Recapturing old loves
So, if I understand correctly, one half of the most wonderfullest soap couple ever, Steve and Kayla on Days of Our Lives, is coming back to Salem today, and then the other half arrives later. I haven't watched Days in a really long time -- every once in a great while I tune in to see if I recognize anyone, but the last time I did, everyone was getting killed off and that was kind of depressing -- all the old favorites of mine from back in the day. I never cared a lot about Bo and Hope, I had always been partial to the oldsters like Marlena and Roman/John, but things got awfully convoluted on the Roman/John score by the time I was easing off watching, and I never really did find out how that panned out.
I started watching the show back in the beginning, because it had Peter Brown (in the icon, on the right) from Laredo, the one Western my sister and I had been able to sneak past my mom in watching (she hated Westerns and we loved them, and so we had to find clever ways to make sure she wasn't around to snap off that old Sylvania black and white TV we had long after everyone else had color -- color! -- and tell us to get our butts back outside). (Back in those days, kids could range far and wide to play, and we were always outside, playing in totally dangerous places, mind you, but no one thought anything about it. There was certainly no such thing as the ghastly play-date concept.)
Anyway, I digress. Over the years I went in and out as a regular watcher, but it was always my favorite soap, along with The Doctors and Edge of Night, even when General Hospital and All My Children were all that. In large part because of Steve and Kayla. I hate that people still to this day, even though no one on the show called him that after he became a regular character, refer to him as Patch, because he has an eye patch (so dashing!). To me, that's like calling someone Hook if he has a hook for a hand, or referring to anyone by their disability. Sheesh. But I adored their operatic and romantic and doomed storyline. I would still, to this day, pay a large, large sum of money if I could get copies of the original eps where Kayla rescued him and they started to fall in love. OMG. I would watch it at lunch in our little break room on my first real career job, and my boss got so caught up in that that he joined me every day because he was so impressed by Stephen Nichols's acting and by Mary Beth Evans and it was just so amazing.
It was one of the first of what would become my infatuation with epic, against all odds romances, especially when good actors are doing the roles. Nichols has done lots of pilots and such, but he's never really broken out of the soap derby, and I've never figured out why, because he's really an amazing actor. Back then, he came onto the show in a one-time role as a thug hired by evil Victor to terrify pretty nurse Kayla and make her leave town, so that some secret or other would remain safe (that she knew about without knowing she knew). He had already been doing some terrifying of the show's power couple, Hope and Bo, and it turned out that Bo knew him somehow from the past. In his scenes with Hope, I just thought he was amazing, and the producers also noticed what they had, so they kept him around to be menacing, only of course he started to fall for Kayla from afar.
Finally, he told Victor that he wouldn't do it -- because he was falling for her! my kind of guy! -- and Victor sent his thugs to beat poor Steve to within an inch of his life, and Kayla was the one who found him. My heart soared. Even though she was deathly afraid of him, she took him to the little hovel he was living in, and fixed him up. At one point she had to coax him to allow her to take his eye patch off, and he didn't want her to see it, but she pointed out she was a nurse, and so he let her, and she fixed him up and went off to the hospital to get some more stuff. She promised she would return, and he struggled out of bed and went to the mirror with his hand over his eye, and made this stunned comment to himself that she didn't even flinch. My boss and I were sitting there all sniffly and with our mouths hanging open. I had never been so happy in my life.
At the time, I was taping things in case I didn't get to see them at work, and I would tape over each week's eps. I curse myself for not saving that tape, and the subsequent weeks as they got to know each other, scared though she was of him, and the way he felt he had to stay away from her because he was just a bad guy through and through. Gah. Why is hindsight always 20-20? I would have probably rewatched those tapes into oblivion, though.
A long time ago, sherrold sent me this note, which I did keep because it really does hit on what Days of Our Lives did so successfully for me then:
"From a new translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and it describes Ovid thusly:
[he was] obsessed with hopelessly besotted and doomed love in the most intense form imaginable, and lived for the moments where passion has become mythic, has achieved the unendurable intensity that lifts the whole episode onto the supernatural or divine plane.
Well, this immediately reminded me of you, and I think next time someone asks you for your style, you should say new-ovidian, or faux-ovidian, or something cool like that."
I loved that note (we had been discussing, on a list, what we thought our "styles" were in writing fic), and it was so true, and honestly, Days had a lot to do with that, Steve and Kayla had a lot to do with it. I think I'd honestly always felt that way, but it was seeing it portrayed there that I finally became aware of this love of the operatic (and it would also help explain why I love those really OTT operas!). Also, Steve was just hot, period, so... But everything I've been really fannish about since then has needed that quality -- it's one reason slash appeals to me in a lot of respects, because it's more of a difficult struggle for same sex couples even in today's era, but the het couples have all had this doomed quality -- Michael and Nikita, Buffy and Angel and Buffy and Spike, Mulder and Scully... I guess it explains why a lot of the major fandoms do nothing for me -- there's no struggle there.
