Monday, July 18, 2011

Why Are All the Good Ones ... or As Susan's World Turns

Years ago, I explained my love of soap operas by saying that I watched them to feel better about my own life.  After all, my life seemed quite normal by comparison!  A few years later, I'd changed my explanation.  Now I watched them to see how "normal" people live.

Okay, I suppose my life doesn't technically qualify as a soap-opera existence.  I haven't had eight marriages (or any, come to think of it), a heart transplant with said heart coming from my husband/brother/arch enemy, or discovered a grown child I didn't know I'd given birth to.  I've never had the kind of cat fight where I dunked someone's head in the toilet or wound up grappling in a chocolate fountain.  Shoot - I've never even had amnesia!!

But if you take what I imagine the average midwestern housewife's life to be (admitting that I know no midwestern housewives, few midwesterners and fewer housewives), I think my life comes somewhat close.

Take my romantic past.  Or what passes as such.  First, there are the men I didn't want.  The son and one of the two heirs to a jewelry dynasty that puts Cartier to shame.  (He never called in advance for a date. How rude!)  A charming gentleman four times my age who shared his penthouse on Park Avenue only with his housekeeper - who lived in the housekeeper's wing.  (Four times my age....)  A former self-proclaimed "dentist to the stars" who lived in one of the richest neighborhoods in Beverly Hills and owns the kind of movie memorabilia sold at absurd prices by snooty auction houses.  (Narcissistic and boring, the type who is oh-so-impressed with himself.)

So wealth and power and prestige obviously aren't what I was after.  (That's my father's voice in the background, sobbing.)  What sort of men did I choose?

No, I've not fallen for drug abusers/dealer, criminals of other sorts, or even married men.  But introduce me to a guy who loves musical theatre, feels passionate about sequins, and loves to decorate, and I'm a goner.

The question, of course, is why would gay men be attracted to me?  It's not like I have this long litany of unrequited loves.  I have a long list of ex-'s, quite a few of whom turned out to be gay.  In truth, sometimes I knew they were bisexual up-front.  And sometimes they lied and told me they were straight. (And who wouldn't believe that, coming from an actor/hairdresser who has a small poodle?!?)

For years I harbored a secret fear that I must be masculine.  After all - a gay man dating a woman - wouldn't he want someone who is butch?  Turns out, from years of casual research and talks with my gay male friends (one of whom told me he was afraid he was a closet heterosexual since he wasn't attracted to me), when gay men are interested in women, they tend to be interested in extremely feminine and usually petite women.  As well as in women who are comfortable taking center stage and refusing to give it back.  (Liza?  Barbra?  Bette?)

Still, I went blithely on my way, assuming all women had relationships with gay men until an acquaintance called me one day to tell me that my best friend's love life was the talk of half the town ... and my own love life was the talk of the other half!  Granted, the tabloids didn't appear to be interested, but everyone else apparently was.

What caused this fascination with my personal life?  In true soap opera fashion, I had begun doing a play where I was less than enamored with my male co-star.  He was rude when I first met him, and at our first rehearsal, he was wearing more eye make-up than I was.  (I later found out he'd been mugged over the weekend and was trying to cover up bruises.)  As any soap fan knows, if two people dislike each other up-front, they are doomed to fall for each other.  And, over post-rehearsal drinks and a shared love for singing tv theme songs, during rehearsals where we learned to trust each other totally, and in an unspoken way, fall for each other we did.  If there is such as thing as "soul mates", that is what we were.

I'd convinced myself he was straight.  He'd convinced himself we could be "friends".  Let the cameras roll.

Pathos is required.  He was swimming in new territory - he had always been gay and falling in love with a woman just didn't compute.  So he would delight in my company, then avoid me for weeks.  (I can be hard to avoid when I know what I want, so he was seriously determined at those times.)  We would go out till 2:00 a.m. or so, then talk on the phone till 5:00 when we both got home.  He would ask me to marry him on Saturday night, then call on Sunday to explain why that was out of the question.  We'd have huge arguments, sometimes in the middle of the street in the middle of the night.  I cared for him, night and day, when he'd been hit in the head with a cast-iron skillet and left for dead during a robbery.  I broke his foot by stomping on it with my stiletto heel while we were fighting in a bar.  We always, always knew we could count on each other, even if we weren't speaking at the time.  We loved each other passionately, but in the end, he couldn't handle feeling that he didn't know who he was.

Our big finale:  one tear-filled evening, we held each other in a long hug while admitting to each other that this simply couldn't work - not in this life-time.  We both knew our connection was too strong to end, but neither of us could handle more off-stage drama and we had to walk away from each other.  We promised we'd try again in our next life-time and parted with feelings of love and compassion.

Sometimes, soaps have happy endings.  But they also have tragedy and misery.  We saw each other only once more over the next few years; he came to town on business and we had dinner together and laughed and shared beautiful memories before saying good-by again.  The next time I saw him, he was dying of cancer and he lasted only a couple of months after that.

In soap operas, death is rarely final.  People fall out of airplanes, are shot dead and buried, undergo autopsies ... and still return, live and well, to pick up where they left off.  In my own personal soap, I fully expect this type of "ending".  Okay, not in this life, but I fully plan for us to laugh and love and fight and create scenes and pick up right where we left off in our grand romance.  And I am not worried about this show being cancelled.

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