Erica Kane is my guru

I'm an English professor who adores great literature, but when I really need guidance, I turn to "All My Children."

By Ann Bauer

Read more: TV, Addiction, Pop Culture, Motherhood, Life

ABC/Lou Rocco

Erica Kane (Susan Lucci) and Samuel Woods (Mario Van Peebles) in a scene from "All My Children."

July 25, 2008 | One night, not long ago, I awoke at 2 a.m., breathless, with the sensation of long icy fingers around my throat.

One of my sons had landed in jail the night before, after a joy ride gone horribly awry. Now, stranded in the darkest part of night and powerless to do anything till morning, I was envisioning him in an orange jumpsuit, eating lumpen food off a metal tray. Hearing the clang of tin cups against metal bars. Seeing angry guards carrying billy clubs and criminals with shaved heads and "I Love Mama" tattoos forcing my boy into unnatural positions over a cot.

After a few minutes of lying so taut I could practically levitate, I resigned myself to the fact that I was never going to be able to go back to sleep. So I got out of bed and made a cup of tea, went downstairs, slipped a tape into our ancient VCR and rewound to some random point. Then I pressed play and there, on the screen -- like an answer -- was Erica Kane, wearing an orange jumpsuit, sitting in a solitary cell and talking to a ladybug.

For the past 20 years, I've watched "All My Children." Not every day; not even every week. And usually not in real time, because I find there's something depressing about sitting in front of a television in the middle of the day. Instead, I record the show -- often accumulating a week's worth at a time -- then sit down to watch stretches of it when I'm lonely or anxious or going through a bout of insomnia. "AMC" is my Valium. It's familiar, dependable; the actors never seem to change. Even better: I can tune in to the middle of an episode after a month's hiatus and within three scenes know exactly what's going on. It's like slipping into a warm bath.

My addiction started in college. I was 350 miles from home at a Big 10 school where I didn't know a soul. So I went to the student union every day at noon, between introductory physics and world lit, to buy a bag of popcorn and a Diet Coke and ended up on the edge of a group of kids gathered around a wide-screen TV. Many pretended they weren't watching -- especially the big, hairy football players -- but if someone tried to change the channel there was a dangerous, collective hum, like the sound before a tornado strikes, and the person handling the remote would quickly back off.

Those were the years of Greg and Jenny, Jessie and Angie, Nina and Cliff. The men were sculpted yet brainy; the women had such dewy skin, it was as if their cheeks had been grafted from infants'. Everyone on the show was in love, dying, divorcing or some combination of the three. And they moved like the players in a Shakespearean tragedy. Just as Romeo killed himself in error after the friar's assistant came late with Juliet's crucial message, the young lovers on "AMC" suffered one tragedy after another because of the fickle winds of fate.

Within days, I was able follow the braided story lines and I'd actually made a couple of friends. (Fellow students, I mean.) They filled me in on the characters' backgrounds: Myrtle was an ex-carnival worker, Palmer the town's codgery millionaire. Tad, Jenny's brother, was sleeping with both Liza and her mother, Marion. And minuscule Erica Kane -- the indefatigable Susan Lucci, who has been the show's centerpiece since its inception in January 1970 -- was a fashion model with a presence that was strangely huge.

I stopped for a while after college, forgetting all about the soap during the first months of my marriage and entry-level job. But two years later, my oldest child was born. A persistently sleepless little creature, he awoke as if he had an alarm clock hidden under his Big Bird blankets; every night around 1:30 a.m. I would feed and rock and pat him for hours. That's when I started setting my VCR.

For years, it was a clandestine habit, something I shared in the middle of the night with each of my three infants. They got older and, eventually, the last one quit nursing. When she entered kindergarten, I went to graduate school and became an English professor. You know: the kind who gives lectures on narrative theory and literal emblems and "the inevitability of retrospect," telling students to fill their minds with a variety of great literature and art. My definition was purposely broad: from "Animal House" to "Bridget Jones's Diary." Yet even I would not have included "AMC." Still, I kept up with the soap, sneaking episodes like cigarettes.

We moved to the East Coast. During the day, I taught literature and writing at Brown. Each evening, I'd climb down from my ivory tower and -- after tucking my children into bed -- I'd follow Erica to Budapest (where she stabbed her eighth husband, Dimitri) and lust after bad-boy cop Trevor, who was tricked into sleeping with his wife's sister, and watch Edmund marry Maria even though he was still in love with Brooke.

Yes, I recognized the overacting and saccharine music and implausible plot points. I had to look past the vulgar displays of wealth: None of these people seemed to work, but they all lived in castles or penthouse apartments. I even forgave the ridiculous standard of beauty for "AMC" women, its female characters ranging in size from 0 to 4 and each sporting enough hair extensions to cover the heads of every co-host on "The View." Because, on some elemental level -- the same one, I think, that has always drawn me to epics and fairy tales -- I was (and still am) riveted and comforted, borne up in some way, by the recurring themes of the show.

The people in Pine Valley, Pa. -- the imaginary hamlet where "AMC" is set -- are, for instance, constantly tumbling into mine shafts or stuck in cellars or trapped in bomb shelters. Their descent can happen in any number of ways: They might be thrown down an abandoned well by a deranged sister or slip into an underground grotto on their own, only to be trapped when some runaway criminal covers the opening with a rock. The point is that over and over, they plunge, literally, into pits of despair. And then they claw their way back out, breaking French-manicured fingernails and ripping Italian silk shirts, but making it back up and into the light.

There is a redemptive quality to all of this. It has the timeless, allegorical cycle of fall and ascent. No matter how wrong things go, this show seems to say, you can always shake off the ashes -- like the proverbial phoenix -- and rise again. And no one on "AMC" except the genuinely evil (child killers, for example) ever has to stay in the hell down below.

In Pine Valley, as in the New Testament, the main character never stays dead for long. Characters on "AMC" keep rising miraculously from their graves. They come back to the fold as angels or -- more often -- cases of mistaken death. Tad (middle-aged now, and a good man) was lost once in a river current and presumed dead; his wife Dixie's car went off a Swiss cliff. Yet each of them returned, years later, unharmed with some outrageous yet perfectly satisfying explanation: Tad, who'd had amnesia, was "adopted" by a California family and became a winemaker. Dixie gave birth to a baby girl and was tricked into giving her away, then stayed hidden out of shame. (Recently, Dixie died again -- this time supposedly for real -- but she returned, backlit with a heavenly haze and wearing long, flowing robes, to comfort Tad and help him retrieve their lost child.)

Next page: Are straight men secretly watching "All My Children"?