ENDLESS LOVE

As America’s affair with soap operas continues, fans flock to festivals

Stephanie Martin swears she’s watched “The Young and the Restless” since she was 4 or 5, when a babysitter introduced her to it. Now 45 and aided by a DVR, she estimates she hasn’t missed an

What does actress Sharon Case do to prepare for story lines about bipolar disorder? Is J.J. alive?

“Every second I could think of a new one,” said Martin, of Hilliard.

She began penning down a list of queries earlier this month when she scored VIP meet-and-greet tickets to Saturday’s Soap Opera Festival, which will feature four actors from “The Young and the Restless” in a question-and-answer session at Hollywood Casino Columbus.

The 100 VIP passes initially available sold out the day they went on sale. Another 50 VIP tickets released a few days later were also gobbled up by eager fans.

In all, upwards of 700 avid watchers of the CBS soap opera now in its 46th season — and nearly 12,000th episode — will attend the Q&A, ready to fire away their burning questions at actors Miller, Case (Sharon Newman), Daniel Goddard (Cane Ashby) and Melissa Ordway (Abby Newman). Tickets cost $45; VIP tickets available for an additional $20 are sold out.

While viewership of soap operas has declined since their heyday in the 1970s and ‘80s, their fans remain as passionate as ever.

More than 4.2 million tune into “The Young and the Restless” daily, according to the most recent

weekly ratings posted on soapoperanetwork.com. The other three major daytime dramas — “The Bold and the Beautiful” (3.4 million viewers), “General Hospital” (2.5 million) and “Days of Our Lives” (2.2 million) — still draw large audiences while DVR, streaming services and social media have made it easier than ever to stay current on the latest, sometimes outrageous, story lines.

Though Joyce Becker and husband Allan Sugarman have hosted more than 2,500 Soap Opera Festivals tied to various soaps since 1977, she said she still expects to see “standing ovations, crying ... and craziness” at Saturday’s event — the couple’s first time in Columbus.

“People love a story,” said Becker, 78, of New Jersey. “People read a book for the story, and they like to watch for the story.”

And they fall for characters.

She said fans’ tears usually come from being overwhelmed by meeting a favorite actor. Saturday’s show, however, will almost assuredly feature emotional tributes to Kristoff St. John, a longtime actor on the show who was found dead at age 52 last week at his California home.

“It’s still so fresh,” Martin said. “I feel like these people have been a part of my life for so long.”

The show’s characters — and, by association, the actors who play them — become almost like family, said Goddard, who has played Cane for 12 years.

“We are a generational show,” Goddard said. “People have fun watching with their family. At these events, you’ll see families consisting of a young person, their mother and their grandmother. They stay with the show for that feeling every day that they can tune in to see their family and watch them change and grow, fall in and out of love.

“And we’re dealing with real stories.”

Ordway watched “The Young and the Restless” with her mother when she was a child. She was already a longtime fan of the show — set in a fictitious version of Genoa City, Wisconsin, and centering on the Abbott and Newman families — when she got her big break in 2013 to play Abby.

“Eric Braeden, he plays my dad,” Ordway said, referring to the actor who has been a staple of the show since 1980. “I have to pinch myself — like this is Mr. Newman.”

The most challenging part about acting on a decadesold show, Ordway said, is that sometimes the fans know more about “Abby” than she does.

“Fans know the history so well,” she said. “They’ll say, ‘Abby wouldn’t do that. Ten years ago she said this.’”

That knowledge will be on full display during the Soap Opera Festival, where the actors will most likely be called by their characters’ names and take some heat for decisions that characters made.

Kim Murnane of Grove City said she relishes the familiarity of the show — and its consistency. A fan since 1974, when she was a teenager, watching became a tradition for her and her father later in his life, before he died in 2014. She now has his “Crimson Cup” (a coffee shop in Genoa City) mug.

“There are no breaks like some shows take,” Murnane said. “It’s five days a week, year-round, year after year since the 1970s.”

Cathryn Thompson, 43, of Dublin, favors ABC’S “General Hospital” but has watched multiple daytime dramas in the past and attended events for fans. The mother, author and middle-school Spanish teacher said that soap operas offer a lot to their audiences, even if they’re not always seen in the best light.

“They’re a great combination of romance, mystery and action all rolled into one dramatic picture,” she said. “If you watched in the ‘90s, there were demons happening on ‘Days’ and aliens on ‘General Hospital.’ It was so unbelievable, but you believed in the characters.”