Soap star Gina Tognoni comes home to clean up
By Matthew Halverson
Gina Tognoni took a bullet to the cranium five days ago, yet here she is, getting all giddy about coming to the most dangerous city in America. “I’m really psyched,” she says.
Psyched? After a nasty little incident like that? Under other circumstances, it might stand to reason that that gunshot jarred something loose in Ms. Tognoni’s noggin, but this isn’t your average “plucky girl gets shot in the head and miraculously recovers to go fight for underprivileged kids” story. (Although we hereby claim the intellectual property rights to that concept and any superhero characters derived from it.)
No, as it turns out, it’s just your average “daytime television actress finds herself in what appears to be a stereotypically ludicrous soap opera storyline but makes time outside of work to do some good in her hometown” story. Tognoni (pronounced Tone-YO-nee) plays Guiding Light’s Dinah Marler, who stepped in front of a bullet to save her husband in a mid-June episode. But on August 18, the actress and a couple of her cast mates will take a break from the dramatic music cues and internal monologues of the soaps to spend a day cleaning at Des Peres Middle School in the city for St. Louis Cares’ Servathon.
And it’ll probably be a welcome reprieve, even if it’s only for a day. The Creve Coeur ex-pat (her family moved to Syracuse, N.Y., when she was 3) has been visiting rehabilitation centers and studying up on brain trauma to make her character’s recovery from the head wound believable. “She has to learn the basics, like how to get dressed and how to open a door,” Tognoni says. “It’s about losing something physically and what that does to the spirit.”
It’s the kind of heady stuff you wouldn’t expect from the same genre in which the good guy always has an evil twin brother and there’s no shortage of mothers willing to sleep with their daughters’ boyfriends (not to mention the fact that the dour treatment of the subject matter is a little disappointing for anyone who might have been expecting Dinah to receive a brain transplant from another character), but Tognoni is eating it up. “It’s a really cool storyline,” she says. “It’s the most challenging I’ve ever had.” (The cynic could call it something else: Tognoni won a Daytime Emmy for the role of Dinah in 2006, and the dramatic recovery story might just be a not-so-subtle attempt to land her another statuette.)
The 33-year-old former star of One Life to Live usually comes back to St. Louis every summer for a family reunion—even though Tognoni skipped town before she was old enough to write her own name, she still has plenty of relatives in St. Louis—but with her busy schedule, the trip to Des Peres Middle is going to have to suffice for this year. “Hopefully I’ll be able to get some of my cousins out there to say hi,” she says, and considering the fact that she’s got about 20 on her dad’s side alone, you’d hope that one of them could make it.
This will be Tognoni’s second stop on Guiding Light’s 12-month, 12-city charitable tour to celebrate the show’s 70th anniversary. She spent a week with the entire cast in Biloxi, Miss., in January, rebuilding homes damaged by Hurricane Katrina.
If daytime television actors aren’t the first people to come to mind when you think about good candidates for volunteer work, it’s OK—the people running the project weren’t crazy about it at first, either. “If I’m brutally honest, we didn’t know how much a group of soap opera actors were really going to work,” says John Jowers, director of marketing for Hands On Network, the nonprofit that teamed up with Guiding Light.
“But they completely caught us by surprise.”
Tognoni spent most of her time in Biloxi painting and hanging drapes, although she gets excited when asked if she got to play with power tools. “I did!” she exclaims. “It was a nail gun!” Some friendly advice to the people at Des Peres Middle: Do yourself a favor and keep the girl who just got shot in the head (even if it was only on TV) away from tools that fire metal objects.
