ellabelle

LOL. That pic is awesome! You know, I have to say that every once in a while AMC did a decent job of remembering its own history. Like Erica and sharp objects: we saw her in 1985 with a pocketknife promising herself that she'd fight Adam rather than let him rape her, she stabbed Dimitri with a letter opener, she stabbed Zach with a knife, and she stabbed David with a knife as well. As soon as Erica tried to choke David in that scene at ConFusion, I shook my head and thought "Jack needs to get her out of there before she finds a sharp object."

There's a scene from late 2000 or early 2001 or so between Erica and Dimitri... she's in David and Alex's office to yell at David, and Dimitri comes in to get Alex's medical bag so Alex can secretly treat Anna at Wildwind. Dimitri encourages Erica to stay away from David but also wants Erica to keep her distance from Wildwind but won't tell her why. For most of the scene, Michael Nader is overly peppy and smiling, far more so than he normally did as Dimitri. I remembered watching it when it aired and wondering what was up with Nader because it seemed so different. I watched it again recently and thought "the man is high as a kite."

Interesting. Summer 1992 was when his affair with Erica started.

Liza was blonde as a child, but her hair definitely had dark roots in pics I saw of her in the early 90s. Susan said, I think in her book, that she had always wanted to be tall with straight blonde hair, so IDK if that influenced Liza's decision to stay blonde or not. Liza's hair is straight and Susan's is naturally curly, so even if Liza went dark, she still wouldn't look just like her mom, but I agree that they'd more strongly resemble each other. I think where Liza most favors her father is in scale - she's something like 5'8" or 5'10" and probably a size 6 or 8, compared to Susan's alleged 5'2" and 92 pounds.

She left Passions in 2000 because she was engaged to someone in NY, but the engagement fell apart and she ended up marrying someone else later. She did come back to Passions at one point, but I wasn't a constant Passions viewer so I don't remember all of the details. Liza is tall and blonde, but she has Susan's eyes, nose and mouth, and with dark hair she'd look a lot like her mother.

I was thinking about this today... does anyone know if Susan's daughter Liza Huber was ever considered for Kendall when they were casting the part in 2001? I could absolutely see her turning it down because she wanted to do her own thing and didn't want everyone to think of her as "Susan Lucci's daughter," but I think it would have been fun casting if she'd been willing and able. By all accounts, Susan and Liza are very close, so it would have been interesting to watch them play a mother-daughter who hated each other. Plus Liza is the right age to play Kendall (she was born in 1975), and I've seen enough pictures of her in the early/mid 1990s with dark roots to believe that her blonde-ness isn't entirely natural these days, so with darker hair she would have very strongly resembled both Susan (of course) and Eden Riegel.

What would she do? She'd get engaged again. Duh.

I want to say that Erica was the one who found the letter and told Ryan the truth. I thought it was lame. I didn't like Chris, but I did like the idea of Ryan being his son, even though Erica + Chris and Kendall + Ryan was sort of a repeat of Erica + Dimitri and Kendall + Anton.

^ She was with Palmer Cortlandt for a while, believe it or not, and she was raped by Ross.

Thanks. I freely admit to liking JR and Annie together in large part because of their sex scenes.

OMG - that is awesome. I would have loved to see that. I think soap sex scenes - at least most of the ones I saw on AMC - have been sadly lacking in the hip-thrusting department.

Not to be nitpicky, but that's not a picture of Erica. It's a picture of Susan participating in a celebrity fashion show.

Me too, Pine Charles, me too.

^ Yes! That was just bad casting and TPTB thinking we'd all forget when Charlie was born. SMG was 15 when she started on the show in 1993 as Kendall, and Christopher Lawford was 38. In 1993, Kendall should have been 24, and Charlie should have been barely in his 20s. Obviously Charlie was SORAS'd because otherwise he would have been too young for an engagement with Erica in 1991, but still... Lawford and Geller were just the wrong ages for their roles.

In what way? The man was the grandson of her former lover, and he was her stepson for a while. The ick factor there ranks right up with her sleeping with Ryan.

