Daytime soap General Hospital

The wife and I have been married for almost 50 years now. I only refer to her as “the wife” on this blog because I know it irritates the Libs. Regardless, she tapes and watches GH every weekday and gets really into the characters, their lives and their comings and goings (characters regularly leave the show and are killed off and then come back years later with some soap gimmick or another) and she’s happy as pie to have them back.

She started watching GH with her mother as a little girl. Her mom’s life was a soap opera all to itself. Her mom was the youngest of sixteen (that’s right 16) children two of whom died as infants. The family were share croppers and all of the kids, girls and boys, worked in the fields and typically dropped out of school by the 8th grade. Her mom’s mom was blind and her mom’s dad was a mean old SOB who bragged to the older boys, “My pants don’t hit the bedpost before I knock up your mother.”

I grew up with two college educated parents. My dad swore when he got mad about something but did not use profanity as a way of speaking and communicating on a regular basis. My mom never swore, ever – except she would sometimes become so exasperated with me and my siblings that she would say, “You damn kids.”, but that was about it. But the worse thing she would say to us was, “Wait til your father gets home.” That was a real threat because my father did not like hearing anything annoying (like rotten kids doing bad things – not really bad things like throwing a rock thru a window but normal bad things like throwing a rock at the farmyard geese) when he got home from work and having to spank us bratty kids was annoying but he would do it because our mother was just not of the temperament to spank kids with the gusto needed for us to fear it.

As I was saying my wife’s mother’s life was full of soap opera type drama. The older brothers were the “supervisors” and liked abusing the younger sisters, verbally, physically and sexually. Needless to say all of the girls ran away from home and got married at very young ages to typically much older, grown men who when they tired of having mere children as wives would hit the local bar and pick up real women there. When the wife and I went to see “Coal Miner’s Daughter” about Loretta Lynn’s life her mother couldn’t sit through the film because it was like watching her life. “Who wants to see that?” she said.

As I was saying my wife remembers fondly sitting with her mom and watching GH as one of the few things they could do together and enjoy at the same time. Another was going with her mom and dad to watch her brother play high school and college football. To this day my wife likes watching football, our own sons playing, our grandson playing or even and especially the NFL on Sunday afternoons – far more than I do.

When she heads downstairs to watch GH on our big screen TV I will from time to time stop down to watch her watch it. She’ll tell me about who’s who and what they’re up to and what they did ten years ago and how that relates to what they are doing today and who’s being killed off and who recently came back and who she likes and who she loves and who she doesn’t like and who she hates – just as if they were people from work, or our neighbors or her actual relatives. I might remark how cute I find it that she knows this much about so many people that don’t really exist and how much she enjoys watching them – kind of like Jimmy Stewart in “Rear Window”.

“No,” she will respond, “it’s not like Stewart at all. I know these people, I’ve known some of them for many years, they are like old friends and I love seeing them every day. I cry when a person I really like gets hurt, or sick or gets cheated on or divorced or gets murdered and I rejoice when everything turns out well for them. It’s no different than how you love reading and re-reading The Lord of the Rings and especially the The Hobbit, or how you quote Bilbo or Gandalf or Gimli or Saruman and rejoice when good wins and evil loses.”

If I respond that LOTR is great literature and GH isn’t she will respond that Anna Karenina and Little Women are great literature and the wonderful Christian novel A Crown of Life by Brian Patrick Mitchell is both compelling and engrossing. Yet you won’t read any of them because they’re mainly about women being fully human, strong, resilient and enduring.

That’s not true I say back. GH isn’t even good TV.

Well, Family Guy and The Three Stooges aren’t good TV either.

But they’re hilariously funny.

They’re boy humor and stupid and you think it’s funny when Peter gets hit in the groin by a bag of nickels.

At that point I pause and start chuckling all over again just envisioning it.

She throws up her hands and says, “See you’re thinking about it even now and still laughing.”

Ok, I will end this little chat with this illustration.

It would seem that men and women find differing things entertaining. Even if a Supreme Court justice put up by democrats cannot say what a woman is (when even a kindergartner knows that much “Boys have a penis and girls have a vagina” – Kindergarten Cop) here’s a little exercise that will help them.

In a Family Guy cutaway a bearded Stewie cuts open a dead horse, pulls out its entrails and crawls inside to get warm (à la The Revenant | 2015). Then the camera pans outward and shows a bunch of little kids in a petting zoo watching the whole thing appalled and ends with Stewie saying, “I forgot my jacket.”

If you laughed out loud and spit out the coke you were drinking you’re a man, if you thought it was stupid, gross and disgusting then you’re a woman.