Since Amanda is leaving English, baby! and her character is breaking up with Mason on the soap opera, I thought I’d put together a few highlights from their relationship, which was at the center of the soap opera plot when it began in late 2007, and has continued throughout it’s first 60 episodes. (It was also loosely based on my real life.)

Crush on a Friend

Before there was the soap opera, there was this lesson. I asked Mason and Amanda to improv a conversation on the topic, and the members demanded more.

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Mason’s Date

This was the first soap opera episode and the first in a long series of episodes in which Mason is oblivious to the fact that Amanda likes him.

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Cuddling on the Couch

One the best Mason-is-oblivious lessons and probably our most sexually suggestive lesson ever. It’s also worth watching for hilarious Friends references.

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Foul Ball

Meanwhile, my character tried to hook up with Amanda. It didn’t go very well. This was the first of several episodes in which Amanda and I are fantastically awkward.

Triangulate

And Devan developed a crush on Mason, which made for tension between her and Amanda. I love lighthearted Mason is when he enters the scene.

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It’s Raining Men

Amanda couldn’t decide what to do. Was it worth it to try to wait for Mason? What if he never noticed her? Marni gives her advice, and Amanda wonders if maybe Jason would be a good option after all.

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Magic Moment

But just in time, they finally got together in a very unique, pre-scripted English, baby! lesson, which was filmed in Amanda’s actual living room.

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Trouble in Paradise

After some months of happiness, Mason and Amanda had a fight that was rooted in the drama that took place before they got together.

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Awful Flirty

During her fight with Mason, Amanda spent some time with Jason in order to make Mason jealous. Amanda is so good at acting flirty, that I actually got king of embarrassed here and had a hard time thinking of things to say.

Make Up

But before too long, Amanda and Mason realized they were being silly and made up on an afternoon walk. I wanted this scene to recall the cover of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, but in the take we wound up using, they didn’t lock arms.

My True Love Gave to Me

When the holidays rolled around, Amanda got Mason a great gift and he got her a not so great gift…and then surprised her with 7 more!

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Healed

Then, when Devan and Jason were both in bad health, Amanda prayed for them to get better. It worked, and she shocked everyone by announcing she would become a nun.

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Farewell

And in her last Ebaby! appearance, Amanda leaves Mason to become a nun. It’s a sad and awkward scene that’s difficult to watch. Just minutes after shooting this, Amanda left Ebaby! forever and Mason and everyone else were sad to see her go in real life too.

If only our members knew how funny Amanda really is. I have to cut brilliant jokes from at least half the lessons she’s in they’re just not suitable for English lessons. But they’re more than enough to make me and the rest of the Ebaby! cast laugh really hard every time we meet.

A couple of months ago, Amanda told us she was going to leave English, baby!. We tried to talk her out of it, but it was no use. When the time to tape Amanda’s last set of lessons was coming up, we had to find a way to have Jason and Devan be healed and for Amanda’s character to leave the soap opera. So we decided Amanda would miraculously heal her friends with prayer and then become a nun.

It’s tragic, really, since the whole idea of having a soap opera on English, baby! was inspired by comments from our users that they wanted to see Amanda and Mason get together. We spent months dragging out the tension between them, and when their characters finally got together, it really was kind of magical. So it’s not only a shame that the Ebaby! staff and members won’t get to see Amanda as much, but also that her character’s relationship had to end.

We haven’t posted all the movie and music lessons that we taped with Amanda yet, but since her final soap opera episode goes on the homepage on Tuesday, I asked her if she would answer a few questions over email so her fans could get some closure. Be sure to visit this look back her character on the soap as well.

Jason: You’re moving on and we’re so sad to see you go. You were on the Ebaby! cast long before I was. How did you get involved with it? What are you going to do now?

Amanda: Over two years ago, I came across an interesting posting on Craigslist. I was a stay at home mom, just easing her way back into the workforce. In addition to working part time teaching baby/toddler song and dance classes as a glorified clown, I wanted to do something else on the side. Something that had nothing to do with being around little kids. No offense to my only and favorite son.

I loved the fact that Ebaby! was an online resource for those learning English. We’ve come a long way w/ESL programs. Plus, my old buddies from college (shout out to Phi Kappa Psi!) had created a group companies that Ebaby! is a part of, so that totally sold me.

Right now I am going to try and spend more quality time w/my kid. It’s funny, the grass is always greener. When I was a stay at home mom, I wanted nothing more than to get back to work. Now that I’m working my freaking flat ass off 24/7, all I wanna do is be with my kid. I will continue working my other 100 jobs: 1) Tradeshow/NanoPort Operation MGR at FEI 2) Property Manager 3) Actor/Model. I was burning the candle at both ends for a while and no one wins in that scenario. When your kid looks you in the face and says, “Why don’t you wanna spend time with me anymore? You come home from work and then you go back out to work,” it’s time to re-evaluate and take a breather. My bad.

Jason: What’s your all time favorite lesson that you’ve been in? Does one stick out as your least favorite?

