*SPECIAL GUEST STARS* || Jasbir Puar + Jennifer Doyle on General Hospital

Cue the disco break in the Love Boat theme song--our special guest stars have just hit the Lido Deck! Jersey Girls Jasbir Puar (left) and Jennifer Doyle (right)-- aka the authors of two darn hot queer theory books, Terrorist Assemblages (2007) and Sex Objects (2006), respectively--are here to chat and chew about their favorite daily pasttime: GENERAL HOSPITAL. So kick back on the couch and get cozy under that chenille throw, as these two daytime divas share their transatlantic musings about Luke, Laura, Robin, Carly, Emily and that Herb Alpert song, "Rise." [Jasbir = JKP; Jennifer = JD]

*****

JKP: So the longest Halloween ball (13 episodes) in the history of soaps has finally come to a close. Even the wonderfully time-warped writers of GH finally realized that a Halloween ball should end before Thanksgiving. So it did, two days before, on November 19th.

JD: No surprises there: Soap Time has lots of worm holes in it. A holiday party takes a month to unfold, kids go upstairs for dinner and come downstairs teenagers for breakfast.

JKP: Much to tell you about ensuing events, including that Lucky now knows Jake Martin is not his son and--woweeeee!--the smackdown between Sam and Elizabeth was hot. Hair-pulling plus serious punches. But the most bizarre news that has left me completely discombobulated in front of the television since Thursday (Nov 15)--and I mean prolific sobbing and many toilet paper rolls used in the process--is that Emily has been killed. Poor Nikolas knows not if he strangled Emily during one of his violent blackouts or if she was strangled by the certifiably-insane mobster Anthony Zakara (who also during said party speared Rick Lansing with an arrow, induced Luke into cardiac arrest, shot Sonny Corinthos and held his gf Kate Howard hostage…the usual soap opera ballroom antics). Since I've never taken to any of the good girls on GH and Emily is the quintessential youngest child peace-making do-gooder, I can only guess my grieving is on behalf of poor Nik who now has to reckon with thinking but not knowing for sure that he killed his fiancée. And in all the tabloid go-around about who might die next--Sam, Jason, Sonny, Jax are always in the mix--nary a mention of Emily. They played us, and played us well.

Frankly, JD, all this trauma I've been undergoing lately would be considerably eased if you were witness to the events as they unfolded. How can you stand not having your daily dose? I'm often at it twice a day now, once at 3 pm and the same episode later at 10 pm on SoapNet. Given such devoted spectatorship (and also the fact that GH was named in Time Magazine's Top 100 Shows of All Time in August--the only soap so lauded) I’m devastated that the writer's strike threatens to banish most if not all soaps to the internet permanently. We're good until January or so--in much better shape than most genres, as I suppose the writing is such crap it is easily churned out months in advance. But apparently audience shares are dwindling--how could this be with SoapNet, you ask? I have considered the merits of becoming a GH writer in order to save the show from its banishment to the internet, though the internet might increase a different viewing audience. Leaving the academy would not be the hard part, but being a scab would.

JD: I’ve had that fantasy too. You know, in LA you can walk to the ABC studios from my apartment.

O!I: I think many of us would share that fantasy, if not to write for GH then something else. Quantum Leap maybe? [gigglesnort] But more importantly, when did each of you start watching GH and why?

JD: I started watching GH in 1981, because my best friend Jeanne McKinney watched it. She was way more engaged with the world than I was, listened to better music, read better novels, watched better TV. I wanted to be able to talk to her. (Jeanne and I are still friends.) In fact, I may have started watching it when we collaborated on a freshman history assignment on the Quartering Acts - she and I wrote an epistolary novel instead of a paper, in which all of the letter writers were modeled after GH characters. I think it was, like, 200 pages long. Our fandom was always ironic, campy, in an 80s sort of way.

JKP: I don't ever remember a time when I wasn't watching GH. I watched with my mother, my younger brother, and eventually my younger sister, so at least by the time I was five (1972), I was full into daily viewing.

