THE FIFTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD AMERICAN actress, a back-to-back Daytime Emmy Award winner for Best Lead Actress in a Daytime Drama (’85 and ’86)1, who was once proclaimed the “Sarah Bernhardt of soap operas” by Carolyn Hinsey in Soap Opera Weekly in a 1991 feature article, sits in her dressing room, quietly nursing a gin rickey—a native D.C. cocktail for the once native daughter—while her neck is wrapped in cornhusks that have been soaked in the prepubescent oils of the undocumented young Mexican women who clean the fifteen bathrooms that are spread throughout her palatial home. Only moderately overweight (she maintains a “matronly figure—prison matron,” as it was described by Joan Rivers on E!’s Fashion Police once), she’s a real actress who was once nominated in the early 1970s for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Featured Role in a Play before she began her thirty-five year (and counting) reign as Lydia Wirthmore on Falcon Palace, the matriarch of the Wirthmore family who own and operate the largest high-end luggage distribution in the fictional Southwestern city of Silver Platte, Nevada (yes, there is more than one high-end luggage distributor in the city, she’s had to explain to several inane daytime talk-show hosts throughout the years who clearly had done no research whatsoever—how else do they think the writers create the familial rivalries, the weekly backstabbings, the tortured romances that provide years of storylines in which Lydia may inevitably shine?). The Actress is the winner of several “Best of” Soap Opera Digest Awards throughout the years including: Best Villainess (’79), Best Couple (’84, an honor she shared with Hayward Griffin, whose character she murdered in self-defense two years later at the climax of a groundbreaking marital-rape storyline that secured her second Daytime Emmy Award in 1986), Best Kiss (’93, shared with Valerie Cortlandt for her later-in-life lesbian storyline, a short-lived dalliance that was over before it even took off and has never been mentioned by any of the other characters ever again, yet has since spawned its own acronym—a “L.i.L.L.y”—memorialized on urbandictionary.com and attributed solely to her storied performance). Now fifty-seven, the Actress, who lounges around between takes in a chartreuse house robe her own sister, a one-time assistant, sewed for her by hand as a birthday present before the two were forced to permanently part ways both professionally and personally, whom The New York Times once referred to in response to her performance in Eugene O’Neill’s A Moon for the Misbegotten as “the inheritor of the legacy of such stage greats as Eva Le Gallienne, Jessica Tandy, and Geraldine Page,” is five foot seven, 168 pounds, with hair colored a “burnt sienna” bimonthly with the aforementioned Third World-oiled cornhusks wrapped around her neck to combat the “turkey neck”—God, how she loathes that term: why not “weathered swan neck” or “crepe-paper skin” or something halfway elegant; why is every day a battle she must fight against her own womanhood?—that has crept into her visage in the last decade or so, resulting in (and she is quite sure of this) a reduction in screen time, a drastic cut in romantic pairings, the acknowledgment by one of these insufferable new teen characters in-scene that she was his great-grandmother, the striking of the Wirthmore office set, a place she considered almost an extension of her own home after all these years. She looks closer at the dressing room mirror with light bulbs lit on its periphery like the ones that hugged the end of a Broadway stage she was on for only that one 363-performance run of A Moon for the Misbegotten at the Winter Garden Theatre, the one extra light casting a ghoulish emphasis on the deep wrinkles in her forehead, the unforgiving lines down the sides of her face from so much yelling on the set, so much screaming in pain while giving birth to one of her four screen children, all that desperate calling for help when her identical cousin Christina (which she herself, of course, played) was holding her hostage at the bottom of a well while she took over Lydia’s life. She places a camisole up to her cheek to wipe away the clownish rouge Dana the makeup lady had applied so hurriedly this morning and smears off the coral lipstick chosen for her by focus groups—the only women who wear coral lipstick are those who have recently been embalmed—pulls herself out of the support girdle the wardrobe people shoved her into, and lets her folds breathe happily against the fabric of her house robe. Her dressing room is located near the old Wirthmore office set in Studio B of the NBC-Paramount Studios in Burbank, California, which is about twenty-five minutes from her house in the Hollywood Hills, which is paid off in full. Now that the set has been struck, Lydia’s office scenes are now filmed in her living room, in an alcove that only reads “office” by virtue of the presence of a cubbyhole stuffed with envelopes, a sterling silver letter opener (which Lydia used once in 1992 to fend off an intruder), and a desk lamp with a hunter-green shade. The Actress sits waiting for her call, choosing not to focus on the round of bells and whistles from the game show taping across the way, one of the many programs supplanting the entire soap opera genre because they’re so cheap to produce, cheaper than keeping up the appearance that Lydia Wirthmore’s fortune is somehow untouched by the outside economic calamities of the real world, the 2008 housing crisis and bank bailout, the election of the nation’s first black president (the “president” in Falcon Palace is a nameless white man forever modeled on Ronald Reagan), years of sexual revolution having passed by most of the women in the cast like clouds that have morphed from a dragon to a bunny when you look away for a second, thinking that if she could have just one more epic storyline—the revelation that she is actually Serbian royalty, a final triumph over Wirthmore’s main rival DiSanto Leather, Inc., with her, Lydia Wirthmore, at the center of a coup d’état, a cougaresque affair with her stepson Derrick—she wouldn’t be sitting here pondering what Ionesco might have thought of all this love in the afternoon or if O’Neill or Albee or even Ibsen might’ve found the lick of courage deep down inside the character of Lydia Wirthmore that the Actress has had to find or if any of these playwrights whose immortal words she should be performing as a woman of a certain age2 would’ve dared pare down her scenes, diminish her character, strike her rooms.