The screen flashes with 209 new messages. Soap fans from all over have flooded Cindi Rinehart’s inbox with their most burning questions: When are Greenlee and Ryan gonna get back together? Is Helena going to kill Courtney? Are Sonny and Carly over forever?

Cindi clicks reply to the first email, takes a few moments to personalize a response and sends it off into cyberspace. Only 208 more to go.

Cindi Rinehart has dominated the wild world of soaps for as long as local soap fans can remember. Cindi’s soap segment is part of the local TV talk show, Northwest Afternoon on KOMO 4. The show, broadcast for more than 20 years, is the country’s longest running local talk show. And Cindi has been there for every minute of it. She co-hosts the show with Kent Phillips and Elisa Jaffe. Over the years, Cindi has managed to create a strong following; her portion of the show, averaging just 17 minutes, almost always brings in the highest ratings.

“And heeere sheee iiis . . . Cindi, the queen of soaps!” the MC shouts over a microphone to the eager audience. Cindi, who is no more than five feet tall, walks on set and the crowd of about sixty cheers. Her gigantic pink, diamond cocktail ring catches the light as she brushes back her blond-streaked bouffant hair and waves to the crowd. Her face is taut with protruding lips – a result of some cosmetic surgeries which she never hesitates to discuss. Moments later, co-host Elisa Jaffe sneaks in and joins Cindi up front.

Only 20 minutes till show time.

Elisa rattles off all of her upcoming plans to the audience. “I, on the other hand am doing nothing!” Cindi interrupts as the audience laughs. She tells the crowd about the hectic year she’s had thus far: “three showers, two weddings, two funerals, followed by the fact that I tried to paint my railings and turns out they’re rotten! I’m looking forward to doing not a damn thing between now and December!”

As show time nears, a technical problem occurs. Cindi is getting restless.

“I’m startin’ to have a hot flash over this thing! Can I get some water?” she asks. A man with a headset rushes off to fetch her mug.

She pulls a compact out of her basket and retouches her makeup.

“Can we do this, pleeease baaaby!” she shouts into the camera.

“Cindi, just calm down. We gotta go with the flow,” Elisa tells her.

“I’m not going with the flow at five minutes till”

Finally, things get rolling and the crew quickly pre-tapes the end of the show, leaving only minutes until the show goes live.

Cindi climbs into her chair as if it were Mt. Everest. She brushes her hair for the second time since she’s been out on the set, then gives a double thumbs up into the camera. In the seconds before the start of the show, she digs through her basket of goodies, including a magnifying glass, drumsticks, a hairbrush and Harry Potter glasses, and retrieves a tennis ball. She bounces the ball repeatedly on her desk.

“I have a short attention span, if you can’t tell” she jokes.

“Thirty seconds!” a crew member shouts. She grabs her script and rolls it up, over and over again, until the red light goes on and she’s live, her face now appearing in countless homes across the United States and Canada.

Just as Cindi’s basket of props is a whirlwind of randomness, so too, is her list of past careers: “I can’t even remember them all – legal secretary, petite model, secretary for the Irish mob, grill cook, counter girl for Howard Johnson, drummer in a rock ‘n’ roll band, radio disk jockey. . . .,” Cindi wrote in an email in response to a reporter’s query.

Cindi said that after living on plastic blow up furniture, hamburgers and martinis, she knows that where she is now is where she’s supposed to be. “My job is to try and make people smile 17 minutes a day, whether I talk about soap operas or peanut butter.”

The smiles don’t end at work. Cindi says she married her husband Jimmy because, among many other reasons, he makes her laugh. Plus, she says she just couldn’t resist him when they first met: “I was roller skating on Alki and so was he. . . . I took one look at that Adonis body and blue eyes and now it's 14 years later . . . still madly in love.”

On the set, Cindi reports the highlights of the soaps as if she’s chatting with her best friend. During the commercial break, she rummages though her basket and pulls out a copy of Reader’s Digest. “Who put this in here?” she asks as she tosses it to the floor. “OK. Who wants autographed scripts?” she shouts as she pulls out a tiny singing toy rat. “On the catwalk, on the catwalk, yeah. . . . I do my little thing on the catwalk,” Cindi sings along with the rat’s song. The audience laughs and Cindi selects one fan to receive her script.

“Thirty seconds!”

Cindi quickly reaches into her basket and pulls out a bottle of soap bubbles. She chats a little more as the bubbles float around her. A cameraman walks by, picks the Reader’s Digest off the floor and tosses it back into Cindi’s basket. “No! That’s not mine! I don’t want that!” she cries as the audience laughs. The red light jolts on and she’s back on-air, fanning bubbles away from her face.

After the show, Cindi heads back to the office she shares with her producer and an intern. An entire corner of the office is dedicated to soap operas. Two large signs are posted on opposite sides of her desk: “Radio Friday 2:15 PM!!! **don’t forget ?” Pictures of friends and former producers fill up the available space. One photo, larger than all the rest, sits prominently displayed on a shelf: Cindi with Barbara Walters.

Cindi says she and Walters became good friends when they met on a yacht in New York. A short time after they met, Cindi and her husband helped Walters’ daughter, who then lived in Seattle, move to a new house. Walters then told Cindi to call her anytime, especially if she wanted to set up an interview. Cindi did just that and interviewed Walters on Northwest Afternoon when the show shot a special in New York.

Nearing the end of her day, Cindi hops on the elevator to take a smoke break. On her way down, she knocks out about 10 leg lifts, using the handrail to lift her tiny legs up and down.
Once in the garage, she lights her cigarette and slowly blows the smoke out her nose.

“Gettin a hot flash!” she says as she wipes her forehead. “But there’s no reason to suffer. I just don’t even acknowledge ‘em most the time.”

She smokes half the cigarette, carefully stubs it out and jumps back on the elevator to return to her office.

“My legacy . . . the one way I’d want to be remembered,” she says, “is that I am the same off camera and on. I’m real. The only thing I won’t say on camera is ‘shit.’” She laughs. The elevator door slides shut and she’s whisked back up to the world of soaps, accomplishing another set of leg lifts on her way.