Xanthe

A one day cameo isn't much. If the show had really wanted to make good use of him and he was available they could have had him either instead of David Bailey with Anna Holbrook's Sharlene or after David Bailey left.

I shocked myself by bursting into tears. Loved him in everything I saw him in, but I have a very nostalgic fondness for Bosom Buddies especially.

Interesting. The Paley Center does have in its catalogue an episode with the May 26 date. I wonder why it doesn't synch up with the daily synopses. Perhaps there were preemptions affecting the schedule? It's in his memoir and we had some discussion in this thread back in April about his and John Considine's "pranks".

I think the dates on this upload may be incorrect -- the first date listed is May 26, 1976, but the first scenes shown correspond to the daily synopsis for May 31 per the AWHP. The first scene is the one where Robert Delaney smashes Mac's bust and slashes Iris' portrait. (The day with the argument leading up to this cataclysm and the rehearsal where Nic Coster was so angry with Beverlee McKinsey he came in without any trousers on would therefore have been the episode before on the Friday.) The video quality is not good as it seems to have been someone filming their TV set.

I really liked Zane with Felicia. He was down-to-earth and laid back and seemed to mesh well with Wally. If they had to bring back Mitch for Matthew's sake I would rather they had kept Zane alive and found something else for Mitch to do in his adult time. Having him pester Rachel was also tedious, so not breaking up Mac and Rachel either. I thought at a couple of points they were testing Brittany with Mitch and Jamie. I don't know if the idea of Mitch and Brittany appeals to me only because it would have had the virtue of sidelining characters I didn't like or if they could have been a good match.

Did they realise any improvement in the ratings with the audience checking out whether "Steve" and "Alice" were worthwhile? Was David Canary considered Bonanza-famous? Did they intend to recreate the Steve and Alice romance, or was the plan all along for Rachel to get Steve back while Mac and Alice receded into the background? I have a hard time grasping what attracted Mac to Alice -- his other relationships that we saw onscreen seem to have tended toward difficult women. (But perhaps Janice was sweet to him to his face in order to entrap him and I am considering her secret murder plot against him to consider her difficult.) The love quadrangle seems very lopsided.

For some reason, things that are on Hulu in the USA are often included with Disney Plus in Canada. That's how I watch Only Murders in the Building.

Extremely minor correction: it's Emily of New Moon, no the.

The party was the 10th anniversary party and you have caught them all except Beverlee McKinsey. Right after this Lemay mentions the difficulty they had casting leading men. He liked John Considine (Vic at that time) but found he had no chemistry with any available leading lady. He then mentions an actor who had left over salary issues and then been hired at another soap where the sponsor had approved the salary demand they had denied on AW. Any idea which actor that might have been? Maybe James Douglas, who left the role of Eliot Carrington to play Grant Colman on ATWT?

Thanks for this. I had no idea. Thinking about Perry, I wonder how old he was when Donna married Carl and whether she had Marley with her the whole time.

Lemay's version of this story is that the nervous breakdown was written as "muted catatonic grief". He complained to Paul Rauch about Courtney's "histrionic display"; Rauch claimed that Courtney avoided being directed properly by waiting until taping to reveal her performance, and anyway refused to change her interpretation. So Lemay then wrote her as cured because he wasn't getting what he wanted. Courtney's alleged unwillingness to change is the complete opposite of the story where she immediately shifted from bubbly Alice to please Irna Phillips, so it makes me wonder whether Rauch was lying to Lemay or whether a more secure and mature Courtney was simply emboldened to insist on her own interpretation. It's certainly possible (in either case) that Courtney's abilities were limited and she needed to play within her range. If Lemay had been able to figure out how to play to her strengths instead of expecting her to be something she wasn't it would have been better for the show.

I was going through some old AW stuff and found that I had this old sticker of David Oliver. I was always somewhat perplexed by it because although he was very cute as far as I could tell he was not insanely popular or a household name. I did some searching today using the phrase "LOOKING GOOD" and discovered that Ted McGinley and a lot of other men whose names I do not recognize were part of the same series of photos and you could get a jigsaw puzzle or a calendar. And the origin appears to be a 1983 book called Looking Good: Men of USC. I am not surprised that there was a book of photos of models who may or may not have graduated from USC, really only that they made stickers and puzzles where they were credited with their names.

I thought I remembered this incident in the book but when I hunted for it all I found was an incident where a "Napoleonic" producer was bullying Alice Hirson, Coster stood up to him, and that led to Coster's being fired from Somerset and hired at AW. Apparently for habitually not bothering to learn his lines. I would very much like to know the name of the "little twerp of a kiss-ass actor" who remonstrated with Coster for accusing Beverlee McKinsey of being more concerned about the script than the emotions in their performance on the day of the Mac-bust-smashing.

