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By Associated PressIs there anything that hasn't happened to Erica Kane on ABC's All My Children? Nope. Well, we think.
NEW YORK - It's difficult to tell what's real and what's not in Pine Valley, the sleepy fictional town that on Jan. 5 will have been the backdrop for ABC's All My Children for 35 years.
On a seemingly typical day, a banner announcing "Happy 35th Anniversary" is hanging in Pine Valley Hospital. Much of the cast is gathered. Agnes Nixon, the show's creator, addresses the group from a podium, flanked by Susan Lucci, the show's grand dame, Erica Kane; and Ray MacDonnell, the show's pillar, Joe Martin.
Then a director yells: Cut!
They're not celebrating the show's anniversary. It's a scene in which they're toasting the anniversary of Martin's 35 years of working for the hospital. This marks Nixon's first speaking part on the show she created in 1970. Time, it seems, has blurred the lines between soap and reality.
"People ask me if I thought it would last 35 years," Nixon, who turns 77 on Dec. 27, said during a real 35th anniversary celebration off the set. "I say, "I hoped it would last six months.' "
With the milestone, AMC joins the ranks of over-35 soaps: Guiding Light, General Hospital, As the World Turns, Days of our Lives and One Life to Life, which Nixon also created.
"It's interesting," said Eden Riegel, who plays Kane's ultimately unlucky daughter Bianca Montgomery. "There's so much work, you actually spend more time as your character than you do as yourself."
That means Lucci and MacDonnell, who've been on AMC since its debut, have spent 35 years of their lives playing the same character.
It's a surreal world. "I've been shot at like four times. Hit once. My wife got shot and donated her heart to another person and she came back as a ghost. I flew to Chechnya to save somebody in the war. I became a billionaire. Lost it all. Then became a billionaire again," Cameron Mathison, who plays playboy Ryan Lavery, said nonchalantly when asked to recall his character's past. "It's not as exciting as Susan. Nobody's as exciting as Susan."
Lucci, who turns 57 on Thursday, and her alter ego's antics have become synonymous with AMC. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Lucci received colossal publicity for the 19 Daytime Emmy nominations it took before she won in 1999. (And she has lost two more times since.)
"Just when they've taken Erica Kane every place, they come up with something and surprise me," Lucci said during the taping of the show's 9,000th episode.
Those places include New York, where Kane became a model; Sea City, where Kane became a waitress; a prison, where Kane staged an escape; and a forest, where Kane fought a bear - and won. She has been (legally) married nine times, had two children and created a big cosmetics company that recently pushed a product through Pine Valley's fourth wall: The show's fictional perfume, Enchantment, is available in real life.
When AMC began, Kane was 17. Long before California teenagers were tussling and smooching on Beverly Hills, 90210 and The O.C., Nixon was telling stories about teens with problems. One of the first AMC story lines dealt with a pair of star-crossed adolescents divided by the Vietnam War. At the time, it was groundbreaking.
"From the beginning, I thought the teenage rebellion was an important issue," Nixon said.
AMC also has tackled child abuse, AIDS, alcoholism, drug abuse, eating disorders and the coming out of Bianca, who has been at the center of a baby-switching story line that has captivated many - and bored some - fans for more than a year.
"I think it went on too long," said fan-turned-AMC actor Carol Burnett, who filmed a scene for the 35th anniversary episode. "I thought the truth would come out four or five months ago, but lies kept being told. That's Pine Valley. Everything's a secret. It's Secretville."
The secret, which occasionally seeped over to sister soap One Life to Live, is being unveiled amid the anniversary celebration. Burnett, whose "over-the-top" and "fashionably challenged" recurring character, Verla Grubbs, was introduced in 1983, has a part in the story line.
"I felt like I knew her because she feels like she knows me," Riegel said the day after filming the scene with Burnett.
Most AMC actors talk about plots - many involving themes replayed repeatedly in the soap world - with great indifference. Alexa Havins, whose character, Babe Chandler, has been crying about the baby swap since February, is nervous about her character's future. It's also her career.
Because scripts are constantly being churned out, Havins and her colleagues have only a limited idea where the future of Pine Valley is headed. But Nixon, the true "my" behind All My Children, is clear on what will happen over the next 35 years in Pine Valley.
"Whatever happens in the daily newspapers," Nixon said. "It's always been a contemporary show. That's the way it's been, and that's the way it'll continue to be."