April comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers

The Greenlee and Leo scenes, specifically.

Fucking killed me. Killed me. It was so intensely emotional that I cried through the whole thing, even all the smiles and laughter and happy memories. I've been waiting since 2003 for that scene, and it was gorgeous and heartbreaking and perfect and NOT ENOUGH. Greenlee and Leo, the couple that drew me into soaps and made me love them, and then went away, never to return. Until now. For just this one little moment. It actually felt like a miracle.

Thank you Rebecca Budig and Josh Duhamel for having the most amazing romantic chemistry in television history, and Lorraine Broderick for knowing how to write for a soap, especially this soap, and this couple. The only thing I want that you didn't give me is more.

You'd basically have to be dead inside not to love watching li'l Budig scampering around on those especially click-y heels--so inappropriate for a woman supposedly recovering from major back surgery--and struggling, adorably, to open the heavy wooden lid of a crate to reveal exactly what Adam did NOT want to see: David Hayward, the snarkiest ethics-challenged cardiologist on the east coast.

(By the way, smuggling your husband-of-convenience, who's wanted by the police, from the office of your cosmetics company back to the mansion of the corporate mogul--who he's been doctoring on the down-low--in a giant wooden crate that's disguised as a shipment of make-up samples supposedly meant to demonstrate the new line for the corporate mogul's fake multi-million dollar investment in your company is

a) PURE SOAP, and
b) AWESOME.

You cannot get this on prime time.)


And David and Greenlee, standing side-by-side behind the crate and cutely poking at each other as they failed to blackmail Adam, induced some kind of petit mort of the entertainment muscle in me. If Budig and Irizarry weren't having a blast during the filming of that scene, I will eat my big floppy green straw hat, which I just pulled out of the closet on account of it's definitely now spring. (It's past the vernal equinox, it's been warm on and off for weeks, and the crocuses are up. The calender, the weather, and my aesthetic sensibilities are all in alignment on this one.)


Re: attic scenes, wherein David tries to convince Greenlee that it's time to give him up to the cops, and she refuses: David is toooooootally falling in love with Greenlee. His self-sacrificing impulses have kicked in, and that never ever ever ever ever ever happens with David unless he loves someone. Greenlee isn't in love with David yet, but the depth of her emotional investment in keeping him around makes me squee inside. She's right, her stubbornness is her best quality.


So I guess that Greenlee is still staying at Wildwind? Weird. For the better part of a decade, she's been in that same apartment, with a revolving door of guests, lovers, roommates, and occasional tenants. (Although, come to think of it, she was probably in Ryan's apartment in the years they were married...most of which I skipped, thank god.) Anyway, it's nice to see her on a new set, although how in hell David got Wildwind, which last I had heard belonged to Maria and Edmund, is beyond me. Was it something Anna-related? I'm also not clear on why David's so obscenely rich these days, although I'm willing to roll with it. When you take yearlong+ breaks from a soap, these things happen.


Note for the day: I so dig that in between all of her futzing around, aiding and abetting her awesome criminal spouse, Greenlee actually LOOKS like she's working her ass off on Fusion business--not just showing up at the office to order around the staff, but also hauling around paperwork wherever she goes, generally looking like she knows what the fuck she's doing, and reminding me eerily of a former store manager I once worked for, who was equally tiny, stylish and insanely competent. She had that same air of drive and intelligence, and the same vaguely brittle quality. She was the best manager I've ever worked for, and I would have walked across hot coals for her. (Unlike Greenlee, my ex-manager never yelled at the staff for dumbshit mistakes--though I think she sometimes wanted to--because an employer's verbal abuse, a la The Devil Wears Prada, is something less than entertaining in real life.)

I, the enspoiled, thought David was in the the Chandler Mansion tunnels during that match-striking-maybe-a-Greenlee-metaphor-episode, but it turns out that he was actually in Leo's tomb (sob). Oh, Leo. Never gonna get over that. David's mournful mien in that scene is now doubly justified. For good or for bad, they never did recast Leo, so he never had the chance to be trashed, although he is largely forgotten, which merits a grudge on my part towards the producers.

