I Survived ‘Guiding Light’

Deep inside the CBS Broadcast Center in Midtown Manhattan, I stood in a hallway watching a fight.

The soap opera where I worked went off the air and the wardrobe department had an empty suite of offices filled with stacks of designer wallets and handbags. With a limit of four per person, everything was first come, first served – and free.

I saw secretaries, producers, executives, actors and security guards crawling, clawing and grabbing bags. Everyone was on their phones and someone shouted, “You have to come over here!” A Daytime Emmy Award winner dove for a purple bag with a silver clasp in the shape of a jaguar. I fled before I was trampled.

It was the late summer of 2009, the final weeks of “Guiding Light,” which had started as a radio program in 1937 and moved to television in 1952. “Only love can save the world,” was the radio refrain. the show’s theme song. Not true! Only reviews could save us, and we didn’t have any.

People who work in daytime drama excel at suspending disbelief. It came naturally to us as we toiled in an environment where it was normal to see angels, clones and time-traveling housewives strolling the halls with a script in one hand and a coffee in the other. But now that the ‘Guiding Light’ was coming to an end, we had to face reality.

It wasn’t meant to be. Soap operas are supposed to be forever. That’s what New York actors did between theater roles, commercials and guest spots on “Law & Order.” And if you left a daytime drama, you could always come back, sometimes as your evil twin.

Soaps had their big hair heyday in the 1980s, when I started playing an orderly in “Guiding Light.” My character was a loyal employee of Cedars Hospital, a place where paternity results were routinely switched, no one was ever asked about their insurance, and every patient had a private room.

I probably had the smallest recurring role on the show, and I loved it. My acting responsibilities include following Dr. Bauer on his rounds and agreeing with everything Sister Lillian said. Many of my lines were one word, like “Stat!” During the operation I sometimes shouted extra loudly, just to remind people that I was there. By the end of my 26 years on the show, there wasn’t an actor left alive who could hear my “Stat!”

My biggest challenge had to do with the side-by-side emergency room doors at Cedars Hospital. These were the most counterintuitive doors I had ever encountered. To enter the Emergency Room, a “Guiding Light” player had to grab the metal bars and pull them back; To get the doors open on the way out, an actor had to pull the metal bars ever so slightly – and then push them forward.

So it was common for the show’s emergency room scenes to be ruined if someone got stuck trying to get in or out. The presence of a crying ingénue or a flying stretcher would only complicate matters. As the show organizer, I was the one who most often encountered this annoying problem.

In the waning days of ‘Guiding Light’ the plots became more ridiculous and the budgets smaller. One character, who previously starred in a storyline about her struggles with menopause, miraculously gave birth. Another developed superpowers that allowed her to shoot electricity from her fingertips.

In the studio, someone commented that our last few episodes would be bittersweet. “What’s sweet about it?” a technician growled. “It’s all bitter.”

To unload decades of props, costumes and furniture, the producers staged a tag sale in the rehearsal room, with no item costing more than $20. It was shocking to hear strangers crowing about a lamp they managed to get for 50 cents, or the Armani suit they would have bought if it hadn’t had a bullet hole in the back.

One afternoon, a woman burst into the dressing room I shared with a fellow actor. She carried an armful of dresses and a fur coat.

“Do you mind if I change here?” she asked.

“Yes!” I said. “This is our locker room.”

She gave us a dirty look and left. I just sighed. It was like when a family member dies and relatives you’ve never seen show up to cart stuff away.

On our last day in the CBS studio, I went to the set. Like it was a different episode, the clothes girl took a picture of me in my scrubs for continuity purposes. This suddenly seemed absurd. She must have had the same thought. Immediately after taking the photo, she shrugged and laughed.

People seemed distracted. Everyone was talking about the sale down the hall and the giveaway still happening upstairs.

“Focus, people!” the director pleaded. “We have a show to do!”

An older actress came up to me while I was sitting on a stretcher.

“Do you think this is a good time to say a few words?” she said.

“As?”

“Well, I feel like ‘Guiding Light’ captured the emotional history of the United States and…”

I interrupted her to suggest that maybe she could wait until the end of the day, when the episode was over. She looked a little deflated as I stepped away and stood next to Dr. Bauer. He put an arm around my shoulders, which struck me as a brotherly gesture.

In the last scene at Cedars Hospital I followed Dr. Bauer as he led the show’s matriarch to her dying brother’s bedside. During their heart-to-heart conversation on their deathbed, the doctor and I discreetly withdrew. As we went outside, Dr. struggled. Bauer fumbled with the awkward emergency room doors, causing a loud bang, while I sneaked a look at the camera. Normally this would be considered a big no-no, but today I didn’t care. Nobody did it.

“Snee!” shouted the director. “To proceed!”

A prop man grabbed the stethoscope from my neck. Like a thundering herd, the crew headed to the next set. Before returning to his dressing room, Dr. Remind me to definitely come to the party later.

I was now alone at Cedars Hospital. I had spent so many hours in this fictional place, through three different studios, four casting directors, almost my entire adult life. Now it was time to say goodbye. And that’s something people in soap operas are absolutely not good at: endings.

I took a slow passage through the set, purely out of nostalgia. I must have been in a daze because without thinking I walked out through the ER doors. For the first time in history, they yielded smoothly to my touch.

I resisted the urge to look back. As I walked down the hall, I threw my CBS ID card in a trash can. Above me the On Air sign was dark.

Raul A. Reyes is a contributor to NBC Latino and CNN Opinion