On the soap opera series Guiding Light, I play Lillian Raines, the head nurse at Cedars Hospital. Before going on the set like a Barbie doll, I get my shoes polished – high heels no less – my clothes pressed, my hair washed and set, and my makeup applied. My hospital is located in Springfield, USA which seems to have an international airport with hourly flights to Caracas, Saudi Arabia, tiny, unheard of islands in Greece. The flights must be on a fleet of Concordes, as you land in about two hours in either New York or Bangkok. My hospital is also a place where people I know well – intimately – can put on an orderly’s uniform and walk right past me and I will not recognize them. It has a computer that anyone has access to while I’ve turned aside. On this computer, they somehow can find out blood types, the allergies of their enemies, and then give me a needle filled with poison to inject and kill their enemies for them. The hospital is my daily life, but it is when I leave the hospital that things in Springfield really start to heat up. Over the years my daughter Beth Raines has been abused, beaten, raped, blind, aphasic, committed a murder, and believed dead for 3 years. My husband abused me so that I had to wear sunglasses to work, but now he’s in jail. My fiancée spurned me for his ex-wife no less so I’m alone now with my work at the hospital where I maintain my composure and keep smiling. In the emergency room, with two rehearsals, we can save a patient by performing a heart transplant. If someone wants too much money in their new contract, the transplant will fail.

I hold the hands of women having babies. They manage to look gorgeous – hair curled, makeup perfectly applied and somehow I overhear their whispers to the doctor that the child about to be born is indeed the doctor’s own child. What I do with this knowledge varies. The doctors, by the way, go to medical school from four months to eight months and often have trouble getting out those ‘big’ words – but oh, they are cute. One of our doctors, Dr. Rick Bauer, "lost" 29 patients in a row. We all knew an actor’s time was up whenever they were referred to Dr. Rick.

I have "been" Lillian for 18 years. I now have an eight-year-old granddaughter, Lizzie, who has already killed someone, obviously following in her mother’s footsteps. My character in her lowest hour slept with her best friend’s husband. Her friend after hurling plates and glasses around the kitchen, telling me I had turned them into a "suburban cliché," skidded off a snowy mountain road and died. But I suffered for this in silence and Lillian still does penance, as well she should.

Soap opera land is a joy to live in. Where else can you cry and scream, seduce and laugh, and get paid for it? You see, Lillian Raines is responsible for the cut and color of my hair. She is why my face is made up and it is because of her I get great clothes at Saks. She is the reason I am given good tables at restaurants, house seats in theatres, upgrades to first class on planes, instant help at drug stores. She is the reason to get up in the morning at 6am.

Sometimes she gives my friends a headache.

By Tina