Xanthe

I don't remember the storyline with a camera behind a mirror -- what was that?

Jerry Lanning did sub for David Bailey in 1989, and he was the corrupt judge at the trial for Grant's murder (for which there were so many suspects I no longer remember who was actually on trial -- it must have been Paulina because I remember Tito in the judge's chambers) and I don't recall Lanning being more charismatic than Bailey. But then I liked Bailey well enough.

I have never seen Endless Love but I would say Russell Todd looked too handsome and buff here to be cast as a regular teenager. Was Tom Cruise in there as well?

I believe it's that the article describes Ada as the matriarch of the show for a quarter century, when Mary Matthews was the original matriarch until 1975 when the character died.

Not to take away from how those stories showed Rachel to advantage, but the boardroom conflicts at Cory were not as interesting to me as the lower-level office atmosphere in the early 80s with Pat and Cecile and Jamie and later Sally and Peter working together. I will never forgive Margaret Depriest for taking Jamie out of publishing to put him in the hospital. I don't remember how they handled Rachel's career as a sculptor during the later years other than the odd plot point. She was working on a bust during Lumina -- was it that she sculpted David Halliday and when the bust was cracked she recognized it as disfigured Jordan Stark? Or did she sculpt Stark and from that recognized the resemblance to Halliday? How similar was that plot to the bust she was working on when she was blind after the accident with Steve? Did that bust play any part in her realizing that "John Caldwell" was really Mac? That was on my mind after watching the AWHP photo montage -- the bust appeared to be clean-shaven so I presume it was of "John Caldwell".

And this is when I realised that I have been vaguely imagining A. R. Gurney's "Love Letters" every time I thought of the show Wyndham and Keating did. Although the SB actor didn't pan out and RKK was hired, I thought it might be possible that the "heart-wrenching" story could have included Ryan's organ donation somehow. But it's equally possible that it didn't.

I came across this bit in a Carolyn Hinsey column from 1996: Based on the timing it seems like whatever the storyline was turned out to be Bobby Reno as played by Robert Kelker Kelly, but do we know who the Santa Barbara actor might have been?

How good did they try to make Iris? My memories of Texas don't go much beyond the fact that it existed and Iris and Dennis were there, but I had a vague idea that although Iris didn't have Daddy to obsess over and Rachel to spite, she possibly interfered in Dennis' love life. Was Iris completely toothless in Texas? Of course part of the transformation of Rachel from villain to heroine was the introduction of Iris -- did heroine Iris not have any antagonist to plague her?

Yes. I believe the explanation was that the scripts and episodes from the first 3 years were not available so they had to start from the later point.

I think Carolyn Culliton was around in those days, wasn't she?

The first book starts with Missy on trial for the murder of Danny Fargo.

There are two main sets of novelizations. There are the "Soaps & Serials" set, which were part of a whole line in the late 80s and covered the history of a lot of the soaps that were on the air at the time. They were slim paperbacks, each about the same size as a Harlequin Romance. They cover 1967-76 storylines only. The other is the two books by Kate Lowe Kerrigan. I believe we talked here about how publicity for these novelizations annoyed Harding Lemay who thought it gave the impression that she and not he wrote the actual show. These were published in the 70s as well. I bought the Soaps & Serials when they were released, and the Kate Lowe Kerrigan books second-hand sometime later. None of them are books that I would reread for pleasure, but I use them for reference when I am looking for more detail than the AWHP synopses provide -- with of course the caveat that the books are wrong or vague in spots or omit characters and entire storylines. They are interesting for the history such as they are.

Both Julia and Sally were adopted, so being a blood relation didn't have any bearing there. Liz also took a strong interest in the Corys, especially after the supply of Matthews-adjacent girls dried up. When Olivia came to town she was all over her and Russ. I think there would have been some wiggle room for Liz to take an interest in Ricky.

I don't remember the details of how Vince and Maisie and Ada decided to invest in Mary's Place together, but there were definitely points where I wondered if they were trying to set up some kind of love triangle. In hindsight they were of course setting up the return of Mary so it seems unlikely that they intended to have both Ada and Maisie competing over Vince when his wife returned from the dead, but maybe they were thinking about having Vince starting a relationship with one of them by the time Mary turned up.