Amanda: That’s easy. The phone call between Amanda and Jason. I could watch that one a hundred times, oh wait, I already have. There’s just something about the cadence between the two of us that is freaking hilarious. And there’s that special and perfect douse of awkwardness. Voila!

My least favorite (but not because it isn’t a good lesson) is between Amanda and Devan, when Devan announces that she has cancer. Yes, I think that it’s important to increase awareness of something that has taken loved ones from all of us, but at the same time, I felt uncomfortable acting as though she was sick when she really wasn’t. It seemed almost taboo to me. I felt uncomfortable the entire 60 seconds.

Jason: You’re really funny, and the members didn’t get to see a lot of your jokes because they can be a little too adult for the site. Where did you get your sense of humor?

Amanda: I actually don’t find myself funny at all. Usually, I figure people are just laughing at me. My father is a self-proclaimed pervert, a dirtbag, if you will. I guess I am my father’s daughter. When you grow up with Playboys laid out on the kitchen table like they were Good Housekeeping and a VHS collection of porn by the living room TV, you tend to become very candid about sex.

My biggest fear of all time is stand up comedy. I really admire those guys. I would pee my pants if someone put me on a stage with a mic and said, “Make us laugh!” Oh and by the way, Tina Fey is my idol. Unbelievable how funny she is. Delicious stuff right there.

Jason: You do a lot of acting outside of English, baby! What are some of the most interesting rolls you’ve played? Where can we see your work?

Amanda: About the same time that I started with Ebaby!, I dove into the ever challenging and humbling world of acting. I have no formal training so I’m pretty much fumbling my way through, simply giving it my best. It’s for fun more than anything, at least right now. Because I am always on Craigslist, I went to my first casting through a posting, landed the principle role, got an agent and the rest is history. Now I can’t imagine not having it in my life. Better late than never. I’ve always wanted to play a hooker but have yet to have the opportunity. Some of the more interesting roles have included: reporter, attorney, college sports fanatic and Asian Woman. That last one took months to prep for.

Some really exiting news: A feature film that I shot last summer is an Official Selection of the Phoenix Film Festival! We could not be more ecstatic about the recognition. I just booked my flight and can’t wait for a weeks worth of screening and parties. You can follow our journey on www.frontave.com, as we’ll blog about our experience at the festival.

Jason: You mentioned once that it’s hard for Asian women to be cast in comedic roles. Can you talk about that?

Amanda: With the exception of Margaret Cho, there aren’t a lot of comedic Asian female actors, nor roles for those actors. We are mostly depicted in a more serious, dramatic, dark, aggressive, competitive, cold and sometimes oversexed/vixon-esque light. Not that that’s a bad thing. But when was the last time you saw a slapstick style sitcom or film with an Asian as the lead? Jackie Chan, not included. It’ll come around some day, but for now, the audience isn’t gonna gravitate to the Asian chick for a chuckle right now.

Jason: Finally, in the last episodes of your character, you become a nun and leave town. If you were going to make a sudden, dramatic change in your real life, what would it be?

Amanda: This is a tough question as I am a total and complete creature of habit. I have to do what I normally do and if not, there has to be a plan. There are few things I’d drop everything for to chase. And I actually would never even do that. I’d have to convince my husband and kid to come with, otherwise it would be a no-go. The only sudden, dramatic changes I could think of would be:

1) Have a 2nd child
2) Quit my day job to be back home
3) Move to Bend or Palm Springs
4) Get my real estate broker’s license
5) Change my current cell phone plan

And there’s no chance I’d do any of these anyway. That’s what she said.

Guess which of our nearly 3000 English lessons has the most comments? Last year’s Will You Be My Valentine lesson is the winner with 230. I think it has a lot to do with that hilarious photo (thanks, iStockphoto)!

This year we have a whole series of Valentine’s lessons planned for next week, but our members beat us to it with a love poem forum thread. The topic of romance is definitely a favorite among Ebaby! members. Almost every week we feature at least one, sometimes two lessons about relationships and dating. The response to our Crush on a Friend lesson was so positive that it inspired us to start a soap opera that’s now on its 58th episode. The most popular episodes and plot lines are ones where couples get together, like the first time Mason realizes he likes Amanda and when Marni starts her long-distance relationship with a guy she met online. My favorite episodes to act in were actually the ones where my attempts at romance were failing, and people liked those too.

And don’t forget the most popular of all pages on the site, our Turkrainian Wedding video.

I think it’s really great that this topic is so popular. I was just reading today about how you can get in trouble for kissing in public in India, so it’s kind of amazing that despite great cultral differences about love and dating, people from all over the world can relate to stories about it.

You were never supposed to see the photo to your left. It’s from a lesson that we shot in my semi-abandoned house that we decided never to use because it was “too dark.” But the plot development it inspired stayed in the English, baby! soap opera, much to Devan’s dismay.

See, when the cast arrived to film some scenes at my house–which has holes in the walls and very little furniture– we thought, “What can we do with this apocalyptic setting?” It occurred to me that Devan should be addicted to drugs. We already established her supposed propensity for substance abuse in this drunk driving lesson, and she was recently broken hearted.

