Previously: TV’s ‘Guiding Light’ switching off after 72 years | ABC cancels 2 longtime soaps from daytime lineup | 3:57 p.m. Saying goodbye to “Guiding Light” live

If nothing else, she’s down-to-earth . Never mind the three resurrections or the seven husbands or the four Daytime Emmy Awards that have been sitting, for years, in her Montclair, N.J., home.

Kim Zimmer’s new book 'I’m Just sayin!’ details her life as a daytime diva. (Photos courtesy of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.)

Kim Zimmer paints herself as a regular 56-year-old broad, pampering her 30-year marriage and trying to redesign a midlife career just like everyone else.

Except she’s not like the rest of us.

She’s Reva Shayne, a woman who for almost three decades was center stage on Guiding Light, one of America’s most beloved soap operas until it was pulled – some think, callously – in 2009.

The early soap opera began as mommy’s little coping mechanism, a 15-minute snippet of fantasy, dreams and drama that rescued many a housewife from the daily, man-drives-the-car-to-work doldrums, and Zimmer was a big part of that world since 1983.

Many a lonely woman, night-shift beat cop and procrastinating college student followed Reva Shayne’s shenanigans.

“I honestly never believed that Guiding Light would ever be gone,” Zimmer said during a phone interview this week to promote her new book, I’m Just Sayin!

“I really believed the networks would keep that block of time from noon to 3 for daytime soaps.”

But she believed wrong. And when joblessness, menopause, kids flying the coop and a 40-pound weight gain all hit at once, it wasn’t the story line she’d hoped for.

“I was blind-sided,” she said. “I was devastated.”

And this time, gutsy and unpredictable Reva Shayne wasn’t there to bail her out.

Kim Zimmer had to do that all by herself.

A Midwestern Michigan girl with down-home roots, Zimmer fell firmly in love with theater as a college girl, met A.C. Weary, the only husband she’s ever had, and moved to New York City to begin a serious acting career in 1979.

Their daughter was born in 1982, about the same time she appeared on – this will take you down memory lane – The Doctors, a steamy but short-lived soap opera that once starred, in addition to Zimmer, Alec Baldwin and Kathleen Turner.
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Mika Brzezinski – the blond part of the MSNBC show Morning Joe – has a new book out. It’s not all that well written. It kind of jumps around, willy-nilly.

It’s not cheap.

Still, I bought it. I read it. I’m still thinking about it. And here’s why.

A paycheck is a tricky thing when you’re a woman. There’s a good chance the man next to you might be making more money than you.

And that’s putting it nicely.

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(Photo by Geoff Stokes / flickr)

The family that I live with recently made some changes in their TV-viewing habits and there’s just one thing I have to say about it.

Holy crap.

A few of you out there know what I’m talking about because once we switched – Uh-oh. You caught me. I’m writing about me again. – I started talking about this new service that we now buy from a major corporation that I will simply call Three Letters and an Ampersand.

Think about this for a second, and you’ll get it.

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We know that Thanksgiving is barely behind us. (You really do need to clean out the fridge, pronto.) But we think it’s time to get into the spirit for the next big events, like it or not.

Glitz. Glamour. Good old-fashioned fun. There’s a whole world of South Florida holiday razzmatazz waiting out there, and we’re tired of hearing the excuses.

Too far. Too crowded. Too much work. Blah, blah, blah.

This is the year to get over yourself. Live like a kid again. Eat a chocolate Santa for dinner.

With that, we bring you Seven Days of Holiday Wonder — a week’s worth of fun holiday activities the whole family can enjoy. Because, after all, this season is really about spending time with the people you love. Right?

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Alida Bowden has turned her home into quite the Halloween display. (Bruce R. Bennett / The Post)

More photos | More great local haunts | Map, directions

It started right outside the front door.

Oh, it was simple enough back then. A Halloween poem, warning of danger within. A rat or two. Some spiders.

Then, something frightening began to happen on this quiet street in suburban Boca Raton.

First the graveyard. Then the ghouls. Then the fog and the lights and the eerie sounds from within. The neighbors and the cars and the YouTube video.

“It just got more elaborate and more elaborate,” says Alida Bowden.
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