Xanthe

I didn't like the way they brought Stacy back with Megan and Mark Singleton dead and I am really having a hard time with the whole obvious romance novel Derek thing. I never watched the Beauty and the Beast series so I don't know how similarly this was an echo of that. But I feel unconvinced when they try to show me that Derek has intellect because he reads Stendahl, and embarrassed when Stacy imagines him and her as the hero and heroine of Felicia's book The Lady and the Laborer. There are some scenes where Stacy is representing Jamie in his custody battle with Vicky and they're just such a relief. With Lisa out of the picture I feel like I would have preferred to see Stacy and Jamie together. Should I not be so hard on Derek? Am I just mad because it makes me worry that they used similar tricks to make me like Catlin and Sally and it worked?

🤔Johnny-come-lately? I saw your confirmation later afterwards. Thanks for the suggestion of the Bing image search. I had got no results with a Google image search but I tried Bing today and got a hit. Will keep that in mind for future.

Today's find: Becky Ann Baker (credited as Becky Gelke) as "Jill", giving Iris a massage.

Thank you and thanks @j swift -- as soon as you gave the name I knew it was right. I knew I could count on this board.

This actress looks extremely familiar to me but I don't know from where. This is from a September 1989 episode where Stacy goes to ask advice from a former law professor. The character is called Professor Houghton and I don't seem to find anything relevant on the AWHP.

In order to bother with the test you probably have to have some kind of suspicion. And even though GH is made in California it is set in New York. I have just been watching some of the drama around Steven Frame's paternity in 1989. Before he was born Vicky started to panic and asked her OBGYN for a paternity test and the OBGYN said it was too dangerous and wouldn't be ethical for her to approve it. Vicky backed off but then after Steven's birth Jake found out that Steven's blood type was AB and suspiciously noted that his own blood type was AB. During the retcon that John could be Marley and Victoria's father a couple of years earlier, Victoria was likewise suspicious when she found out that both she and John had the blood type AB. The thing that never seemed to be discussed is that blood type is not passed from the father to the child directly. Essentially you get one letter from each parent, and all you can do is use blood type to rule out the possibility that someone is the baby's parent. So if Vicky is AB and Steven is AB, anyone who is A, B, or AB could be Steven's father -- only someone with type O could be ruled out. I assume at this point these soap towns are crammed with people with AB blood and anyone could be anyone's father.

I came across a commercial from 1989 for NBC SoapPhone. It was a 1-900 number ($1 for the first minute and $0.45 for each additional minute) and promised updates from different characters from different soaps. I was a bit confused to see Genie Francis but then I remembered she had been on Days. Does anyone remember this? Did you ever call it?

I read somewhere recently that Elon wanted to rebrand PayPal as X way back when but was prevented. It reminds me of the story of the movie producer who kept asking movies to add a gratuitous giant mechanical spider until he finally got his way with Wild Wild West.

Hoping to avoid his creditors?

Other than Dark Shadows, have there been any period soaps? Everything I can think of is usually set as contemporary but when you layer on writers' generational unconscious bias (grandmothers are like this, teenagers are like that, except of course they are thinking of their own experiences of 20 or 30 years ago) plus conventions of the genre that may not have aged well you get these types of anachronistic issues.

In early 1989, after Jamie had left her for Vicky, Lisa decided to try video dating and had a date with a guy called Girard. The actor is credited as Graham Winston but I believe it is Graham Winton who later played Caleb Snyder on As the World Turns. 20230722_142600.mp4 Sometimes I wonder whether if Joanna Going had stayed or if Lisa had been recast they could have done something effective with the Jamie/Lisa/Vicky triangle over the long term. Before she left, Lisa got very friendly with Matt while he was confused about whether he and Josie were ready to have sex and both that and her departure were a bit unsatisfying. But Laurence Lau's Jamie could be very pompous and shouty so a long-term triangle might not have worked well without a Jamie recast. Around the same time as Lisa's video date, Jamie and Nicole had lunch and reminisced about what messes they had been back in the day and now they were fine stodgy successes in relationships with volatile messes like Vicky and Cass. While it was nice of them to acknowledge their pasts (there had been some earlier scenes between Nicole and a pregnant Vicky where Nicole behaved as if she had never been acquainted with Jamie at all and I don't think she acknowledged anything with Stacy after Stacy showed up either), it was a bit sad to think how much more interesting these characters could be.

