alwaysAMC

Ugh - will have to watch the rest tonight on Paramount. This Iran/Israel stuff isn't good 😕

We have a new set! I wonder if they repurposed an old set or if they got more space.

Wow people really watched their soaps on Friday this week! I hope everyone had a good weekend cliffhanger.

Wow, this is pretty big. I'll even tune in just to see her in action all these years later.

So it seems like Nicole doesn't know Martin's secret? I can't remember if we already knew that, but it seems like only Anita/Vernon/Bill really know, right? Derek is still so wooden. He isn't keeping pace with his costars on consistent improvement.

I love watching Eva give Kat the business. Marcel is back! And it seems like Martin recognized his name.

This week's episode was really strong. Very emotional with the three men (grandfather/father/son). I also like seeing JJ leave for rehab on his own accord. And we have a new villain to look out for - Marco! It'll also be nice knowing what happened to Mina's father, why he's in the hospital, and once he wakes, how he'll fit in.

Haha true, and I love Dani trying to help her sister, but who is going to clean all that up? That is stressing me out just seeing all the damage inside the house. 😲

Oh no! Thankfully not here in Texas (yet). LOL at Bill smiling when asked. Very good point!

I love bossy PT Shanice! Always love Leslie watching and talking about her stories haha.

I’m up to October 2, 1996. Ugh, the opening was updated to add Zachary and Dahlia, and remove Vanessa. I guess this means Maeve left the show and everyone will just assume Vanessa died in her car wreck, so sad. Matt found the MRI test results from the mail, just before Vanessa’s memorial, but Nola convinced him that no test results matter at this point. They also gave Nola the short Vanessa haircut now, so it’s throwing me off haha. Btw, how is Quint not around for any of this? He just came back full-time, but then couldn’t be available for his sister’s memorial? Billy is back! He just showed up at the hospital and gave Josh a big hug. So did Reva, and Reva finally just mentioned that she calls Dylan every week (ha!). He has 24 hours out of jail for deaths in the family, so I guess he isn’t staying right now beyond the memorial. He’s pushing Reva/Josh as a couple to Reva. I feel so bad for Matt during this whole thing. Watching him break down at the beach is heartbreaking. Rick just told Phillip about his one-night stand with Blake, and now Amanda just told Roger the truth in front of all of them about Rick being one of the fathers. Blake denies it, Roger doesn’t believe it, but Amanda is so bad and I kind of love it haha. Zachary is now obsessed with Michelle and saved her from drowning. He called her Mary until he corrected her and said she’s Michelle. Was there a Mary in the Bauer family? It seems like he recognizes her from a long time ago. It seems like Michelle is done with J for good, as she’s now developing a crush on Zachary. It looks like they’re going with a J/Dahlia/Marcus triangle, away from Michelle. So Griffin was behind his assassination attempt? Weird and I don’t care. Roger got electric shock treatments now and is acting differently, like a changed man who is overly nice, but of course it’s an act. I sure hope he ultimately gets the upper hand and we can get him out of this hospital. Blake and Hart seemed to be upset that Dinah allowed the treatments to happen, but those two are too little, too late for me. Annie is now missing work because of the pill addiction; things are getting worse. Annie just went off on Abby at work, so you can tell she’s getting angrier. What I do like about this story is how quickly others began to question her pill taking, and it’s not some secret that lasts for months. Josh just caught Reva skinny dipping at the creek and Annie found her diner apron and realized they were together. I really think Kim Zimmer puts a lot of herself into the Reva character haha. I’m in the middle of reading her book and Kim and her friends are into skinny dipping in real life! Overall, a boring month but I’m looking forward to another holiday season in Springfield for something new and fun (I love the holidays). I think I’m now going into McTavish and Laibson’s last month as HW and EP. I’ve got to say, post-Marion/Brent, McTavish’s big umbrella storylines of 1996 (Lonatrat and A. Spauling/5th Street) were huge busts. Lonatrat made everyone unlikeable and A. Spaulding/5th Street was so slow and uninteresting. Otherwise, my thoughts on the smaller B storylines: Grant family/Griffin was so gross and unnecessary; Dahlia/Marcus is boring; Holly/Fletch/Meg is nonexistent; Zachary and his meddling, I’m on the fence; Abby/Rick pairing I like; Blake/Ross/Rick and the twins I like; Annie and her pill addiction I like, but the slow Reva/Josh movement is boring and I lump Reva’s return into the 5th Street storyline because she’s mostly just with Buzz and Alan.

If all true and this is the right leading lady, it may make sense why Kim didn't mention her by name, since Courtney passed away in Dec 2010, just under a year before the book came out in 2011. That would be the respectful thing to do, and it's not like Kim was shy about name dropping others in the book. All speculation though haha.

Y'all are so smart, I love this team work! I really should because that would be fun, I just need to figure out how to do that on here haha. I see people doing it in the BtG threads all the time and always wondered how they do that without saving photos to their computer and then uploading them - that just seems like it would take a lot of time.

Cady McClain said the same thing with her hairdos - she switched it up so much because she was either unhappy or bored. Kim must have been unhappy in 1996 because she has so many different short styles, it's wild (haha).

I would love that!

