In the months after I finished One Life to Live at ABC, since my long-planned new career in children's media didn't quite happen, I spent hours sending job posts to former co-workers. So many listings, I thought, spoke directly to people I knew, and if I couldn't get work for myself, by golly, I would get work for someone else. I'm not sure if any of those forwards got anyone anywhere, but I do think it at least made us feel as if we were all somehow in it together.
Several years later, I still feel as though we are in it together. Whether it's having coffee with a former "Lifer" or chatting with colleagues who worked on other soaps, I find that there is a connection that years do not break. All these years later, we have dispersed, some ending up closer to the soap studio than others, but all of us having grown up in the same crazy, perhaps dysfunctional, family that got us to where we are now. The paths we take may be uniquely ours, but they can't help but be influenced by where we all were together.
I'm not forwarding job posts nearly as often as I was back then. Years of experience have taught me that many of those posts just send you down a dead end. But the coffee and the chats remind me that I am part of a family whose members and whose opinions still matter to me. We went, together, from lives planned around directing calendars, orders of the day, and out times to lives that are still being planned and re-planned daily. We can't go back. But it's awfully nice when we get to take some of the steps forward together.
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