Sometimes I wonder if my chosen profession really has any serious positive effect on the world. After all, I’m not feeding the poor, healing the sick, or working to change the world. I design costumes. I help tell stories.
But every once in a while I am reminded of how much pleasure certain shows I have been part of bring to people in places outside of my limited world. “Santa Barbara” is one such show, a daytime soap opera that told the stories of beautiful people in the sunny California town.
A few years ago I heard from a young Russian woman from Bellarus who wrote me about how valuable and popular the show was in her bleak communist country, when it first started opening up to the Western world. I can’t express it better than the author herself:
More than just a popular TV show, “Santa Barbara” was a phenomenon in my homeland. Every night at seven o’clock the street were empty as the citizens of the former Soviet Republic huddled around their television sets to watch the first American program to air in the post-communist era. Not only the world of American culture portrayed through Santa Barbara was mesmerizing, it also provided a possibility for escape from the bitterness brought on by the collapse of the Soviet Union. In a place shrouded in snow for most of the year, where the average temperature seldom climbs above 40F, the warmth and sunlight of that Southern California town and the luxuries if its inhabitants hypnotized most of my fellow countrymen, and certainly myself.
After that email, the young woman, named Antonina Grib, who had come to the US on a tennis scholarship, contacted me again, eventually came to LA to intern with me on “Passions” and is now a very successful and in-demand costumer in Hollywood, living indeed “the American dream”.
Recently, I was “found” by another fan, this time one who lives in Torino, Italy, who to this day loves Santa Barbara. He runs a fan site in Italy and his interview with me appears this month at the link right below this post.
He wrote me:
Santa Barbara came to Italy in 1989 and it ran until the last episode in 1999. I followed the soap from the beginning until the end and never missed one episode. And I often wonder: Why?
The reality is that “Santa Barbara” struck my imagination because I could share it with the person who most of all taught me something about life, my grandmother, Grace.
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When I was about 12 years old, one morning I was awakened by a mild earthquake.
My mother rushed to me and to my grandmother to tell us to leave the house immediately for fear of collapse. We did not have much time, so I took a backpack and filled it with all the videotapes of Santa Barbara. Nothing else interested me, I just wanted to save “Santa Barbara” - (What a hero!). When my grandmother saw me full of videotapes, she began to laugh and then all of us began to laugh. The house did not collapse... perhaps for this reason. That was many years ago, but if there was to be another earthquake today, I would do the same.
So if my career creating lovely costumes for characters on stage or in films and TV has brought a little bit of joy, then that makes it all worthwhile.
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