JD: No way! Oh my god – you’ve been watching it FOREVER! I feel like watching GH marked my entry into adolescence. It’s funny, but I never got into other Soaps, even ‘prime time’ ones like Dynasty (gasp!), or Desperate Housewives – a show I’ve never been able to get into. I was watching Footballers Wives with my friend Sarah, but that’s almost a pastiche of Soaps – I recommend it to O!I Readers – fully 20% of the screen time is taken up by some combination of the following: people doing lines of cocaine, the mixing of cocktails with close up shots of manicured lady-claws dropping ice cubes into crystal highballs (or whatever you call those glasses), tergo shots of men in the locker room or getting out of or into bed. It’s the best – and there’s an AC/DC David Beckham-type character (Conrad) who is married to a falling Bollywood star (Amber) – they are introduced practically in flagrante dilecto, in a three-way I think. That show is the only night-time soap I’ve ever loved as much as GH. Anyway – the fun of watching it was very much also about watching it with my friend Sarah.

JKP: My mom also watched One Life to Live, but I think my sense that my mother might be very similar to the evil Dorian scared the shit out of me. As you can see there was nothing ironic, campy nor cool about me watching GH. I was convinced my mom resembled the red-headed Bobby Spencer and my dad the now deceased lascivious Allen Quartermaine. I imagined myself as Demi Moore's character, the newspaper reporter Jackie Templeton and I coveted her hair (which I now have three decades later thanks to recent technology enabling Japanese thermal reconditioning). Pretty frightening for a diasporic Punjabi family in suburban NJ. [L: Demi Moore as Jackie Templeton, with Anthony Geary, aka "Luke."]

JD: You really do have her hair. And her pluck.

O!I: Speaking of Jersey, do you think being “Jersey Girls” has anything to do with taking up GH as a pasttime?

JD: I think a Jersey Girl would never be shy or embarrassed about her affection for daytime TV. That said, it’s hard for me to name my state of origin as the origin of my GH watching. That said, I can say there was a period there when my viewing habits were über-Jersey: My friend Lauren and I would watch it together the year after we graduated from Rutgers. She was teaching at a high school. I was waiting tables in Metuchen. We’d go to her apartment after our aerobics class at whatever that late 80s/early 90s predecessor to Curves was – it was in a strip mall on the fringes of New Brunswick. We’d watch the taped episode while eating fajitas or something, and drinking margaritas. This was just before grad school. That was very Jersey.

JKP: Watching GH was so rooted in my day-to-day Jersey girl existence and intertwined with my family dynamics. I lived in Jersey for almost 20 years (we moved from New Haven Connecticut, where I was born, when I was less than two, I think). My mother started working outside the house when I became old enough to start looking after my younger siblings, I would guess around the age of 11. We would all come home from three different schools between 2:40 and 2:50, and settle in to watch GH from 3-4 pm. It's still on 3 pm EST, which I'm sure structures the incredibly fraught nostalgic temporal experience of watching for me. In SF it was on an hour earlier at 2 pm, and I never got used to it. Every day my mom would leave a long detailed list of what we had to accomplish by the time she returned home at 4:30. And at 4 pm, after the pivotal last hit provided by "Scenes From the Next General Hospital," the three of us would be flying around the house, folding the laundry, vacuuming, ironing my dad's shirts, starting dinner. It was a real moment of solidarity for us siblings, especially as we never got everything completely done but that never disrupted our desire to watch GH together. Occasionally my mom would come home a few minutes early and then we were totally screwed.

JD: That’s so interesting, because I watched it in total isolation from what I was living at home – my sisters (both ‘jocks’) hated that sort of thing. My parents were super-intellectual – My mom would lay around in her bathrobe reading Anthony Trollop novels and Hannah Arendt. And I can’t even imagine my Dad watching it or anything like it. It took them a few years to get into that sort of TV. Watching GH was one of a hundred ways I found to isolate myself as a teenager from my immediate environment (family) and connect myself to the world “outside” (friends). Tragically, my friend Jeanne moved away mid-way through high school, and then I think I kept watching partly because I was so lonely when she left. I was a melancholy GH fan. My fandom still has homosocial resonances – it continues to be a way of connecting to other women.

