By the Dawn’s Early Light!
Shortly after jotting down the names of all the television soap operas, I found myself at the writing desk in my garage attic hideout, crafting my very first short story — a soap opera of sorts — motivated by the brilliance of another spectacular sunrise.
What can I say?
The Star-Spangled Banner has always had a special place in my heart; so, I felt it was more than appropriate to use a phrase from the national anthem as the perfect title.
Once the ideal title had been chosen, I conjured up a centralized family — the Rutledges — whose interpersonal relationships fanned out across the fictionalized town of Cedar Falls; and a cast of characters had been fashioned in the blink of an eye.
Since the names of all the principal players were staring back at me from a white sheet of ruled paper, I had a desire to create some visual aids to make those would-be performers jump off the page and come to life.
“Eureka!” I exclaimed with a Cheshire cat grin while glancing over at an old issue of the Ellwood City Ledger lying on the nearby coffee table behind me.
Upon snatching up several different types of magazines — back issues of the J.C. Penney catalog, Teen Beat and TV Guide — that were readily available to me, I furiously began cutting out a variety of images within their pages to design my very own storyboard of characters.
During the summer months before the beginning of eighth grade, I became the fourth generation on my mother’s branch of the family tree to start watching Guiding Light — an hour-long popular daytime soap opera revolving around the Bauer, Chamberlain, Norris, Marler and Spaulding families — on television every weekday between three and four o’clock in the afternoon.
My great-grandparents, Walter and Cora Roberts Moffett, tuned in to the very first episode of the show on Jan. 25, 1937, when it debuted as a 15-minute radio program, which centered on the Rev. John Ruthledge and his parishioners.
Now you know how I conjured up the surname for my soap opera’s centralized family with the minor spelling variation.
While immersing myself into the diverse storylines involving multiple characters each day, I began imagining brand-new characters with their own backstories and timelines, which led to an epiphany — why don’t I create my own soap opera?
Besides, I’ve had a knack for storytelling even before I knew how to write my own name.
As a little whippersnapper in preschool, I would set up our numerous Fisher-Price Playsets — like the airport, family house, farm, garage, schoolhouse and village — into a sprawling city with a population of over one hundred Little People, giving names to each wooden figure, in our basement and play for hours almost every single weekend.
Enthralled by the debut of Little House on the Prairie at the beginning of third grade, I began receiving Laura Ingalls Wilder’s beloved books for the next few Christmases and birthdays; whereupon I aspired to one day write my own set of books that were akin to the Little House series.
These early influences fed my passion for storytelling and inspired the creation of my one-of-a-kind character storyboard.
Looking at it now from the confines of my elevated private sanctuary, with all its carefully curated images, I started pecking away at the keys of my manual typewriter as the words flowed onto the page like a river carving its path through the mountains, unstoppable and full of life.
What began as a quaint little story about a hospital chief of staff — Dr. John Rutledge — and his idyllic family, blossomed into a drug-related murder mystery that reached the highest office in city government before filtering down to local law enforcement and creeping into the halls of the area high school.
During the course of the day, Mayor Clayton Wainwright takes care of business for the people who elected him as the leader of their community; but by night, he pads his own pockets by hooking those same citizens on amphetamines and methamphetamine infesting the city through a sophisticated drug operation.
Following a major drug bust on the nearby interstate highway, some of the seized cocaine disappeared from an evidence locker at Cedar Falls Police Department; but since surveillance cameras were conveniently out of commission, Chief of Police—William “Bill” Henderson—was unable to detect the suspect, who was thought to be one of his own officers.
Under the shadow of darkness, Officer Bradley “Mad Dog” Cooper — the dirty cop in question — met with the mayor at his sprawling estate, within the gated community of Stonebridge Country Club, to store the addictive stimulants in a basement wine cellar.
However, their lucrative drug operation is put into jeopardy when the mayor’s own grandson — star quarterback Clayton “Clay” Wainwright, III — and captain of the Minutemen, a local high school football team, has an acute myocardial infraction during the homecoming game at Liberty Field, thereby launching a narcotics investigation into Cedar Falls High School.
When an anonymous tip leads to the arrest of Clay’s best friend and teammate — senior running back Nino Rodriguez — as the high school campus supplier, he is also charged with statutory rape, because the legal adult was apprehended at an alley abortion clinic with his 15-year-old girlfriend, Savannah Rutledge, daughter of the chief of staff at Cedar Falls Medical Center.
After getting arraigned at the county courthouse by Judge Clayton Wainwright, Jr. for the distribution and sale of cocaine and statutory rape, the Mexican American is mysteriously stabbed in solitary confinement, which lands him in the hospital under the direct supervision of his girlfriend’s seething father.
Meanwhile, the badly burned body of local police officer Stephen “Steve” Johnson is found in the furnace of his basement apartment—which he shared with his half-brother, high school custodian Nathaniel “Nate” Johnson, who is missing — along with several scorched Polaroids of young teenage girls in their underwear on the other side of town.
Once the mayor learns about the explicit details surrounding the murdered law enforcement officer, he orders Mad Dog to frame his deceased colleague for the missing drugs, thinking it would be the answer to his prayers.
My face suddenly lit up like a Christmas tree.
If I wrote a plethora of short stories about the events in Cedar Falls, I could string them together and possibly publish a book — my dream of becoming an author could come to fruition at the tender age of 13.
Heck! Maybe some big-shot movie producer would stumble across my book, fall in love with the drama of Cedar Falls, and turn it into a made-for-TV movie — or better yet, a full-blown miniseries on CBS.
I could already picture the opening credits rolling as my name flashed across the screen: “Created by Mark S. Price.”
Who knows? I might even become the youngest playwright ever featured in the Guinness Book of World Records.
Stranger things have happened — especially in soap operas.