At the First International Soap Opera Exposition, held in the Statler Hilton some days ago, we saw many stout middle-aged women with cameras and many stout middle-aged women with children. We saw five men who were there because they liked and watched soap operas; all the other men we saw were connected with the exposition. We sat in a room filled with some of the stout middle-aged women with cameras and the stout middle-aged women with children. On a dais in the room were three actresses and an actor who play leading roles in a soap opera. In the middle of the room was a microphone. The women lined up in an orderly way to ask the actresses and the actor questions. The women called the actresses and the actor by their soap-opera names.
Among the questions that the women asked the actresses and the actor were these:
“Is there ever a time when you get into a part so much that when you get home you can’t get out of it?”
“Did you get married on Valentine’s Day?”
“How do you get along off camera?”
“If you had to pick a part other than your own on your show, which part would it be?”
“Why can’t you be honest with Pete and tell him you don’t love him?”
“What do you like to do with your free time?”
“You are all so lovely and thin. How do you maintain your weight?”
“Are you married when you are not on the show?”
“How do you prepare yourself when you have to cry?”
One of the actresses said that Louis Malle was considering a screenplay she had written about Henri Christophe, one of the eighteenth-century liberators of Haiti. Another said she liked to have fun. The third said she liked life to be a blast. All three actresses said they had to watch the amount and kind of food they ate. All three actresses said that when they had a particularly difficult and emotional scene to do they tried to think of particularly difficult and emotional scenes in their own lives. All three actresses said they were not married. The actor announced that he was appearing in an Off Broadway show. The actor said that the Off Broadway show was a very good Off Broadway show, and that he hoped the people in the audience would come and see it. The three actresses laughed with the audience and with each other. The actor seemed serious and standoffish.
Just before the interview session was over, a woman stood up and said, “I watch your show every day. It’s like a religious thing with me.”
The whole room stood up and cheered.
—September 18, 1978