JKP: To this day, GH is a regular topic of conversation in my immediate family. Aside from how to most efficiently file our taxes, it might be the only thing we can all enjoy talking about together. Since retirement my dad has taken to watching it with my mother. Within minutes of phoning my parents the conversation will turn to the latest GH plot twists (Often my dad is particularly miffed by the antics of sexy sweet mobster Sonny Corinthos--"That Sonny! What is he up to now?!”, said with Indian accent.) My sister and I routinely communicate about GH—these days on IM. And when we are all together for holidays we still watch GH together (regardless of how we are scattered around the house there is an inexplicable gravitational pull to the living room at 3 pm), my dad now taking the place of my late brother. The pleasures of collective watching and rehashing produce a pivotal continuity of our family ties—both GH’s kin networks and our own. In some ways GH holds together for us—say on behalf of us—a cohesiveness we otherwise only sporadically occupy, providing dysfunction to reorient our dysfunction functionally. The more we insisted on producing ourselves as a good upwardly mobile model minority immigrant family, the more GH (among many other objects) carried or refracted our dysfunctional modalities. I have no doubt also that particularly in the late 60's, when my mother first arrived to the U.S., watching soaps was an especially 'American' thing to do--as in American housewife, and thus crucial to the kinds of class positions and narratives to which my parents were aspiring—as it was also for us in our teen years when we floundered to comprehend growing up in racist WASP suburban NJ. And the kind of deep historical knowledge we all developed about the characters and plotlines somehow mirrored our claims, or desires to claim, attachment and belonging to the U.S. while mitigating some psychic alienation.

In other words GH played a role (this will sound crazy but the more I think about why watching it mattered so much the more it makes sense) in the formation of our diasporic subjectivities. In that sense one could even surmise that the whole deliciously fucked up Luke-Laura love-rape story storyline that dominated the late 70's and the ways in which family and romance never worked out the way it was supposed to could be the beginnings of my queer diasporic sensibilities.



JKP: To add fuel to that argument: the music that accompanied that "rape" scene—an easy listening type jazz piece from..who????...was so mesmerizing to me that in junior high, when we had to choreograph a mat routine in gym class to any music of our choice, I picked that song.

JD: That is fucking amazing. You know, that song figured into the show recently, when Lulu learned about the rape. We have to figure out what it was – it’s something totally famous.

JKP: Here it is on Wikipedia—Herb Alpert’s 1979 “Rise”, received a Grammy for best pop instrumental performance, thereafter commonly known and referred to as “The Rape Song.” I wonder what kind of crazy gymnastic tumbling simulation of that rape scenario I came up with…

JD: It’s worth trying to picture that. I’m always happy to meet other GH fans, but this is as much as I’ve ever discussed it with anyone! I’m still reeling from this confession -

JKP: Until recently I’ve been a closeted viewer, so embedded in it were dynamics of family cohesion and shame, and seemingly incongruent with being an academic. So like you I’ve been a melancholy GH fan too. I have never had margaritas, or any celebratory drink for that matter, while watching GH. That just seems so wrong. Next ASA we must schedule a viewing over vodka martinis.

JD: I agree, and must we wait so long? It’s so funny – all this is making me very nostalgic for New Jersey. (It isn’t just The Sopranos that hails the bridge and tunnel in me!)

JKP: Well JD your description of margaritas at a strip mall in NB and waiting tables in Metuchen is seriously taking me back!! And it is a travesty that we both started Rutgers undergrad in '85 and never found each other.

*****

O!I Who are your favorite characters? What are your favorite plotlines in the run of the show? If you could be a GH character, who would it be?

