THE SOAP OPERA EFFECT

The Soap Opera Effect ...

I tell you, sometimes I am absolutely brilliant! The things that pop into my brain could really revolutionize the world ... or at least, I think so in my own happy place. The Soap Opera Effect is just one of those revolutionizing principals ... right up there with the discovery that the world is, indeed, round, and the Laws of Gravity and Motion.

It came to me today when I was talking with my mother. She was telling me, between hysterical bursts of laughter, about the current book her book club is reading. THE CINDERELLA PACT is written by Sarah Strohmeyer (I believe I have the author's name correctly spelled -- my apologies if I didn't), and it is, according to my mother, so real for her because she can hear me saying pretty much every thing the main character Nola has said. In other words, I very well could be Nola.

I am very eager to read this book, mainly, because my mother had me in stitches as she was reading a particularly funny part of the book. You see, Nola's single, 35-year old life hasn't exactly fallen into place the way she had envisioned it. Boy can I relate! And then it hit me ... it's the soap opera effect. Let me unpack it for you ...

Soap operas are an escapists' dream world. Every thing is pretty ... everything is perfect ... everything is modern and stylish and very "now." Yes, there is always, running just beneath the surface, this foreboding train wreck barrelling down on the town Happyville. Yet, it's always miraculously, amazing when the soap opera haz mat team is able to single-handily fix the wreck, and not a hair was pulled out of place! Nary a lipstick shade was smudged!

I had a friend that lived by this theory. Her life was supposed to follow exactly as Cassiopeia's on LOVES LAST LILT. She was under the false impression that she and her husband would ALWAYS feel amorous at the very same moments ... that there was no such thing as morning breath ... that you always wake up the next morning looking like you could stop traffic (in a good way!) ... there are always fresh flowers on every surface of your immaculately cleaned house and that those flowers all came from your very creatively, romantic man.

Here was my response to her: "PAHLEEZE!"

However, there's always been a small part of me that has perhaps, during moments of weakness, maybe day-dreamed about being swept off my very delicately, thin feet (attached to a delicately, thin body) with roses and Sonnets and all that flowery crap.

Real life hasn't exactly worked out that way. Here I sit, on my celluloid butt, in a less than immaculately clean home (some might even say, PIG STY), with nary a real flower to be seen, and the only one greeting me at the door with any sort of romance in mind, is my psychologically, unbalanced cat that only whips out the amorous card when she sees her food bowl is empty. I don't meet handsome, mysterious strangers that ride into town at night ... in fact, when I do meet them, it seems, these days, it's when I am sweaty, stinky, and otherwise, down-right disgusting.

That, my friends, is the soap opera effect.