I remember all of the soap magazines talking about the "May-December" romance between Erica and Charlie (which is a much nicer term than 'cougar' IMHO). There was a lot of talk, IIRC, about how much older Erica was than Charlie, he was her former romantic rival's son, he was her ex-husband's son, her ex-lover's grandson, etc., etc. The funny thing is that Charles Van Eman was a whopping 10.5 years younger than Susan Lucci. Hell, Charles Van Eman is OLDER than Vincent Irizarry and no one batted an eye at Erica and David together in terms of their ages!

Ahhh... Santa Barbara. It was the first soap I ever watched - my dad got me hooked on it when I was 12. I started watching about a week after Julia was raped by Dash, but even I in my youth and naivete did not see it as he said/she said. I didn't buy for a second that Julia was someone who would lie about that, nor did I think she was incapable of knowing the difference between consensual sex and rape. Despite the awfulness of the rape storyline, I loved NLG as Julia. I never saw Lane Davies as Mason so I have nothing to compare Gordon Thompson to, but I did love GT, and I adored Marj Dusay as Mason's mother - I was beyond thrilled when she came to All My Children years later as David Hayward's mother. I loved MW as Eden, and it bothered me to no end that she just wasn't as good on AMC. She had some good moments, but I agree that she looked much better as Eden. I HATED the multiple personality storyline though. It just seemed too out there, and I hated what it did to Cruz and Eden.

Is it just me, or does Jack manhandle Erica a lot?

I think they killed him off to force Bianca to stay with Erica. Barbara had made it clear that she couldn't handle Bianca, and with Travis gone, Bianca was stuck with Erica. Plus Travis dying forced Bianca, Jack and Erica to deal with Bianca's memories of the affair and the divorce, which was pretty compelling drama. It's kind of ironic how she was so adamant about them NOT being together as a young child and then as an adult was furious with Erica for messing up her marriage to Jack. Judging how Bianca reacted to Erica and David, Erica and Chris, Erica and Jack... I got the impression that Bianca just wanted her to marry someone and freaking stay married already - she ripped Erica a new one for cheating on Chris with Jack, and later for cheating on Jack with Jeff.

I didn't see Jack as being a parallel to Eric at all. Travis was a better parallel. Jack was pretty emotionally connected to Erica at the time. I don't recall much about his interactions with Mona. She'd moved on with her life, and while she didn't seem thrilled he was there, she was polite in the scenes I saw. I remember reading a SOD article about Erica having Bianca in which Susan said that she asked Agnes early in the pregnancy what kind of mother Erica would be because if she was going to be bad mother, she wanted to start subtly laying the groundwork for that in her performance, and she was relieved when Agnes told her that after much debate, Erica would be a good mother. I never saw Erica as a bad mother where Bianca was concerned - she always had the best of intentions with regard to her daughter, but she usually made the wrong choices for the right reasons. She stayed with Travis to try to do what she thought was best for Bianca but ended up making a huge mess of things by continuing the affair with Jack. To me the Frankie murder trial is a huge example of Erica as a mother: she was literally willing to sacrifice herself, her freedom, her life even to spare her daughter because she thought Bianca had shot Frankie in a jealous rage. It was a horribly misguided thing to do especially since Bianca wasn't the shooter, and Bianca was pissed that Erica thought she'd be willing to kill someone in cold blood, but the fact remains that Erica was willing to give up anything and everything to protect her daughter.

