FURTHER OUT

My outing continues with a page-long interview and photo in this week's Soap Opera Digest. I was part of a feature called My Soap Job where they chose a person from each of the shows who has an unusual part to play in the production.

Now, while I was unspeakably happy to have Oakdale Confidential hit #3 on the NYT list, and equally giddy to be featured in Romantic Times Bookclub Magazine because it is such a major publication with book-buying readers, this is the part where I geekily admit that the Soap Opera Digest spread totally put me over the moon.

Mainly because I've been reading the magazine since I was @ 11 years old (like so many others, I started watching soaps during their zenith - the Luke & Laura Summer on the Run on General Hospital. Even people who claim, oh, no, they never watched a soap a day in their lives, they know who Luke and Laura are -- admit it.).

And I've been collecting the back issues of Digest since probably @1982 or so. I've got boxes and boxes of them. My parents used to laugh at me when I was still a kid and took over the linen closet for my collection. They stopped laughing when my first job out of college was working for E!'s Pure Soap show, a job I got because I was a walking encyclopedia on all the daytime dramas then on the air. My parents even helped me ship all my magazines to Los Angeles where Pure Soap was taped.

And then, a year later, they helped me pack them up again for a trip to New York and a job with ABC Daytime.

These days, my father says, "All those years we thought you were wasting time watching TV. And you were actually studying for your career!"

Heck, I learned more from Soap Opera Digest when it came to getting a television job (and on the NYT list) than I ever did in college!