OAKDALE DAYS
Why do so many terrible things keep happening to one town?
By Larissa MacFarquhar
The New Yorker
April 15, 2002
Barbara Ryan has not been lucky in love. She was dumped by her stepbrother for a jewelry thief who reminded him of his ex-wife, and later she dumped him for a pretender to the Swedish throne who turned out to be an Egyptian-tomb robber. She was jailed for the murder of her first husband until he showed up alive, she lost her second husband in a mysterious ballooning accident, and she married her third husband three times but it didn't work out. As a consequence of her various marriages, she has been shot, drugged, kidnapped, committed to a mental hospital, afflicted by amnesia (twice), nearly gored by a bull, nearly poisoned in a remote Scottish castle, tormented by visions of herself as an eighteenth-century woman named Bianca, and had her oxygen supply turned off by a murderous uncle-in-law as she lay hovering between life and death. Just last summer, she was caught in a fire intended to kill her archrival, Carly; she lay in a coma, hovering between life and death again, and the unscathed and winsome Carly ran off with husband No. 5. Now, her once beautiful face burned and hideous, she hides in her lonely house rather than suffer the pitying gasps of strangers. Is it any wonder that in recent months poor Barbara has begun to nurture thoughts of revenge?
The shame of it is, though, that she will never be able to avenge herself on the true author of her torments -- a friendly yet floridly sadistic man named Hogan Sheffer. As the head writer of the soap opera AS THE WORLD TURNS, Sheffer is responsible not only for Barbara's agonies but also for those of her thirty-odd enemies and so-called friends in Oakdale, the small fictional town near Chicago where she lives. Sheffer torments Oakdale, but Oakdale also torments Sheffer: he spends his days urging his brain to create ever more ghastly fates for the characters in his charge -- bitter and complicated misunderstandings that will take months to resolve, evil conspiracies, appalling streaks of terrible luck -- and at night he walks the streets of Oakdale in his dreams. He has five blank hours of programming to fill every week, fifty-one weeks a year, and if ever the thought arises that he may at last have plumbed the very deepest well of human misery he must push that thought aside and create misery anew. He must, in addition, master the countless rules of the soap genre, few of which are obvious but all of which are essential to success. It helps that he feels he has no choice. "I literally have no other marketable skills," he says. "I don't fix things. I'm a techno waste. I don't have a college degree. It's either this or I sell shoes."
