Last Stop, Pine Valley

The SJG has logged plenty time in Pine Valley with Erica Kane and the gang.  I started watching "All My Children" in junior high.  Back then, I only got to see it when I was home sick, or during school breaks.  There wasn't one thing about these goyim I related to, on any level, and yet, I adored the elaborate plot twists and love triangles; the non-stop tsouris.  Most of all, I marveled how no one ever used the phone. Characters just stopped by, uninvited, to make trouble.  Historically, Jews call first, which explains the lack of Hebrew and Yiddish, let alone a rabbi or a Bar Mitzvah, in Pine Valley, at least not when I watched it, religiously. I'll never forget the time I met Ruth Warrick, the great actress who played Phoebe Wallingford,  at the Century Plaza Hotel.  It was the early '80s and I was there to interview some business mucky-muck.  The SJG was the business editor of the illustrious Century City News.  Why they hired me to write about business is anyone's guess.  Maybe because they were about to go bankrupt and weren't too picky.  Back to Phoebe.  I stepped into the elevator as she was stepping out.  I went all giggly.  I was uncool.  I blurted out, "I love you."  She smiled and said, "Thank you," and kept walking.  My favorite star-sighting of all time.  And now, ABC has gone and cancelled "All My Children" and "One Life To Live."  In the words of my grandfather, "Bastards!"