DePaiva. “Some wonderful theater performers would work [on soaps] during the day and moonlight on Broadway at night.”

“The reason it was so wonderful for actors in New York,” says Smith, “was that we were here for theater, which we did for the passion, for our art. And daytime was the closest thing to theater on TV.” Plus, she says, “it was a way to pay the bills. It was a great way to have a steady job in an industry without steady jobs.”

Erika Slezak:
“It leaves a huge hole in daytime TV and in the days of our fans,” says Slezak. “ABC tells us the audience doesn’t want entertainment anymore; that they only want information. I don’t buy that. I want something that will make me laugh, make me cry.”

Read the whole thing at the link up top.