I don't know anything about GL puppets and imposters, but on AW, when Kathleen went to California while she was paralyzed, Cass interacted with her through a puppet show (because he was on the run from the law and/or she refused to see him). I don't see it mentioned in the synopses but the name of a puppet is given as Mickey on Cass and Kathleen's couples page on the AWHP. http://www.anotherworldhomepage.com/casss1.html

It's an interesting idea but I would want to tighten up some of the questions around why Liz wouldn't have known where Ricky was supposed to be etc if Pat and other family members were in contact. I don't recall Liz ever mentioning Bill or Missy or Ricky in all the time I was watching, even when she went to California with Kevin or came back a few years later, but there would have to be some kind of explanation. It's so easy nowadays for scammers to just operate by phone or internet, a good imposture storyline should be sure to have an emotional component so that there is or there develops a reason for the imposter to want to be around the people he's conning. I'm a big fan of Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar for example. And since we're speculating and lamenting what could have been on a show that has been off the air for more than 25 years, we can at least assume a storyline with no video calls or Facebook keeping faraway relatives in constant contact.

I like the idea of any of these types of plots including lying/imposters/red herrings. The storyline where Paulina was looking for the baby she had given up was better because of the part where Tito passed himself off as her son before Paulina found out it was Remy. The idea that a grown Mikey or Mikey imposter would try to take advantage of Donna and Michael could have been interesting. Of course I have also taken the position that if they had wanted to do a triplet storyline with Scott it should have been a red herring before they determined who his real real parents were. That makes me think of the Maggie storyline where Cecile lied to Cass about teenage Maggie's parentage. In hindsight I think it was a better idea than I gave it credit for at the time, but I think with Sandy offscreen the scope was too narrow.

I was trying to remember whether there had been any miscarriages on AW in the 80s and 90s and this has jogged my memory -- Donna had a miscarriage which led to her wanting to foster Mikey, and then of course Frankie had a miscarriage while Cass was with Kathleen. If they had brought Mikey back later in life, I wonder how they would have painted the Millers. Didn't Donna try to have Eve Miller exposed as a prostitute at the custody trial? I suppose If Mikey had been raised in a stable loving home there would be less reason for him to seek out the Hudsons as an adult. I believe Liz did take Kevin to California, but I don't think she ever mentioned him when she came back. Alice could have mentioned Kevin when she attended the Cory 25th anniversary party.

As part of the storyline where Brittany managed to seduce Catlin and get pregnant with Peter Reginald/Little C, she was hoping to find that baby Evan had survived the accident as well. She found a news story about an adopted child that she thought resembled Evan and insisted on visiting the family in another state to find out if it could be Evan. This was probably around the time that Brittany shifted from being plausibly just stubborn to being obviously definitely not above lying and scheming to get what she wanted. None of this would prevent another storyline in which it turned out that Evan was alive after all. In a world where this did happen I would want it to be one where Catlin had in fact raised Kevin Thatcher as well, because I am still annoyed that after Kevin was such an important feature of Catlin and Sally getting together that Catlin would have given him up after Sally died. There are a lot of children of Bay City who vanished never to be seen again and the same with families. In order for any of them (or any of the allegedly unborn) to be brought back, the foundation would have to be in place so that some relatives were there.

Thank you for Cara Pifko! I saw this production and really enjoyed it. Minor correction, the first character is "Patient Griselda" and not two different characters.

I was watching CNN's Have I Got News for You and in a game where they have to guess which of 3 facts is true about a person they had one about Parker Posey where the true item was that she had dropped out of SUNY Purchase to work on a soap. No one knew and both teams rejected the true item as "too believable". Then they played a short clip from 1991 of Tess sitting on some grass with a blond guy I didn't know who was talking about his father and a drainage ditch. Then the HIGNFY people made fun of the clip.

I found the character, Pasham, mentioned in the synopsis from January 4, 1990. 1992 is probably an error (unless the character came back later). http://www.anotherworldhomepage.com/aw1990d1.htm

Thanks! My mother loved her in This is Wonderland.

I want all of Mary Page Keller's run on Another World from 1983-85. Getting engaged to Peter, finding out about David and Kevin, falling in love with Catlin. Actually if I am being greedy I want more Sally going back to Julie Phillips and Jennifer Runyon.

Just got my copy of the Texas book. I haven't started it yet but although I knew it wasn't likely I had hoped for an index so I could jump to specific topics if I wanted to. Serves me right for buying a hardback rather than a searchable ebook.