: About Me

After graduating from Harvard University in 1983 with an undergraduate degree in humanities, I began writing about nursing. Her articles appeared in The Boston Globe, Revolution: The Journal for Nurse Empowerment, and Soap Opera Weekly, where I published a piece on how nurses are portrayed on soap operas and shifted my focus to writing about soaps.

In the early 1990s, I wrote several articles for SOW, including, "Who Really Watches Soap Operas," a demographic analysis that has been cited in numerous scholarly articles. I was a thesis advisor for Sam Ford, who received a Masters in Media Studies from MIT in 2007, and now teaches a class there on soaps, to which I have contributed. I also post on several soap boards and media blogs.

In addition to my soap opera observations, I am a playwright and screenwriter. My short plays have been performed in greater Boston, New York and Los Angeles. I've completed one screenplay, Never Can Say Goodbye, and a treatment for a second, The Good Father. In 2007, my one-act play, Settling In was broadcast on Somerville Community Access Television (MA).

Entertainment > TV Genres & Trends Soap opera: Comparing the modern era with the original concept

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I've been checking in on a blog set up by Sam Ford for the class on The American Soap Opera he's teaching at MIT. The student comments touch on many of the aspects that underlie the current, sorry state of the American Soap Opera. Of course, being only a few weeks into the course, and from what I can tell, relatively new soap viewers, they lack the contextual understanding to connect the dots. They're watching As the World Turns, a show I've watched since it premiered in 1956, when I started kindergarten. You can do the math. But they're watching and studying ATWT as it exists today; I'm w...

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