So David was hanging out, all sadlike, in his dead brother's tomb, and it was wicked mournfully understated, for Leo has been dead now for most of a decade (sob). I love you, Lorraine Broderick. I bet this show will suck again once you're gone, but you're here now, and we love you for it. There is absolutely nowhere in the universe better than the sadly departed Leo's grave for his self-centered-traumatized-spitfire-cosmetics-exec widow and his manipulative-amoral-fugitive-from-justice-cardiologist brother, now linked by a convenient marriage, to meet up. Are you made of magic? Soap magic? Did you meet with a soap unicorn, and frolic, and go on to bear soapy centaur offspring?

David has finally made it to those Chandler mansion tunnels which I was spoiled unto--once again, anyone know what up with them? I mean, just, why?--while the delightfully bitter-and-broken-yet-unstoppable Greenlee is waging snarky corporate war on her mortal enemy, Erica, being aided by Greenlee's lawyer bio-dad, Jackson, who is a) Erica's ex, three or four times over, and b) the (woulda-been-awesome) father Greenlee never knew as a child (because Greenlee's mom was a jerk who married a jerk, and Greenlee is exactly the kind of fab soap diva who merited a few of the retcons that help to tie her permanently onto the soap's canvas).

Even when they aren't on screen together, David and Greenlee are both so hot that I worry that, like soap-vet-corporate-mogul-Adam, I will develop an accelerated heart rate and someone will need to shove my head down into ice water to slow my racing pulse. Nothing this good can last.

Rebecca Budig has come back to All My Children. I care, but I know you don't, so I am cutting this.

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The other day, I saw, somewhere on the vastness of the internet, someone complaining about TV in public, specifically in re: TVs in public are always tuned to things like soap operas--yeah right--which apparently offend his delicate masculine sensibilities. Oh yes, they offend him. Dude, aside from being a sexist twit, you're at least a decade out of date, and if you really wanted to keep your cultural elitist cred, you'd be bitching about reality TV or Fox, not daytime soaps, which are a) dying and b) still more awesome than anyone you will ever know.

I can pretty much never take soap-haters seriously, because the things they say they hate about soaps are pretty invariably either not actually universal characteristics of soaps, or are perfectly unexceptionable genre characteristics (a strong emphasis on personal relationships, decompressed serial storytelling, etc), and thus are silly to hate. Like hating musicals because they're full of people singing. And that's just. So! Offensive! How dare they! If you want to hear some good reasons for hatin' on a soap, go hang out on a soap message board and listen to the complaints of people who watch them. You will learn more about the genre and what makes it tick (and what makes soaps fail) than you ever knew you could.

Soap operas can be hauntingly beautiful. American TV soaps air about forty minutes worth of content for most of the three hundred and sixty-five days in a year, so they have a lot of filler; they recast frequently, they retread ground often; they revisit the spectacular enough to choke on it. But they still sometimes achieve moments of haunting beauty, as in this scene here, at 3:48.

It's a very sad scene (in the verbose, drawn-out style of soaps) and probably would seem to sad to anybody, given that it's a conversation about the miscarriage of a wanted pregnancy, but what gives it spectacular kick is the audience's knowledge of the background. This a conversation between an ex-husband and wife who once loved each other intensely, but whose relationship crashed and burned in a spectacular and emotionally scarring way, with lots of guilt for both parties; they refer several times to incidents from the process of that breakdown. Both are now married to other people; she's in love with her new husband, but he's publicly known to still be in love with her.

It's such a gorgeous thing, the interplay of emotions--her, almost at peace with the past, with the mistakes she made and the wounds she suffered, trying now to comfort him; him, feeling raw, guilty and exposed by the collapse of his present marriage, and the miscarriage just suffered by his present wife. Although she loves him, she's trying to keep those feelings under control, so as not to torpedo her current, happy life, yet everything he says is the stab of a dagger--every confession of guilt for his failures of his present wife is also a sorrowful apology to her for having made them first with her.

It's a beautiful dance, graceful and poignant, danced with elegance by people who stumbled through the steps years ago, and now, somehow, find themselves dancing it again. They know the score, know how it ends, and are trying so hard not to move to that rhythm again, but are propelled onwards by the weight of intimacy, the memory of deep feeling.

It's sort of fucking awesome.