JD: My favorite character? That's easy - I have two: First, Robin Scorpio, before she came back this year. (I like her now, but I loved her character then.) And Carly, esp. when she and Robin overlapped. Robin's last year or two on GH (before she left for Paris) were my favorite years on the show, because then we had that amazing story-line, my absolute favorite to date. She was a GREAT actress as a kid, too. [Right: Kimberly McCullough as "Robin Scorpio"]

JKP: I hate Robin. HATE. I hated her back then and I hate her even more now. Her earnest-girl persona drives me crazy. She is dull and humorless (witness supposedly passionate recent love affair with Patrick Drake—could it have been any more drab?). And I hope JD you are being sarcastic about her acting skills. Carly is a definite favorite though now that she is no longer with Sonny she's not nearly as interesting. Smart-mouthed Maxi is also one of my recent favorites. She's always in trouble for saying what no one wants to hear. She's a bad ass. And who doesn't love Sonny? He's charming, hot, and can have sex with any girl he wants.
JD: I wasn't being sarcastic - I was referring, though, to her skills as a child actor not to the strained performances of this past year. I agree, her return isn’t what it should be - she isn't what she used to be - and I'm puzzled by her, erhm, very young appearance - how come she looks like she's twelve? This seems to be a major hurdle regarding the development of her character. They have no idea how to dress her. Her scenes with Patrick couldn’t help but take on a kind of pedophilic tone. And Sonny? ARGH. How can you love Sonny? He's got a three inch acting range, he’s two feet tall, and I think if you'll pay close attention, his line delivery is remarkably close to our sitting president - inexplicable pauses, constipated delivery. He's only good when smoldering with rage or throwing shit around the room. At least we agree regarding Maxi. Now that’s a character – once the sad sick one almost always already dying (she had a heart transplant), and now the absolutely deliciously scheming (and gorgeous, in a slutty way) witch.

JKP: I totally concur about Sonny’s acting. Lately he forgets more lines than he remembers. It’s becoming pathetic. I’m assuming his psychotropic meds (he’s bi-polar in real life and they wrote it into his character) are giving him trouble. But I do like how he always gets the girls.

JD: Favorite story: Carly is Bobby Spenser's long lost daughter. Bobby is sister to Luke (of Luke and Laura), and they were raised (famously in S.O. lore) in a brothel. Bobby got pregnant as a teenage prostitute, and gave her daughter up for adoption. That daughter returned in the form of Carly, hell-bent on getting revenge for having been abandoned. I can't remember ALL the details now, but Carly first busts up Bobby's marriage (she and Tony had been one of the Super-Couples on the show - rock solid, meaning, destined for disaster). And C gets knocked up by AJ Quartermain. But she lies about the paternity (I think she says it's Tony's, then Jason's and/or Sonny's?), and she does lots of evil things to AJ - who had been trying to sober up after having gotten in an accident which left do-gooder brother Jason with a brain injury that turned him into a hunky hit-man. ANYWAY, Carly eventually comes out to Bobby as her daughter. [Left: Sarah Brown as the original "Carly"]

JKP: She does pass the baby off as Tony's even after Michael is born, then when it all comes out that Carly has stolen her birth mother's husband, she runs to Jason and asks him to pose as M's father.

JD: That’s right! I love her and Jason’s relationship. They'd had a one night stand - but are tied together ultimately as friends. (I am writing about friendship right now, and Jude the Obscure). Jason was then coupled with Robin, an HIV positive straight arrow of sorts. (Long story there.) Robin refuses to go along with the lie regarding the baby's paternity, and outs AJ as the baby's father. (By the way, I hated what they did with AJ – I always like him as a kind of Scotty Baldwin sort of alcoholic.) All this takes, like, two years to unfold and I was glued, and I mean GLUED to the TV through the whole thing. Jason breaks up with Robin, quite unfairly. Robin ends up exiled from the world of GH. I hated to see her go, because she was (and is again) a terrific foil for Carly. All soap opera women need good foils.

*****

O!I: Ok. Now that you're both very "excitable speech" about your fave characters, do you have any GH crushes past or present?

