{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Space In-Between","title":"From Todd Manning to Turin: Jean Passanante on Soap Operas, Widowhood, and Starting Over in Italy","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":2538,"description":"In this episode of *The Space In-Between*, Dinine sits down with Jean Passanante, a retired Emmy-winning television writer whose credits include *One Life to Live*, *All My Children*, *General Hospital*, and the now-canceled *As the World Turns*. Over her career Jean won four Emmys and eight Writers Guild Awards. Before daytime television, she worked as a dramaturg at theaters including the Eugene O'Neill Theater Center and New York Theater Workshop, and appeared as a movie actress in John Sayles' independent classic *The Return of the Secaucus 7*. Like Dinine, Jean is a mother, grandmother, and widow, and in her \"third act,\" she's added something new to her resume: Italian citizen.\n \nThe conversation traces Jean's path from transferring to Dartmouth as one of the first women admitted to the newly coeducational school, and the open hostility she met there, through her years in nonprofit theater, her decades writing for daytime television, and the storylines she helped shape, including the soap's first gay teen storyline and the \"tortured Todd\" Manning arc, which she and her fellow writers were determined never to romanticize as a love story. Jean talks about channeling the agency of the powerful women she wrote for, from Erica Kane to Dorian Lord, in her own life.\n \nFrom there, the conversation turns to the harder chapters. Jean and Dinine, both widows who lost husbands to related neurological illnesses (Jean's husband Jack to Lewy body dementia, Dinine's husband Jonathan to multiple system atrophy), talk candidly about caregiving, the layered and often poorly explained realities of modern end-of-life medicine, the isolation of a terminal diagnosis during the pandemic, and the friends who kept them afloat. They also talk about what came after loss: Jean's decision to pursue Italian citizenship and build a new, solo chapter of travel and reinvention in Turin, including what it's taught her about fear, independence, and a shyness she didn't know she had. The...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/yhyIrYSsY73zG1DF6CqYxNm8fAUSC7eOlo-PL_10MkU/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9zaG93/LzQ4NzE5LzE3MDUz/NDE3NjgtYXJ0d29y/ay5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}