Given Kim's penchant for drama, her love of drinking wine, being more of a guy's girl, and coming across as a bit of a narcissist, I could see this being a memory mistake, an assumption, or hearsay or rumor someone told her without any backing. I can't see her out and out lying on purpose, so part of me thinks there was smoke somewhere, whether true or false, and she believed some mistake, if incorrect or misremembered.

I loved this too! 🖖 I liked that they set up Shanice as a part-time physical therapist. It gets her out of the nurse's station and gives her more to do. I'm interested in seeing if we follow Anita to Chicago or if she's truly going to be off-screen for a while until we see the Articulettes' reunion. Overall slower day today, though.

This is what AI just told me (haven't audited the response), but gosh I hope it wasn't Judith Light! "In 1983, "One Life to Live" featured several leading ladies.Notable actresses included Phylicia Ayers-Allen as Courtney Wright, Jane Badler as Melinda Cramer, Judith Light as Karen Wolek, and Ellen Holly as Carla Gray. Janice Lynde also joined the cast in 1983 as Laurel Chapin, a character who would later be a central figure in the show."

Haha right?? I assumed it wasn't Erika nor Robin, as she was complimentary of them both in the chapter. She referred to Erika as "the wonderful Erika Slezak" and Robin as "the unbelievably talented Robin Strasser". So, it's gotta be another leading lady at the time. Hmm... And in reference to the situation she said "As the old saying goes, "It's not who you know; it's who you blow!" LOL. She definitely was burned on the way out.

I was gone this past weekend, so I'm behind on reading Kim's book, but here are highlights and my thoughts on the next two chapters: Chapter 3 - all about her move to NYC and going on auditions. She mentioned her engagement to AC, where she essentially asked him to marry her. Then, her wedding to AC, where the wedding guests went skinny dipping during the reception at the hotel pool. I’m very much sensing a pattern here with Kim and Reva both haha. When I read this, I basically hear Reva in the writing. Every other sentence ends with an exclamation point, which says a lot to me haha. The rest of the chapter is about her four years on The Doctors, how she met Alec Baldwin on the show and how they’re still friends today (well as of 2011). She talked about how during this time on soaps, in the 70s/80s, many actors used cue cards. The cost of messing up lines and having to re-edit scenes was costly (~$1500/instance), so there was a ton of pressure not to screw up, which she felt. She said The Doctors’ ratings were never that great while she was on and they ended up getting cancelled 3 months after she left. She left because she just had a baby (which they wrote into her storyline), and her husband AC had a small role towards the end, where the two of them fell in love and went off canvas together. She ends with a short story from her time on her first film Body Heat. Ironically this movie also had Kathleen Turner, who is the actress Kim replaced on The Doctors in their role as Nola. She ends by saying she had more people recognize her from that film than her entire 4 years on The Doctors (yikes). Chapter 4 - Kim has her baby, moves back to LA and enjoys being a mom on Venice Beach. OLTL calls her back for a 3-year contract for the role of Echo, so she packs up her family and moves back to NYC where she becomes a working mom and AC is a Mr. Mom at home. She loved working with Clint Ritchie, who she says was an out of place cowboy in Manhattan that loved to party hard. Good drama here: even though she was signed for 3 years, they are on 13-week cycles and could be dropped at the end of each cycle. Well, she found out from the secretary that she was pretty much done after her first 13-week cycle. She finally was able to meet with the EP who gave her the news. After 3 months and relocating her family, she was being dropped from OLTL. Kim says the EP told her even though Echo was wildly popular with fans, she was no longer needed in storyline. Apparently Kim’s popularity had ruffled feathers with one of the leading actresses on the show, who was dating an ABC executive and thus why Kim got fired. She didn’t say who the lady was, so I’m dying to know! From there, as her final OLTL episodes were airing, she got a call from GL to audition for Reva. She wasn’t interested in going back to a soap opera after her experience with OLTL, but she gave it a shot since she really needed a job. She fell in love with the casting director and then the writing team, especially Pam Long. Kim wasn’t Pam’s first choice for Reva, she was hoping for a red-headed, firecracker Southern Belle, but Kim ultimately got the part. She said her first audition with Jordan Clarke (Billy) went so well and he apparently rooted for her to get the part. Her second audition was with Robert Newman (Josh) and she thought it went well, but Robert was much harder to read and kept his cards close to his chest. She said she could normally break through anyone’s walls, but she couldn’t with Robert in the beginning. She couldn’t tell if he wanted her as Reva or not, even though she felt he was so handsome and sweet and they worked well together in the audition. A few days later, she got the part. Now, does Kim have this OLTL leading lady to thank for getting her ‘iconic’ role as Reva?

I would have gone with maybe Tower Bridge, the London Eye, a classic phono booth, Union Jack, Big Ben, double decker bus... even like the lion at Trafalgar Square. I think the umbrella is just too simple and could be used for any northern city.

I continue to love any Kat and Leslie scenes together haha.

Very cool! The older blonde seems like she'll be stuck up in a perfect way, we'll see. I don't love how they chose an umbrella as their symbol. London has way more iconic symbols they could have used.

Oh wow, very cool! You were at the right party haha - what was it? Yeah Brit sucks and kept trying to do the most last night. I felt so bad for Shamea - and still has no luggage!

Very cool! Thanks for sharing! Haha love it - thanks for sharing!