So, I know most of you are bored with hearing about BAMForBeginners.com, but something very, very cool happened today.
As I was logging in for the morning and checking in with my email, I was getting notes from my fellow BAM fans about if I had heard about the TV mention I got. I had no clue what they were talking about. After a few minutes of tracking down the info, it seems my little fan site got a shout out on a Canadian soap opera info show called “Soaps Up” that airs on A Channel. It seems they were discussing the return of the character Maggie and mentioned if you wanted to learn about the history of BAM you should visit my site and then listed my web address on the screen.
Someone is trying to get me a copy of the video now, but how totally unexpected and incredibly cool!
I’ve gone back and forth on telling everyone about this, but darn it, I’m proud of it!
I have admitted before I watch All My Children, but I have never revealed who my favorite characters are. Well, technically they aren’t on the show any more, though one of them keeps popping back up. They are Bianca Montgomery (played by Eden Riegel) and Maggie Stone (played by Elizabeth Hendrickson), more commonly known as BAM.
For those unfamiliar at all with this, Bianca is the lesbian daughter of the infamous Erica Kane (played by Susan Lucci). In 2001, Frankie Stone, arrived in town to pull a con on Erica by using Bianca, instead she fell for her. Three months later she was killed. Here came the problem, fans loved the actress who played Frankie! So they brought her back as, you guessed it, Frankie’s twin sister, Maggie. Maggie was straight, but there was also tension between her and Bianca over the Frankie connection. As time progressed, more and more glimmers of hope popped up that they might get together and the name BAM was born, short for Bianca and Maggie.
A lot of people give me crap over my fondness for BAM thinking I’m only in it for the lesbian angle, well, nothing could be further from the truth. I’m in to BAM because it is an amazing story performed by two wonderfully talented actresses. The tension was always something else, and on February 24th, 2005, they left Pine Valley together, bound for Paris, and a possible relationship. Bianca has been back a few times due to being Erica’s daughter, but never a sight of poor Maggie. Sure, we’re gotten mentions, and last Christmas we were told they were a couple finally.
That was until Bianca came home again in October 2006. Stupid writers! It seems Maggie cheated on Bianca with a girl named Cecelia. And when all hope was lost, and it seemed like we would never get on-screen BAM time, word came out that due to a letter writing campaign by fans, Maggie was returning for 3 weeks beginning January 15th. Not only that, she would be portrayed by Elizabeth again.
Now comes where my time has disappeared to…not only am I a BAM fan….I was kind of involved in the campaign to bring her back (not a major player mind you, just one of the nameless foot soldiers). Late in the original run, I joined the message board for BAM Fans, and honestly, it is the most welcoming, warm, and family like communtiy I have ever found on the web. They are amazing, and they fight for what they want with a passion I have never seen the likes of. And no, they aren’t all lesbians. They are married women, single heterosexual women, the wife of a minister, lesbians and, yes, me, one of only 3 – 4 men (I guess at that one, they rarely show up) out of the nearly 3000 members.
So, I love this community, and with us having won the battle to bring Maggie back, we decided we had to promote this to people to boost viewers. Enter Nik (hi Nik!) who got the idea to make a list of key scenes to the story of BAM that were on YouTube. We would then post that list on message boards to bring in new viewers. I said I would make it in to a simple web page and then we could just post a link. It was ok, but not exciting. There was my mistake.
Next I got the idea to install WordPress and make it pretty…
then I thought it needed info pages…
then I decided it needed a checklist of EVERY BAM scene, not just key ones…
then I decided each day from BAM history would get an entry just like it was a blog so people could easily look things up by date or key happenings by using the search….
It grew out of control, but we are now close to having a nearly complete catalog of the entire BAM story on this website I named BAMForBeginners.com. So every night after work I’ve been coming home, showering, eating dinner, and getting to work on BFB. I’ve been putting in close to 8 hour nights on it, so it’s been almost like a second job for a little while now, but that will be winding down now as we only need to add the Frankie info and fill in some gaps in the overall story. And believe me, there are some gaps we’re skipping such as chunks of the year long “baby swap”…parts of the Michael Cambias murder…as little Lena (Bianca’s girlfriend for awhile) as possible…it is a soap after all, some really silly, silly things do happen.
I know this will all sound incredibly silly to people outside of the soap fandom, but over the years I have come to learn you really shouldn’t pick on anyone’s passions. Sports fans tend to pick on say Star Wars fans for camping outside theaters for tickets, but yet they forget they have done the same for “the big game”. And geeky people pick on sports fans for knowing every stat of every player on their favorite team, but yet they can tell you how fast each space ship is from their favorite series. What is one’s hobby/past time is another persons joke fodder. So yes, I am a soap fan…an AMC fan…and a BAMmer through and through.
Oh, and remember in the 100 things list I said I had written a fan fiction I was proud of, but don’t tell people? Yeaaaaah, you guessed it.
Who in the world is directing All My Children this week? A film school drop out? They changed film stock and it look horrible, and now you have overcomplicated shots being filmed that the camerman can’t handle! Boom shots? POV shots? The show looks like absolute dreck this week! I’m hoping we go back to standard fare soon.
On a side note, the new Colby, Ambyr Childers, not only is a horrible actress, they SORASed the character 8 years!
The Channel I watch All My Children on in the afternoons, when I can, shows the syndicated version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, the version hosted by Meredith Viera. I try to avoid seeing this show, but sometimes I do flip channels early. So today I flip over and a woman gets asked on the $4,000 question “What famous Washington D.C. monument is featured on the back of the $5 dollar bill?”. I smirk thinking how easy this is.
She used the “Ask the audience lifeline”…only 65% of them got it right. The AOL Instant Messenger respondets…well…only 56% of them got it right.
Where in the world does the daily version of this show find it’s contestants? Do they only accept people with the lowest possible IQs they can find? “That man appears to have trouble tying his own shoes…quick! Snatch him up for the show!”
And if you are reading this and need to pull out a $5 bill to see which monument is….first you need to be smacked….secondly, it’s the Lincoln Memorial.
Ok, I don’t care who knows any more, but…I watch soap operas. Get over it. I only watch All My Children, BUT…General Hospital has won me back for at least two months with the reapperance today of Robert Scorpio, played by Tristen Rogers.
For those not in the know, Robert was part of the part of the golden age of GH when it was Luke, Laura, Robert and Anna running all over Port Charles saving it from the various evil plots of the Cassadines. And now the news that Holly, Robert’s second wife, played by Emma Samms is also returning for a few weeks…wow…I am so glued to this show for awhile.
Darn this show bringing back some of my all-time favorite soap characters!