JD: I don't know that I've ever had a serious crush on a GH actor. By the time I was watching GH, I was pretty crushed out on David Bowie. I wouldn't kick Patrick (Robin's ex-boyfriend now) out of bed. I wouldn't go out of my way for it either, though. I saw the actor who plays Nikolas at The Coffee Table in LA in 2000 - back when he was married to Eva Longoria [Right: Tyler Christopher, aka "Nikolas" and Natalia Livingston, aka "Emily"]. She was with him. And she was so tiny I couldn't quite wrap my mind around her. She was wearing a Juicy Couture sweat suit. If I could be anyone on GH, it'd definitely be Carly. But if someone were to cast me, I'd no doubt be Robin. She's the smart one. I should say, though - Lulu (daughter of Luke & Laura) is really growing on me. She's a great character - lots of fight, very horny in a way I can relate to. And I love her foil, Maxi - evil, evil, evil! (She played Lucky, Luke & Laura's son, via his pill addiction, and broke up the young super-couple of Lucky-and-Elizabeth.) I would definitely be friends with Carly if she were real. She reminds me, in her brilliant impulsiveness, of my friend, the writer Sarah Miller.

JKP: You as Robin? No way. Robin is so BORINGLY RESPONSIBLE. You'd be a great Carly. You'd also be kind of fun as the brainy quirky neurotic lawyer lung cancer survivor Alexis who is devoutly good but just can't help her intermittent naughty transgressions. I'd like to think I'd be cast as tell-it-like-it-is troubled girl Maxi. But I'd probably wind up cast as friendless and family-less abject vixen Sam, who they brought in four years ago or so to finally banish the visage of Brenda (the girl Sonny and Jax fought over—passed back and forth really—for years) from the show.

JD: Oh my god. I forgot about Alexis. Of course I'd be Alexis. (What happened to her? Glad to hear she’s a survivor!) I love Sam - she's such a whirlwind of disaster! I'm so glad she and Jason aren't together. I fantasize that she’s going to become a criminal boss all on her own, and give Sonny a run for his money. I am so bummed that I missed the fight with Elizabeth. That must have been hot. And Brenda could never really be banished. She was the best. I am deeply flattered you think I’d be a good Carly! I do think you could pull off Maxi, and I don’t think Sam is abject in the least.

JKP: Sam is definitely developing into a fierce femme fatale character after being tossed around between Jax, Sonny and Jason for years, this despite being a former scam artist. [Left: Courtney, Sam and Elizabeth]. Her soft-spoken voice drove me bonkers until recently when it started nicely complementing her increasingly underhanded manipulative ways. One of my most absorbed viewing stints this past summer was when no one knew whether Sam was the one who had kidnapped Jake Martin (Jason—Sam’s boyfriend--and Elizabeth’s newborn son, whose paternity was a secret from Elizabeth’s clueless and lackluster husband Lucky until the Halloween ball). The storyline was great—it turned out Sam had not been the abductor but had indeed witnessed the kidnapping. And yeah the Halloween ball catfight was awesome. Elizabeth actually threw the first punch. There were collapsed up-dos and torn gowns. Totally hot.

JD: I am in awe of your elegant and economical description of the development of Sam’s character. I was riveted by the whole sequence which grew out of the fact that she slept with that snake Rick (the husband to Alexis, Sam’s biological mother, who’d given Sam up for adoption). That was FANTASTIC. The more I think about it, Sam might also be one of my favorite characters.

JKP: OMG yes! Sam’s seduction of Rick was phenomenal. I was completely floored when they slept with each other. I was like, UH HUH. NO YOU DIDN’T. NO WAY. And Sam was like: “Way.”

*****

O!I: What about your fave GH bit players or guest appearances? And other than “Rise,” what’s your favorite GH related love(?!?) song?