So, yeah, this is a really loooong way of saying that Days is finally going to be back in rotation for me. I doubt there's any way they can recapture that magic (even before they left, their storyline was less engaging to me), but I'm more than willing to watch them, even just for the memories.
I started watching the show back in the beginning, because it had Peter Brown (in the icon, on the right) from Laredo, the one Western my sister and I had been able to sneak past my mom in watching (she hated Westerns and we loved them, and so we had to find clever ways to make sure she wasn't around to snap off that old Sylvania black and white TV we had long after everyone else had color -- color! -- and tell us to get our butts back outside). (Back in those days, kids could range far and wide to play, and we were always outside, playing in totally dangerous places, mind you, but no one thought anything about it. There was certainly no such thing as the ghastly play-date concept.)
Anyway, I digress. Over the years I went in and out as a regular watcher, but it was always my favorite soap, along with The Doctors and Edge of Night, even when General Hospital and All My Children were all that. In large part because of Steve and Kayla. I hate that people still to this day, even though no one on the show called him that after he became a regular character, refer to him as Patch, because he has an eye patch (so dashing!). To me, that's like calling someone Hook if he has a hook for a hand, or referring to anyone by their disability. Sheesh. But I adored their operatic and romantic and doomed storyline. I would still, to this day, pay a large, large sum of money if I could get copies of the original eps where Kayla rescued him and they started to fall in love. OMG. I would watch it at lunch in our little break room on my first real career job, and my boss got so caught up in that that he joined me every day because he was so impressed by Stephen Nichols's acting and by Mary Beth Evans and it was just so amazing.
It was one of the first of what would become my infatuation with epic, against all odds romances, especially when good actors are doing the roles. Nichols has done lots of pilots and such, but he's never really broken out of the soap derby, and I've never figured out why, because he's really an amazing actor. Back then, he came onto the show in a one-time role as a thug hired by evil Victor to terrify pretty nurse Kayla and make her leave town, so that some secret or other would remain safe (that she knew about without knowing she knew). He had already been doing some terrifying of the show's power couple, Hope and Bo, and it turned out that Bo knew him somehow from the past. In his scenes with Hope, I just thought he was amazing, and the producers also noticed what they had, so they kept him around to be menacing, only of course he started to fall for Kayla from afar.
Finally, he told Victor that he wouldn't do it -- because he was falling for her! my kind of guy! -- and Victor sent his thugs to beat poor Steve to within an inch of his life, and Kayla was the one who found him. My heart soared. Even though she was deathly afraid of him, she took him to the little hovel he was living in, and fixed him up. At one point she had to coax him to allow her to take his eye patch off, and he didn't want her to see it, but she pointed out she was a nurse, and so he let her, and she fixed him up and went off to the hospital to get some more stuff. She promised she would return, and he struggled out of bed and went to the mirror with his hand over his eye, and made this stunned comment to himself that she didn't even flinch. My boss and I were sitting there all sniffly and with our mouths hanging open. I had never been so happy in my life.
At the time, I was taping things in case I didn't get to see them at work, and I would tape over each week's eps. I curse myself for not saving that tape, and the subsequent weeks as they got to know each other, scared though she was of him, and the way he felt he had to stay away from her because he was just a bad guy through and through. Gah. Why is hindsight always 20-20? I would have probably rewatched those tapes into oblivion, though.
A long time ago, sherrold sent me this note, which I did keep because it really does hit on what Days of Our Lives did so successfully for me then:
"From a new translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, and it describes Ovid thusly:
[he was] obsessed with hopelessly besotted and doomed love in the most intense form imaginable, and lived for the moments where passion has become mythic, has achieved the unendurable intensity that lifts the whole episode onto the supernatural or divine plane.
Well, this immediately reminded me of you, and I think next time someone asks you for your style, you should say new-ovidian, or faux-ovidian, or something cool like that."
I loved that note (we had been discussing, on a list, what we thought our "styles" were in writing fic), and it was so true, and honestly, Days had a lot to do with that, Steve and Kayla had a lot to do with it. I think I'd honestly always felt that way, but it was seeing it portrayed there that I finally became aware of this love of the operatic (and it would also help explain why I love those really OTT operas!). Also, Steve was just hot, period, so... But everything I've been really fannish about since then has needed that quality -- it's one reason slash appeals to me in a lot of respects, because it's more of a difficult struggle for same sex couples even in today's era, but the het couples have all had this doomed quality -- Michael and Nikita, Buffy and Angel and Buffy and Spike, Mulder and Scully... I guess it explains why a lot of the major fandoms do nothing for me -- there's no struggle there.
So, yeah, this is a really loooong way of saying that Days is finally going to be back in rotation for me. I doubt there's any way they can recapture that magic (even before they left, their storyline was less engaging to me), but I'm more than willing to watch them, even just for the memories.