You might have read that the longtime soap opera, As the World Turns, is being canceled after 54 years. The soaps are the daily newspapers of daytime TV, once everyday staples that are now dying off like dinosaurs in a meteor-induced dust cloud.

In the not too distant past, the soaps seemed eternal, playing endlessly on television with characters who never died, family feuds that were never settled, tragedy that never stopped, and holiday episodes that would never end.

The soaps relied on the appeal of unchanging archetypes: wronged women, strong men, wise fathers, and mothers who wheedled information out of their neighbors and offspring as confessors and ceaseless meddlers. Even the names of classic soap operas had a kind eternal, ethereal ring: The Edge of Night, Guiding Light, Search for Tomorrow, Another World. The titles sound like Jehovah's Witnesses pamphlets. Their content might be mundane, but in that mundanity we would be uplifted by sacredness of the ordinary.

Like you, I scoffed at the silliness of the soaps, but I had a special connection to them. My aunt, Barbara Berjer, was a soap star. She was born and raised in Seattle, a Mt. Baker girl who attended Franklin High (where she dated, to my grandfather's disapproval, a young baseball phenom named Fred Hutchison), and Cornish. She studied acting in Chicago, then wound up in New York. She appeared on Broadway (in Gore Vidal's Best Man, in Dylan with Alec Guiness), popped up occasionally on network TV (Law & Order) but day-in, day-out, she brought home the bacon by acting in the soaps. In our house, the TV set was tuned to whichever show she happened to be on, whichever slow-motion train wreck was her life at the moment, courtesy of the script writers.

In the 1950s, it was From These Roots, a pioneering soap reportedly a favorite of Tennessee Williams, no stranger to melodrama. From the mid-1960s to the early '70s she was a mainstay on As the World Turns as the character, according to Wikipedia, "Claire English Lowell Cassen Shea #4." So many marriages and mutations. From the '70s-'80s, she lit up Guiding Light. Having aged from young love interest to middle-age matron, she was out of the soaps for a few years until she returned in the mid-'80s on Another World, this time as a mysterious old lady who seemed to show up for holiday specials, a kind of Yoda figure with a Scottish burr who was, in fact, an uncanny impression of my grandmother.

When I visited my aunt in New York, she would arrange for me to come to the CBS studios in lower Manhattan to watch the show being rehearsed and broadcast. In those days, As the World Turns and Guiding Light were done live, meaning soap operas had to hire real actors who could memorize their lines and do everything in one, live take. They relied on trained theater people. It was astonishing to sit in the control room and watch these productions, as complicated to pull off as a NASA moon landing. In later years, when shows were taped, they began hiring models, often young hotties who couldn't perform live but looked great with editing and retakes.

My aunt was a wonderful actor, convincing in her roles, a mentor to people she worked with and, in later years, coached (like a young Anne Heche, an Another World cast member). But I was baffled about why she was in the soaps. It seemed so tacky. I got up the nerve to ask her once and she bristled at the suggestion that they were somehow beneath an actor. She told me that from the standpoint of craft, it was the hardest job in acting. Why? Well, there was the fact that you had to learn a new script each and every day and perform it live. This wasn't a stage show that was the same day after day during its run. But she said the main challenge was to play the same character every day and make her convincing. It's tough enough to be oneself everyday, let alone let a character inhabit you for years.

So soap actors lead double, or maybe even triple, lives. There was Barbara Berjer (sometimes she also used her married name, Foley), there was "Claire English Lowell Cassen Shea #4," and then there was the amalgam that the public saw, a person who was some combination of the two. Strangers would stop my aunt on the street and lecture her about her soap opera relationships as if she were the character she played. One male actor who portrayed a cad on Guiding Light was attacked on the streets of New York by a fan who could not tell the difference between the soap and reality. Then there was the celebrity who enjoyed a degree of fame, but Barbara Berjer the actor was also a kind of performance, a persona.