JD: I hate guest appearances. Partly because they are often musical, and my LEAST favorite shows are the ones with musical numbers in them. (I am sure that there are musical numbers in GH comes as a surprise to many O!! readers, but there are - usually but not only around the holidays. They now feature Rick Springfield, who has returned as the formerly hunky Noah Drake. Unlike many O!I readers, I am not a huge fan of pop songs, or at least I wasn't at all when I first starting watching GH (weirdly, these were the years when I started listening to punk, post-punk, no-wave etc.).

O!I: Wow. Not having a fave GH song could be construed (in the words of the Backstreet Boys), as “tragical.” But I understand that not everyone appreciates the smooth falsetto stylings of Christopher Cross, who recorded Laura's them, "Think of Laura." Anyway, how much do either of you watch it now?

JD: One of the sad facts about living in London this year is that I haven't seen GH since August. When I am home, I watch it almost every day. JKP had to tell me that Emily died! Weird! Though she's almost died, like, a hundred times already.

*****

O!I: How much does it bleed into your current academic work, or is it your refuge from it? What queer/feminist modes of empowerment/affirmation (if any) have been inspired or thwarted by GH?

JD: My academic work isn't affected by GH, except in the classroom - I often ask if there are GH fans in a class and talk about the show with them, as a way of complicating how students think about my relationship to the critical theory & the 19th-C. novels I'm usually teaching.

JKP: I am quite frankly not doing any current academic work. I am on deep sabbatical. So GH does not function as refuge, though when I was working on Terrorist Assemblages it did mark the end of my writing day, and I suppose it was always a relief—certainly it was a reward for finishing work. But these days, well, let's just say GH IS my deep sabbatical. And not because I'm writing my second book on it. Though the thought has occurred to me.

JD: My academic work does affect how I watch GH - I read scholarship on soaps - I love Jane Feuer. I loved learning about how they are structured, about the "beat" and reaction shots, etc. GH used to have a structure: Plot line A; B; C [commercial] C; B; A [commercial] A; B; C [commercial] C; B; A. I used to love that. I read a fair amount of film criticism on melodrama (one of my favorite cinematic genres) - It was in working on Stella Dallas that I realized that it's in soaps that we see the 30s style of filmic acting which I love so much. Sarah Brown, the original Carly, reminded me a lot of Barbara Stanwyck.

JKP: She was awesome, and won several daytime Emmys.

JD: Totally deserved.

JKP: These days I only see her occasionally, as a secondary character on Cold Case for example. It still seems really difficult to make the transition from daytime to primetime TV. [Right: Sarah Brown as Carly].

JD: That’s sad. She should be a huge star. Regarding that last question about queer forms of empowerment, etc: One of the things about soaps that non-soap people don't realize is that they have been on the vanguard regarding difficult social issues. Lulu actually had an abortion on GH - that's really rare - something you don't see now on primetime (though we did with Maude in the 70s). Though these characters aren't gay, there were 2 HIV positive characters on the show, and one got AIDS and died (Robin's boyfriend Stone). GH wasn't the first to take on AIDS, but GH continues to write HIV/AIDS into its scripts - it's a weird transposition (onto the very white, straight-do-gooder Robin), but many of the issues that long-term positive people deal with get written out through Robin's ambivalent relationship to relationships.

JKP: Lucas, Bobby and what's his name's son (JD: that would be Tony), is gay. He came out last year, after being gay bashed on the piers. Then his father died in that flu virus quarantine that hit the hospital and they dropped the gay teenager line fast. Another interesting outing of social malaise is with Sonny's bi-polar disorder--they went through all the paces of his breakdown and resistance to medication and diagnosis. The actor himself (what's his name?) has bipolar disorder in reality so there was a lot of crossover discussion on Oprah and other talk shows about his life and his character's life. And now Robin is trying to convince various friends to become a sperm donor so she can raise a child as a single mom! Ok so Robin has her moments. Was it GH or some other soap that broke the whole interracial relationship taboo? I can’t remember. All sex is pretty monochromatic now. Though Patrick is sort of dating an Iranian chick from Britain.

