I recently went on vacation to the beautiful state of Colorado. I left with a heavy heart. I was going to miss my soap operas. Only, a true soap fan knows what this is like. It's like your leaving your child at one of their friends house for the first time, trusting that the parents will take care of your child. But in my case I was leaving my renewed favorite soap opera, General Hospital, in the hands of my VCR, but not over night...for a month.
Why didn't I tape As The World Turns, you might wonder? I find myself asking the same question. You see when I left Arizona I felt I was leaving an unbearable source of agony and annoyance. Carly was being overly whinny, Aaron and Lucy were thrust out of existence, Bonnie was being...Bonnie, and the murder mystery was as dull as staring at a piece of bread, but the shock of my life came when I came back, after only being gone a month, and some how found myself staring at the ATWT I used to know. The fun, fresh, sexy, daring show I began watching two summers ago. The stories I once thought unbearable now entrance me. I love the Mike and Katie storyline, as long as they leave Molly out of it, I'm glad they're showing Mike as a full character, with flaws and weaknesses, instead of the dimwit-hunky-construction-guy path they seem to have been heading down pre-Who's-Sage's-Daddy? I love Roger Howarth as Paul. I never thought I could picture anyone else in the role, and I never thought I could picture Howarth as anyone else as smarmy Todd Manning, but Howarth hs created almost an entirely new character. No longer Rose's puppy dog lover but a now hardened and bitter shell of a man who's thinks he's doing the right thing, but doing it the wrong way. He's fresh and sexy, in that scary-sexy kind of way.
But some things never change. Bonnie is still Bonnie. An annoying buzz in my ear that won't go away even when I swat at it. I missed a lot of Aaron and Lucy scenes, and Craig with poison ivy. Carly still is stupid enough to tell Jack that "Nothing bad is going to happen to us." You'd think she'd learn from her mistakes...but you'd be wrong.
