Xanthe

She was working as a prostitute when Quinn located her in order to adopt Thomasina. According to the AW synopses for 1983 she was arrested in May and Quinn bailed her out. However it looks like by October she had left prostitution. In 1984 when she started dating Grant Todd she admitted her past to him. He initially said he was OK with it but then dumped her pretty quickly. I wish we had more of 1983 available online.

She was never seen onscreen. There were also a few minor characters that MJ crossed paths with either as part of the Sin Stalker storyline or as Chad's "girls" or both ... I think one was called Letty? Or Linda? I just remembered -- Lily Mason!

I can't speak to storylines on other soaps, but I'm not sure what fans would be upset about, exactly, since prostitution was never recommended -- it was a disgraceful and/or salacious episode from the character's past. I don't remember AW ever really directly addressing sexually transmitted disease head on -- they avoided the issue with virginal Dawn Rollo's AIDS storyline, maybe mentioned safe sex in a throwaway conversation about Amanda's unplanned pregnancy or around Matthew (buying condoms from Judith Barcroft) and Josie (confiding in Kathryn Erbe) thinking about having sex, but overall maybe just seemed to have fewer incidents of casual sex. At least, when I look through the AWHP character guide, it seems like the 70s had all kinds of random hookups listed under "lovers" that were more likely to be "flirtations" in the later 80s and 90s. Let's see -- AW had Sharlene's prostitution storyline, then Sandy's past, and then MJ's along with her ex-boyfriend/pimp. Any others? Was Josie's modeling career supposed to have devolved into prostitution before she returned and became a cop?

Jamie and Lisa's first meeting is so awful. I remembered not liking it but it was even worse than I remembered. The way they chose to show Maisie's murder was very strange -- I thought when they started with the choppy effect that they would just give us some quick cuts and not really show it. But instead they stopped cutting and showed the gloved hand merely touch Maisie's throat and she fell to the ground, hopelessly dead. Meanwhile they spent a lot longer on the brawl with Michael and Donna which was given the freeze frame position at the very end.

Keep in mind that they aged Matthew first in order to give Mitch storyline so Amanda had to be older than that when she showed up. I don't think it was necessarily wrong to age Amanda and Matthew (especially given Jamie's age) but I agree if Nancy and Sally and Thomasina and/or Julia had been around maybe they could have waited a little longer and also integrated Amanda and Matthew and Cory and Jeanne and Maggie and Alex and Kevin Thatcher into young adult stories later. The purges of 1985 and 1986 were really difficult and there were too many random characters with Lesoleil and too much international supervillain with Carl and then Reginald.

Oh, interesting. I wonder how much the song was used for Sam & Amanda prior to this episode and performance as a true theme. Thanks @Matt for posting the episode.The way the song was used was a bit odd as a love theme in that they showed both a loving Sam and Amanda but also Marley with Jamie interspersed with Dennis in a racecar thinking about Marley. Frankly I thought that was clumsily done -- at first I thought that there was something wrong in the broadcast when racetrack noises came in. I am also wondering who the Obvious Seductress who took Dennis back to her motel was. She talked about getting reacquainted and I think he called her Dawn, but I didn't catch any real information about where they knew each other from. Surely she wasn't supposed to be Dawn Marshall from Texas?

In the AW Bible, the character who would be Pat Matthews was named Cynthia. http://www.anotherworldhomepage.com/public.html

Thank you!

I was discussing Dabney Coleman's death with my mother and although she does not remember Bright Promise she said she had a vivid recollection of a scene where Dabney Coleman was kissing a woman and she made a comment about wanting to come up for air and he took offense. Any idea who the woman could have been and what the relationship between the characters was?

Found this -- the mention of Leclerc and Durham is extremely brief. https://www.tampabay.com/archive/1990/04/06/pair-of-parrots-pilfered-from-perches/

That doesn't really sound to me like anything Munro would have been interested in. Her stories are comparatively narrow and not really in the business of juggling interrelated storylines. It would have been interesting but my first reaction is maybe she would have been best as a consultant or in a team of two writers with complementary skills.