JD: I can’t remember if GH broke that – they did have that plotline about Justus, the son of Mr. Quartermaine Sr.’s black love child, Bradley. The woman for whom Q Sr. crossed the color line was Mary Mae Ward – a singer? Maid? Both? [Left: Rosalind Cash; Right: as "Mary Mae Ward" in 1994]. Anyway -Yes, I remember that Lucas plot – went on for, what, a month or two? That’s nothing in Soap Time. They blew it there – there was a good story in the making. Robin is trying to get pregnant with a sperm donor? The actor who plays Sonny actually is bi-polar? Wow. I try to draw the line on my relationship to GH by not reading Soap Opera Digest, following the actors etc. beyond the show - I barely know any of the actors’ names. Clearly I’m missing a lot. I made an exception for Sarah Brown (OG Carly) - as I went so far as to write an ode to her acting skills on an ABC chat room.

Daytime is an interestingly contested territory - one of the most popular storylines among female audiences used to be the rape victim who then falls in love with her rapist (Luke and Laura, famously - the fantasy being about being absolved of responsibility for your desire). The tide turned on this issue around 1990, I think - a direct response to feminist consciousness-raising on this issue. An actor on One Life to Live, for example, refused to appear on the soap when his storyline (in which his character participated in a gang rape) went in this direction. GH has mined the violence of the origin of the myth of L & L several times for story - doing a kind of dramatic penance. Long running programs get to have a unique kind of historical consciousness unavailable to other forms of culture. It makes for really rich television viewing.

JKP: When they trotted Laura out from her coma for her and Luke's 25th wedding anniversary (and that was in real time, 25 Judeo-Christian calendar years) last fall, I sobbed for weeks. Historical consciousness indeed—it sold a lot of Luke and Laura diamond necklaces. I was so bereft when Laura went back into her coma that the woman I was dating at the time almost bought me one.

JD: If Eve Sedgwick watched soaps instead of reading Victorian novels, she'd have written "Between Women" [which is the actual title of a wonderful book by Sharon Marcus-O!I]: the homosocial currents between women as they wrestle over men and social position are so fierce: Carly and Robin; Lulu and Maxi - these are the great 'couples' of the moment.

JKP: There are also the antagonisms between Carly and Alexis and Carly and Kate Howard, Sonny's new beau. Carly is so intense she needs multiple foils. Does Carly have any loyalties to women? She kind of sucks like that, though there was her friendship with Courtney. But the most fierce femme smackdown couple right now is by far Sam and Elizabeth! I hate Elizabeth more than I hate Robin. Really hate her! And I love hating her!! My sister despises her too. I have thought of becoming a GH writer just to script a horrible demise for her. I think some kind of facial disfigurement a la Anna Scorpio (remember that weird purple scar on her face?) is in order.

JD: I am with you on that one. She was a great character as a rape victim (it was her rape that resurfaced Luke & Laura’s history). She is still a great character, as hate-able self-righteous beeatch. She's so full of shit! I love it!

I am also amazed by the fantasy world of soaps in which men are just dying to become fathers/husbands - where any woman who gets pregnant has AT LEAST two men who could be the father, and are desperate to be that father - and will go to any lengths to prove it. That said, the rivalries are always, really, between the girls. The men are usually more caught up in Oedipal dramas - looking for recognition and reward from some sort of father figure.... a funny displacement of their ultimate irrelevance to the juice of the story. Random fact about my spectatorship: My feelings about GH storylines were so strong that I talked about them in therapy. Some of the most profound insights into my mental illnesses were generated by my therapist's readings of my reactions to certain plot twists.

JKP: I am not seeing my therapist at the moment, having 'taken a break' in July (termination is the fantasy underlying that move). I'm thinking, given my completely unexpected decomposition in response to Emily's death, to whom I never was attached, it may well be time to return.

JD: I know what you mean. The storyline that inexplicably broke me: Allen Q's pill addiction. I couldn't handle seeing him so abject and pathetic. It's totally crazy, but I could barely talk about that storyline without breaking down!