The recovery post-Depriest had a lot of positives, but Stacy and Derek make me want to throw things and Amanda and Nicole are very limited. I do like the way a lot of people are more interconnected -- during Depriest it often felt like groups of people were off in their own little bubbles and the only thing that tied all of the groups together was fearing the Sin Stalker or hating Reginald. But Sharlene interacts with Josie, John, Jason, and also Rachel and Iris. Josie and Matt have peripheral friends as well as their families. Cass has Nicole and Felicia and Caroline and Zach, and so on. I recently watched the scenes where Dawn was diagnosed with AIDS and it was staggering to me that they had Jamie in the middle of the hospital informing Scott and Chad of the diagnosis *before* they all go in to tell Dawn. I know we're more conscious of privacy nowadays but holy cow.

John H Brennan (Tony Carlisle) in a commercial for his Canadian series Bordertown. 20230720_201732.mp4

Katie Rich (Dee) in a Wrigley's ad. 20230720_193505.mp4

Jumping around a bit in the late 80s. It's a bit hard to watch some of Vicky's scenes where she is acting out because of her custody conflict with Jamie and she is driving recklessly with Evan, especially when I also bounce to her coma in 1987. Are Rick and Julie Anne AW's first interracial couple? I was just watching a scene where Rick is confiding in Lisa of all people that he is struggling a bit for some reason and thinking how odd that he wouldn't think to talk to his partner Courtney. Maybe he does at some point.

If it helps, nitter.net allows searching by userid so that you can see their tweets. https://nitter.net/search?f=users&q=bbcdoctorwho

I was just listening to Patti Lupone on Wait Wait Don't Tell Me and it reminded me that Robert Lupone played Mac's nephew (and Adam's brother) Neal.

I didn't know it at the time, but I must have seen Carole Shelley as Dotty Otley in Noises Off in 1985. Paul Hecht (AW's Nikolai Pirenko) was Lloyd Dallas in the same production.

What about: Donna Murphy (DA Morgan Graves) Edward Hibbert (print shop guy who created a modified birth certificate for Sharlene to give to Josie) Frances Conroy (Mary Lou) Billy Porter (singer Billy Rush) Scott Bakula (Quintin Mills) Gary Sandy (Michael Thayer) Wanda de Jesus (Gomez) John Spencer (Frank Julian) Janine Turner (Trish Kirkland)

You should cross-reference with the AWHP. In addition to the Actor Guide, under Miscellaneous there is a section for "Celebrity Appearances" which includes a lot of people who had roles large and small before they were stars. http://www.anotherworldhomepage.com/misc4.html The list is not necessarily complete or current, depending on when fame struck the person or whether their stature is truly "celebrity". You should scan the actor guide as well.

I have conflated Dustin Trent and Drew Marston in my mind for years now and I have been somewhat surprised to discover that they are actually two distinct people. I guess Drew Marston was mostly during the strike -- if I recall correctly he had faked his death in order to incriminate Mac and there was a whole lot of fuss about whether Mac would be charged given that there was no corpse. Was that part of Iris' plan? Dustin seems not to have been working with Iris and had his own agenda where somehow fortuitously he met Amanda through a prostitution ring pretending to be a video dating service and she turned out to be a double of his wife Julia that Evan had had an affair with. What are the odds! (No greater I suppose than that of the resemblance between Rachel, whom Carl had been obsessed with since at least 1985, and Justine, whom Carl had had an affair with at least 15 years before that based on Ryan's age.) But it was Drew, wasn't it, and not Dustin, who managed to get a picture that looked like he and Amanda were having an affair and that was published in the newspaper in order to humiliate Amanda as part of Iris' plan?

It took me a minute to recognize Kathryn Erbe offering advice about safe sex to Josie (This is around the same time that Matthew bought condoms from Judith Barcroft). The first thought that came into my head was that whoever it was looked like Susan Dey.

Absolutely. I prefer to keep my various kinds of nonsense separate and even though none of it is shameful I wouldn't want to be self-conscious about who is seeing what or who might react to what if Threads insists on showing you to your Facebook friends and vice versa.

So nice to see Julie Osburn as Kathleen with Kathleen Layman as MJ. They may be my favourite pair of sisters of all time.

I know that some people disliked it, but they used Sam Groom, who had previously played Russ, as the officiant at Cass and Lila's wedding. If they could not think of a way to use Iris well they might have been able to come up with a way for Beverlee and/or Carmen to play some other part that would deliver fan service and acknowledge the performers. (On the other hand although I had liked both John Aprea and Alice Barrett and I don't object in theory to actors playing different roles I wasn't thrilled with Alexander Nikos or Anne O'Donnell, so maybe it would not have worked.)