So we threw a sheet on the ground and some empty bottles and did a really depressing scene where I come in to Devan’s apartment and discover that she’s sold everything for drugs.

I should say depressing in retrospect because it was actually hilarious at the time. First of all, Devan was supposed to be addicted to pot, which you can’t get addicted to. But in a lot of countries, pot a major crime so no one doe it, so we had a good laugh about people in Asia believing someone could get addicted to pot and sell all their stuff to buy it.

Second of all, Devan and I used to be roommates and I happen to know that pot treats her very poorly (like, vomiting for days) so she never ever smokes it. So it was a little inside joke for us too.

But then we got to the next cast session a month later, filmed on the streets of downtown Portland, and I told Devan we had to shoot a new scene about her being addicted to drugs. Suddenly she really didn’t want to do it! I finally convinced her that she should do it for the members because they need to know a lot of the good drug vocabulary that would come with the lesson and for me because I already had the rest of the plot build around it.

But it took four takes to get the scene we ended up using. Devan kept going silent when someone walked by because she was embarrassed. So if you see Devan around, tease her about her pot addiction for me, will ya?

Our members are so smart. OK, they’re not smart all the time, like when we added the “report member” button to weed out spammers and everyone pressed it like crazy for no reason, but a lot of the forum posts are really intelligent.

Learning a language forces you to be creative. I remember when I got good enough at Spanish to speak fluidly but I didn’t have the vocab to be very straight forward. So I’d come up with interesting ways to get across what I was trying to say. I think that’s what’s going on in this comment on another soap opera episode about online dating in which Marni discovers her new boyfriend may not be as great as she thought.

Unless taxi-as-relationship is a common cliche in Viet Nam, that’s pretty original. Another member may have coined a clever phrase this week on our lesson about the phrase “ugly duckling”.

I can’t find that expression anywhere with Google and, although it may be an unintentional misspelling, I like “notty” for the double meaning of “not” and “naughty”.

For another member, “ugly duckling” is about more than looks.

Maybe she can meet up with this dejected countryman of hers, who doesn’t include a photo clear enough to determine if his sulking is justified.

As interesting as all that is, we’ll wrap things up with another common mistake on the site. A lot of times people mistake one of the English lessons for a member profile and comment on it like this:

So that wouldn’t be so strange…if it weren’t on our lesson about Alvin and the Chipmunks!

Until next time, stay beautiful like an animated rodent.

Since Ebaby! TV was officially launched today, I figured it was time to share the story of the genesis of the Ebaby! soap opera.

First of all, in case you didn’t know, all the dialogues in the Ebaby! lessons are improvised since the whole point of them is to teach people real, conversational English. We just start with a topic and see where it goes, and then I take the recordings back to the office and make lessons out of them.

While most of us are pretty straight forward in the scenes, Amanda is the only member of the Ebaby! cast who is an actress by trade, and she likes to throw us curve balls for fun. Most of them don’t make it in the lessons because they tend to be a little risque. Her goal is to make the other person in the scene laugh.

Amanda’s main target for these shenanigans has always been Mason. She would just throw in some comment that would imply they have a child or are married or are dating or were dating but now she’s mad at him. Marni started trying to keep track of it, as though it were a plot line, “But, wait, last month you were just dating and now you have a child? What’s going on?” Which gave me an idea.

I had also noticed that the cast, particularly Mason, had some fans among the members. There are occasional broken English comments of the oh-you’re-so-cute nature. So I figured, what better way to tantalize these members who had developed a crush on Mason from watching him talk about movies and music than to actually depict him in a relationship?

All I needed was a plot. Luckily, around this time I went on a couple of dates with a girl I really liked. I met her through a friend and asked him if he thought it would be a good idea to try to date her. He said go for it; he’d date her himself if they weren’t so close. Then one day, whoops, they started dating. Sound familiar?

The cast didn’t know that I was basing the soap opera off my life until a couple of months ago when we filmed this scene in which Mason apologizes to me for giving me the go ahead to date Amanda and then making a move on her himself.

Now, even the soap opera episodes are improvised, so no one really knows what’s going to happen exactly until the scene is over. The direction for this scene was just, “OK, Mason, you sit down with me and apologize for pulling a 180 and I forgive you. Ready? Action.”

So when the scene was over, Amanda asked if I would really be that forgiving if I were in that situation. So I told her that I actually had in been in that situation and I was.

I mean, if there’s anything I’ve learned in this life, it’s that there’s no point in wishing for things that are impossible or trying to get people to do something they don’t want to do. What, was I going to steal my Amanda back from my Mason? Forget it. Couldn’t be done. So my options were, be angry at a friend who meant me no harm, or not be angry with him. Life’s too short to waste it being angry at your friends, so the choice was obvious.

The 19th episode of the soap goes on the site today, and it’s actually the first one that isn’t loosely based on my life. My Mason and Amanda actually aren’t seeing each other anymore, and if I wanted to keep basing the soap on their lives, I’d need another male cast member. But that’s another story.