I HATE that they wrote Travis and Barbara off the canvas. It would have been SO much more interesting to see Erica trying to cope with Travis having custody but still living in Pine Valley with Barbara and the kids. Erica would have had the opportunity for more visitation, which I think ultimately would have been better for Bianca than being dragged all the way across the country where Travis practically cut her off from her mother. If Bianca had been close by, I think Erica would have been forced to behave herself more instead of doing things like having a fling with Charlie Brent or getting help for her drug addiction sooner or that awful storyline with her kidnapping Maria's baby. Plus as we later discovered, there was SO much drama going on in the Montgomery household that we didn't hear about until after the fact: Sean feeling like he was wanted by Barbara only for body parts for her favorite child, Molly, Barbara and Travis being unable to cope with Bianca as a teenager and thus sending her to stay with Erica for the summer, Barbara cheating on Travis, Barbara cutting off Bianca from Molly when Bianca came out, everything that led up to Bianca's anorexia. I wish we'd been able to see all of that. Plus Travis showing up when Kendall was revealed as Erica's daughter was pretty interesting even though it was a recast, and it would have been interesting to see all of that play out with Travis and Barbara living in Pine Valley. For better or worse, I think the writers planned for Bianca to go with Travis because there was so much build up there with Erica wanting to protect Bianca but inadvertently doing more harm than good and Bianca pulling away from Erica and leaning more on Travis. What I think was completely unnecessary was Erica lying about the affair and then turning on Jack because he refused to lie for her. We're talking about a child who set the house on fire because she saw Jack and Erica kissing. There was plenty of evidence there that Bianca had a closer relationship with Travis and was not in a position to accept a relationship between her mother and her Uncle Jack, all of which would lean in Travis's favor in court. Having Jack contradict her on the stand like that was to me out of character for Jack and was the beginning of him being Mr. Morally Upright, and it created a huge stumbling block to their relationship. She did forgive him for it the following year, but she did so primarily because she wanted him back and away from Brooke, but she never ever forgot it, and she STILL brought it up repeatedly even after Bianca was grown.

I'm still watching the Erica-Travis-Jackson clips as some of them were right before I started watching the show (I started right after the fire). It's interesting that Erica placed so much importance later on Jack not lying about the affair for her in court when the writers had been setting Erica up to lose Bianca for months prior to that. I was only 12 at the time so I missed a lot, but watching it now, it seems clear from the outset that she was going to lose that little girl. I feel bad for her now watching it, knowing how everything would fall apart for Erica, but God she dug herself into a big hole. She never should have remarried Travis, but once she did, she should have kicked his ass to the curb the moment she found out that he slept with Barbara to conceive another child. People seem to give Travis a free pass for that, but 1) they didn't have to have sex to do it and 2) Molly was in remission at the time. She was NOT hanging on by a thread about to die at any moment. She was getting better, and at best, having Sean was an insurance policy in case Molly got sick again. I "get" Erica, and I totally understand why she had an affair with Jack, but she wasn't doing Bianca any favors by faking a happy family life, and she certainly only managed to make herself look worse to Travis and to the judge. It makes me wonder... since Eric was there at first and then walked out on her again, how different it might have been if he'd never come back to Pine Valley - would Erica have been more likely to just up and leave Travis instead of playing out this covert affair for months? Ironic too that Erica was so worried about Travis abandoning Bianca for his other children when in the end, Erica was the one who lost her child.

Who knows - if Eric had stayed around, maybe the rape story would have happened earlier? I find her interactions with Eric to be very interesting considering what we later learned around him. I loved the Jack of 1987-1990. I thought he was a complex guy with a lot of depth to him. Then they messed with his character and made him more of a Mr. Ethical, do-no-wrong type guy, which is a refreshing sort of character on a soap, but it just wasn't him to me. Jack refusing to lie about their affair to protect Erica, when he'd lied so many times before to his own brother really bothered me, especially since this was a character who came town to deliberately sabotage his brother's Senatorial campaign. But suddenly he's Mr. Honest and Upright? There were other times after this that I liked Jack and Erica together, but none of them ever came close to their original relationship. Love the bouquet scene - loved the "Oh dear God" look on Jack's face and Erica throwing her hands up defensively to knock the bouquet away. Erica hung out with younger women from time to time - she took Jenny Gardener under her wing a bit when they were both modeling. Jack doesn't seem to have super close guy friends, not in the same way that some of the other characters do, but he's been friends with Tad for a long time, and IDK that Tad and Nico were too far apart age-wise.

Yes, Eric was a sleaze. Erica wanted to believe the best about him because she was thrilled that he was alive, and she saw this as her chance to have a real relationship with him, one that she hoped would match the idealized image she had in her mind. Jack saw through Eric and didn't care for him, which was probably at least part of why Eric pushed Erica to remarry Travis instead of Jack. Then he sold all of the Enchantment shares she gave him to Natalie and fled town again. I hate that he died right before Erica got to his bedside in Vegas in 2004. He summoned her, and it would have been really interesting to see that conversation play out, what he would have said to her, how she would have reacted.

This was just what I needed to read this morning. I think I love you.