DRW50

True, although I think this was an earlier cut she had, not the more severe cut. I can't remember the timelines. The one I disliked most was the very blonde pageboy hair around late 95/early 96.

That's a lovely photo. At about 7 minutes Cindi Rinehart gets a caller who complains about "Dixie's hair cut off." The worst part is they put a camera on some poor lady in the audience with similar hair and leave it on her as the caller says Dixie "looks old" now. Some part of the nation was gripped with Cady's hair for about 3-4 years. No wonder she has never had short hair again in her soap run.

@dc11786 As you're around this time in your GH watch I thought this Cindi Rinehart recap might interest you. Around 14 minutes in Cindi talks with an audience member about the impending L&L return. The woman's extremely blunt, "I don't like Bill," tells you just why they wrote that character out.

They never liked each other anyway. In Ross' mind he will always be the guy who was a prick to him and hurt his beloved Debbie.

I don't think Ross is doing anything very different than the last time he was around. He was a shockingly badly written character at points in that run. I'm not surprised he has a hostile attitude toward the man who inadvertently caused him to be doused with acid.

Jim Muneco has put up three more episodes of The City. This is the episode where Steffi and Tony have sex. Marlena de la Croix's comments at the time about how the whole thing was a turnoff made me remember the scenes as much more explicit than they were. It's still something I can't remember soaps doing very often from this point on (a man having sex with a woman who is heavily pregnant by another man). I'm not sure I ever have, actually.

A part of me thinks it is a sign that some shows aren't meant to last forever, but then I wonder if this is how many felt when John Beradino and Emily McLaughlin passed. I can't believe it's been almost two years since Jackie Zeman passed.

It's also the only one that seemed to suit him, although he at least wore suspenders well on OLTL.

I think there could have been a way but admittedly I'm not sure how. What I've watched of Eden (the Playboy Channel soap) is a little better at being cohesive, but that was more along the lines of a trashy primetime soap with bonus nudity.

Nothing against Bailey (RIP) but he bores me, so I'm not surprised you forgot him. Ryan and Penberthy are definitely standouts, although the former seemed to be on the way out by that point. There is something so compelling about Ryan. I think he's a real DILF before the term was used. If AW had been a bit sleazier seeing him get involved with one of Marianne's friends might have been interesting (if horribly traumatizing for the family - poor Aunt Liz would need oxygen).

1988 will be an...interesting year to go through. It's one of the last that I think has the core of AMC, even though many things go haywire. I am curious to know if people think AMC was the worst affected by the strike that year - if it wasn't it must still be high on the list. (admittedly there were issues even before the strike) Barbara really never did have a good hair day.

It's hard not to just associate it with Lemay's image of Walter crying into the scarf. I guess I should listen to the audios again. Ann seems like a much richer part. I just wish much more of Judith's AMC run was available. She's such a fascinating actress. We do have her RH run, but I did not care for that storyline.

That's true. I suppose they are showing up when they have the chance to do so. They did with Drew and Carly a bit too. I miss some of the old bite in the confrontation scenes, but I guess at least they aren't having a lot of "bitch" and "whore" anymore like some of those JFP/Guza-era lowlights.

I thought it was mostly kind of dull, aside from some odd performance choices by Francie, Biff and Miranda, but then this wasn't a "big" episode. What I've seen of this and of Loving Friends suggests they were both struggling to fit between a traditional soap and the racier format for Showtime. I hope we might get to see more. Either way, the scripts and synopses were much more interesting to me.

I looked at Judith's WLS interview and she just said she didn't have to audition to play Ann. She also says that she and George Reinholt rewrote a lot of dialogue because the writers were so burnt out from doing Somerset. I wonder if she did leave AW for that reason.

Willow and Carly have so many things in common. I wonder if the show will acknowledge that. They did many years ago with Monica and Carly, and I didn't even think they had as much in common as Willow and Carly do. In many ways you could do a story where Willow is Carly's karma. The low blow to Sasha about her dead baby was very Carly. As has been said here before, the dialogue in some of the recent confrontations remind you of what the show lost when "Cartini" ran off most of the writing team. There's a lot of juicy material that could be even better with sharper lines.

I think the first part is decent in building up the decay and delusion and introducing the central players, but the second part is a horror show, especially when Brenda Vacarro arrives and it officially becomes the Love Boat for cult murders. The runway shootout is so godawful it still makes me cringe from memory. Beyond the performances and maybe the big scene, the only other thing to really remember in the second part is the chemistry between Powers Boothe and Brad Dourif, who would have a lot of fancams if the film was made today. (This is off topic, I know, but we may as well talk a bit while we wait a decade for another episode)

Luke and Laura are one of the few soap couples where I actually do think adventure suited them more than emotion. Emotion tended to turn to Tony Geary hamming it up and also reminded me that they never had as much chemistry as advertised...not to mention the rape aspect (which they did not mention for many years, and when they did, I wished they hadn't).

I am glad we've gotten as much of Shane as we have. It's been a pleasant surprise. Nice to see Roxy too.

That's a lovely clip. Thanks.

Given how loved Laura seems to be by the show I doubt they wanted to make her look bad. I wonder if it even said "we, we, we," on the page or she just did that.

@gimmetoo Thanks for the obituary. As said in the thread, these details are often off. I read one obituary for Leslie that claimed she was on LIAMST from 1967-1973. That clearly is not true, but AI or whoever just looked at the show's lifespan and put the date. I think it's down to not being serious enough and being too difficult to categorize. If you want a streamlined family, you can't go with the Quartermaines because they were a hydra. Monty wanted to make the show serious and topical. Guza hated soaps, hated light or comedy or complexity, and wanted to focus on his favorite thugs to emulate the primetime and film work that he chased. One of the reasons Leslie probably never got an Emmy was because she was not the type of actress who wove her arms around in hospital chapels or beat her arms against the family crypt. She underplayed the pain, which always made it hit much harder. And it was so true to the character, who had to put on armor to survive her painful upbringing. You could pan a lot of writing choices, but you always felt Monica was Monica. I give a lot of that credit to Leslie. Guza had too much contempt for them to properly write toxicity. Instead, we'd have the comedy, which was often written in a condescending way, we'd have unbearable Emily endlessly telling them how terrible they were and how wonderful Jason was, along with Ned endlessly smarming to Alexis about being the "gatekeeper" as if the family were all pathetic and waiting for his guidance. One of the main reasons I was so repulsed by the tone of that era was the scene where Jason - even as we repeatedly had to hear about how dangerous and damaging the family were - read a bedtime story to Michael in the Q sitting room while using Michael's stuffed animal to cover his bleeding from a gunshot wound. The way that scene shattered the lie told day in and day out was insane, yet no one who ran the show even saw it. It's a miracle the family even survived the '00s. I'm just glad, even if she wasn't given the best, that Monica did. And as mentioned, for all my criticisms of Valentini, I'm glad that he was so respectful toward Leslie. I think of those last scenes and then I think of how JFP treated Anna Lee in a similar situation, and it's night and day.

So, in South Africa at the time of the video (December 1991), Loving ran between Amen and The Wonder Years. What a lineup...

All of those scenes are from 97-98 aren't they?

Of course, Schroeder would be bad news... That movie sounds interesting.