End Of An Era?

The death this week of Agnes Nixon was followed by the death of long time soap actor Larkin Molloy, whom I had watched on multiple different soaps (including an online one) over the last 30-plus years. I never met him--I was simply an admirer of his work. Perhaps if his death hadn't followed so closely on the heels of Nixon's, perhaps if I didn't have quite so many soap-affiliated FB friends, I wouldn't have thought much of it. But it did, and I do, so it was one of those announcements that really made me wonder "is an era really over?"

It isn't, really, because there are still thriving soaps in LA and new shows being announced as soaps. It isn't, really, because hundreds of us are still working and creating, even if in different arenas and different locations. And yet, the era that lived in NY, that employed Mr. Molloy, and that joined so many of us here for so many years, is not just over, it is fading away around us. The midtown building where I worked on Guiding Light is no longer. The armory that once housed One Life to Live now looks a whole lot more corporate and is home to ESPN. Massive studio spaces house talk/service shows, not soaps, and welcome in audiences to spaces where a person was lucky just to be able to stand on the steps for autographs. There are moments when it is hard not to feel washed up when the genre that fed you in so many ways continues to evaporate around you.

And then you realize that you have somehow found other ways to feed your spirit and your family. And then you discover that change and death are happening every day, in every arena, and people survive it all over. And then you realize that what is gone left you with all those memories and all those stories and all those FB friends who let you know about the deaths, but also let you know about the births and the new projects and the hope that they have taken out of everything you shared.

Is it the end of an era? I can't say. I'm too busy keeping up with the era we're in now.