Speaking of love themes, I was looking at the list of couple/character themes on the AWHP and although there is a theme listed for Amanda and Evan, I see none for Amanda and Sam. Did Amanda and Sam really not have a theme? They were not my cup of tea but they were certainly the main romantic storyline at the time. http://www.anotherworldhomepage.com/music.html

Thanks. At the time AW brought him on, Adam was in place as very much a straight arrow of the Cory household who was basically kind and decent. Adam didn't have anything like the little bit of a past that Jamie had had in his Bekins era, falling for manipulative women and having problems with drugs. Stephen Yates had played Jamie as quite a decent guy of course. I don't know if they were looking ahead to a time when Adam would be out of the picture and they would want Jamie to be the core good guy, or what they thought about how Jamie would differentiate himself. At the time I felt like there was a point where it sort of made sense that Jamie felt sorry for Vicky and allowed her to look to him for help. He got past his betrayal of Lisa and was mildly pleasant for a little while as Vicky's devoted husband, but I am not sure that they did enough after he and Vicky started fighting for custody to allow the audience to see him as remotely sympathetic under all of the angry shouting.

Psst! Over here!

The last time they were both on-screen must have been much more recent than 1989 when the SOD article was published, so that on its own would not be meaningful. For each of the couples in the listicle they gave only one love theme. In 1989 Bo and Hope would have been offscreen for more than a year. I don't know how SOD chose between multiple songs but it seems like you can make the case that "Whatever We Imagine" was one of their love themes even if they decided not to list multiple songs. I would probably have wanted to base the decision on how frequently they used it and what kind of scene it tended to be matched with. But if after 1989 they used "Whatever We Imagine" less and "Tonight I Celebrate My Love For You" more, SOD could not have predicted that. I cannot believe what a hard time I had keeping "Tonight I Celebrate My Love For You" in my head while typing that -- my brain kept flipping it to "If Ever You're in My Arms Again."

@NothinButAttitude posted this helpful info in the Another World thread. It's from Soap Opera Digest and identifies the singers on When as Ullanda McCulloch and Darryl Tookes. It indicates that the song is "not available" which suggests that it was never commercially released. Interestingly, when I look up Darryl Tookes it says that he also sang on the Guiding Light theme, which makes me wonder whether When could have been an in-house P&G piece. @Contessa Donatella I see you mentioned in the AW thread that the Soap Digest item in the link was mistaken about Bo and Hope's theme, which it lists as "Whatever We Imagine" by James Ingram. The SOD item is from 1989 and based on nostalgia for the way-distant early- to mid-1980s, bless their hearts. I have no idea whether "Whatever We Imagine" might ever have been used for Bo and Hope -- for some reason there do seem to be fan videos on YouTube that have used it, but I didn't find any clips that showed it used in the show. However even if they had another theme it could be possible that "Whatever We Imagine" was used at some point. Maybe a bigger Bo and Hope fan can clarify.

Thanks very much for this -- I am going to link to it in the soap opera music topic.

I am always curious because his Jamie was so disappointing to me after Yates and of course Bekins: what was Greg Nelson like and what about that character made AW cast Lau as Jamie despite his personal issues? Was it just the simple calculus that the actor had been popular on AMC? He stayed on AW for almost 3.5 years, which is a strange length of time -- was he on a 3 year contract and then lingered a little bit longer?

Mac bought KBAY in 1985 when Carl couldn't afford to keep it and gave Sandy a job there. Then later sometime after Mac's death Rachel sold it and Matthew and Donna became co-owners.

Thanks! Both Blair Baker and Courtney Evans were murdered by Fax Newman. There were two different actresses who played Blair -- based on the photos here and on the AWHP Minor Characters entry I believe the attendee was Bridget White.

That is Stina Nielsen who played Courtney Evans.

I think I remember reading that David Forsyth had had a stroke and probably isn't well enough. Maybe that was from Anna Holbrook's Locher Room interview?

Aww. Fun fact: Taylor Watson Seupel had a very small role in part II of the two-part movie A Bread Factory in which Amy Carlson appeared in part I.

I think it could possibly be Diego Serrano who played Tomas.

I don't think I did know about the script. A nice memento. Regarding the firings, I saw that the Wikipedia entry for Sarah Cunningham says it is the same day for both but I didn't see that anywhere else and there doesn't seem to be any citation linked. It does seem inauspicious for there to be that kind of sudden turnover in the cast right away but I suppose soaps with their ensemble casts can recover pretty well. I notice that tomorrow TCM is airing the Julius Caesar in which Douglass Watson plays the small role of Octavius.