All My Children; All My Mother

While I did not write a post specifically about it, I have noted on this blog that my mother passed away last May (May 14 to be exact). I've also noted in a blog entry a couple of years ago that I became attached in the mid-1980s to the ABC daytime soap opera All My Children because my mom, who was a loyal fan of the show since it began in 1970, watched it regularly.

After not watching the show much in the late 1980s, in the early 1990s, I got back into watching the show. My college roommate, whose mom is also an original fan, and I used to put it on every weekday in our dorm room while eating lunch, following the adventures of Tad and Dixie and Erica and Dmitri and Brooke and Edmund and so on. The show became so significant to me in connection with my mom that in 1995, when the show's creator, Agnes Dixon, gave a keynote speech at the Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association annual meeting, I attended Nixon's speech, met Nixon, and got Nixon's autograph (personally addressed to my mom), which I framed for my mom for Mother's Day that year.

Today, exactly 11 months after my mom passed away, ABC has announced that, as of this coming September, the show will be cancelled.

While I was initially surprised, I can't say that this is something that no one could have seen coming. Soap opera ratings are not what they once were, particularly because people have daytime cable options to watch instead, and the kinds of shows that ABC is proposing to replace All My Children as well as One Life to Live, which will be cancelled as of this coming January, typically have lower production costs. I, for one, haven't watched, but for catching a scene or two here or there, in well over a decade. Still, All My Children did influence my life, and it certainly means that another connection to my mom will drift into the realms of personal and collective memory.

In 1995, when I met Agnes Nixon, I thanked her for the hours of wonderful television programming that she created. Today, I thank her again for that and, more importantly, for the connection to my mom that her show has provided me. There's probably not much chance of this, since the show is likely to have its last episode on a Friday, not a Monday, but if All My Children's last episode comes on September 12, which would have been my mom's 65th birthday, it'll be hard to believe that my mom's not somehow involved.