support@semo.net
1573 686-9114​​​​

...To my utter shock and glee, passersby started plunking coins into my open guitar case not long after I began...   I say I wanted to see what the "busking" scene was all about down in Melbourne; but really, it was the friend who'd hired me to write---she's the one who suggested I try it. I said, "You want me to come out here and do my little lazy-hobby thing in front of all these people?" To which she replied: "You don't know anybody down here...How humiliating could it be? And who knows, maybe you could make a few bucks while you're at it!" Well, in truth, we had just walked past a particularly mangy-looking adolescent on a street corner, one mauling

I saw "buskers", or street performers, everywhere I went---and, having taken my guitar Down Under, I wanted to see what that was like.    I grew up without giving anybody much trouble along the way; I studied, I "played nice"; went to college, got a job---got several, in fact. Did the office thing for years, wore rather nice suits---and at some point before sanity, or cowardice, kicked in, I even found high-heels somewhat amusing. In New York, like scads of other women, I actually wore power-sneakers with my Dior ensembles as I made my way from home to the subway, and from the subway to work---for awhile, at CBS Broadcast International, and then at public television station WNYC. Footwear-wise, I

For "Hooked on Daytime TV", Part I, click here; for "Hooked on Daytime TV", Part II, click here!    "...Erica Kane Martin Brent Cudahy Chandler Roy Roy Montgomery Montgomery Chandler Marick Marick Montgomery had clearly been through some changes..."  I dropped in on the Pine Valley crowd on "All My Children" a few years ago to see what, if anything, had changed since I'd tuned them out. My impressions: 1) The majority of the townswomen were underfed and overexposed, and viewers were expected to see these as desirable traits; 2) 20-year-olds were running every major manufacturing, retail, and media empire on the eastern seaboard; 3) Erica Kane Martin Brent Cudahy Chandler Roy Roy Montgomery Montgomery Chandler Marick Marick Montgomery had clearly been through

For "Hooked on Daytime TV", Part I, click here!   ...There you had your infamous Luke and Laura storyline; your major heartthrob, Dr. Noah Drake; your nefarious Cassadine family...and an up-and-coming ingenue named Demi Moore, done up boldly in the Flashdance trappings of the day...   So there I was, this kid parked in Ohio for the summer, longing to watch cartoons and comedies, but faced with the interminable sins and sufferings of "All My Children". I was only slightly taller than Aunt Nickie's family collie, and considerably less intuitive than he, yet forced to cope, along with my aunt, in the overwrought aftermath of Phil Brent's departure from Pine Valley for Vietnam.

Watching Grandma watch the soaps gave me my first experience of seeing a human being talking to a television set. She often felt compelled by decency to ask these fabulously-coiffed but deeply-twisted soap people, "Are you really gonna tell that lie?", or "How long you think it's gonna take before he finds that out?"...   How far back does your soap-opera memory go? I must not yet have been in school when my mother spoke to me of one Amy Ames, a heart-of-gold heroine featured on "The Edge of Night". There was also a guy named Adam Drake at some point on the show, and a dark-haired beauty named Nicole. Who these people were, I don't know; I can only remember