Comments
Having spent nearly two decades on the creative chain gang known as Daytime Drama, I am a 7-year veteran of ABC-TV's "General Hospital", for which I won a Daytime Emmy Award, and a proud veteran of the late great "All My Children", for which I received 3 Daytime Emmy Awards and two Writers Guild Awards. I will never forget journalist Russell Baker's introduction to one of Masterpiece Theater's serialized 19th Century novel-based dramas: "If Dickens were alive today", Said Baker, "He would be Writing "All My Children". And, of course, it was true. In its heyday "All My Children" was the apotheosis of serialized drama, daytime or night. Now that Daytime Drama is lapsing into television history, I am working as a playwright and oral historian.
In the fall of 2012, my short piece ("Missing Daughter") was staged along with a dozen others at the New York Historical Society under the rubric of "Unheard Voices", a theatrical response to the accidental excavation of Manhattan's legendary African Burial Ground, in which anonymous New Yorkers of African descent were interred in numbered plots between 1650 and 1790.
In July of 2013, an excerpt from my screenplay "Black Roses" was performed at Manhattan's Academy of Dramatic Arts, under the rubric of New York Women In Film And Television. We were one actor short, so my husband played the romantic lead - and was fabulous.
I am now at work on a full length play called "Dressing For Success, 1968", aka "Before It Went So Wrong."
I have also collected lengthy interviews with 18 alumnae of the Barnard College class of 1971. These interviews have been transcribed, taped (by my husband) and chiseled (also by my husband) into a short documentary called "The Way It Was". When we aired this doc at the Barnard 2011 reunion, it provoked laughter and tears and much enthusiasm. We hope the original 18 interviews will be the kernel of an Oral History Archive at Barnard College.