Finding My Light

As you may have read from some of my fellow bloggers, Guiding Light invited five us to visit the show on Tuesday and Wednesday to see the new production model up close and personal to help gain some perspective on how and why things have changed, and where they are going. For me personally, it was an fascinating experience which provided insights I never could have gained otherwise.

The other bloggers were flown in from various locations. Living nearby I was local, but we all stayed in a nice hotel not too far from the CBS studios in Manhattan. It was a real pleasure to finally meet some of the other people who write about soaps online and bond over our shared love for the genre.

Tuesday morning we took a SUV to Peapack to have lunch with headwriter Jill Lorie Hurst (one of our head writers) and Alexandra Johnson-Gamsey (the day's producer) and I look forward to sharing my experiences on that in an upcoming blog. Next we went to the showhouse for a tour and to watch executive producer Ellen Wheeler direct a scenes with Daniel Cosgrove, Jordan Clarke and Marcy Rylan. My next blog will cover this experience and conversation we had at the end of the day with a very passionate Wheeler.

Wednesday we went to the CBS studios for a tour and a conversation with the always outspoken Kim Zimmer. She's an interviewer's dream and a public relations nightmare all in one. This was followed by a Spaulding family lunch with Ron Raines, Marj Dusay, Marcy Rylan and Grant Aleksander. Later, a couple of us went to a photo shoot with the Spauldings and their extended family in the West Village.

I’ll be writing separate blogs on each of these things along with some additional commentary that I hope you will find interesting. I hope retelling the events and conversations of the past two days will add a new perspective on the changes that have taken place on Guiding Light in 2008. I started my blog because I really love the soap genre and wanted to honor its history while promoting its future. In many ways this time on set has made me remember what I set out to do and how much we all want the genre to survive.