Oh, that's a pity. I was hoping it was another legit variant. Speaking of variants, I have been sucked a bit too far into the Tanquir rabbithole to see how it varies from soap to soap. Someone has listed it as a "Mediterranean kingdom" on the Wikipedia entry for fictional countries. It's definitely Arab/Muslim for the debut of Texas, but what I have seen on GL so far is much vaguer and chiefly focused on archaeology.

Interesting. The AWHP says it was originally James Gerald after the two grandfathers and then James Steven in the early 80s. Is James Gerald an error or yet another variation? I do find it as Gerald in the Soaps & Serials novelization "Affairs of the Moment" but I can't lay my hands on the Kate Lowe Kerrigan one to check it. (Not that I expect the novelizations to be completely accurate in any case, but it's interesting to see what they used.) I am always fascinated to see the little pieces that the writers considered ephemeral and unimportant so they either weren't documented or future writers didn't bother to look them up and changed them.

The point of the kidnapping was that she needed to get pregnant to provide her husband with an heir. I think both the king and his people were supposed to believe the baby was the king's so she couldn't very well flaunt Cass all over Tanquir. It probably also saved money on sets and cast not having to have the royal palace. She managed on a shoestring with Ving Rhames and Walt Willey.

The very rich are different from you and me. They have jets and yachts and things and can meet their future spouses anywhere in the world (and now, probably, in space). Geography and nationality did not keep Onassis from marrying Jackie.

When was Tanquir first described as a tropical island nation? I don't remember any particulars of its geography or economy. I wonder if they confused the island on which Cecile held Cass captive with the nation. What was the GL Quint/Nola version of Tanquir like? Do we know whether it was the same HW constantly peddling Tanquir from soap to soap, or various writers pulling it out of the P&G grab bag?

I don't think amnesiac Mickey Horton dissociated exactly when he called himself Marty Hansen on Days. Similarly amnesia also caused Jake McKinnon on AW to think he was Bunny Eberhart.

Thanks for the clarification, @Efulton. I was thinking of Cecile's involvement with Tanquir and that she was definitely comic before she ran off and married the King. I was dimly aware that Tanquir had existed in the P&G soap universe -- wasn't it also a feature of some storyline on GL as well? -- but I didn't think that Cecile had had anything to do with it prior to Majorca.

Tanquir first came up when Cecile abandoned Cass in Majorca, and of course during the time she subsequently kidnapped him and prevented him from marrying Kathleen. But Cecile indulged in a lot of high comedy before she disappeared from Bay City in 1984 when she was investigating Royal Dunning's murder. I particularly remember the time she and Felicia dressed up as nuns and then told the police it was for a production of The Sound of Music. Oh, and when she went to talk to some witness with Wallingford and hilariously kept overlooking the fact that the witness' corpse was stuffed into his refrigerator. I think there might have been some comedy when she was conspiring with Alma Rudder to drive Blaine crazy in 1983 as well.

My friend and I used to laugh about this exact misuse in some romance novel, where the plot was that some man was allegedly unaware that he was impotent and therefore unable to father a child. I agree but Donna was supposed to be trapped in an archaic attitude where the family had to behave with (or at least outwardly present) strict propriety. In that context talking as if illegitimacy mattered would be on point. Shana was played by Susan Keith, wasn't she? Was the character similar to Cecile?

It's hard to say, of course. I think the synopsis said "loved" which seemed to imply an actual romance. And Nicole wasn't around yet, so my mentioning her was more about really not wanting it to be Donna! Mac and Mrs Love could have met jet-setting anywhere in the world. I doubt she went to Europe only to pretend to be pregnant. Regarding the word illegitimate, it does feel strange to me to use that term for a baby whose mother is married but to someone other than the baby's father. Babies born in wedlock are treated as "legitimate" regardless of who their father really is. It made me think it should be applied only to Donna if the affair was before the Love parents marriage, or to Marley as Donna's child. But they probably weren't being strictly accurate and felt they could make Peter or Nicole part of a scandal. I feel extremely resistant to the idea that Donna could have been Mac's daughter and Iris's sister.

I ran across a synopsis of the week of February 28th 1983 that mentions Donna taking an interest in Mac's past admiration of her mother. Obviously it never came to anything (and I am glad it didn't) but I am slightly curious about what they might have been planning. If they were thinking he could have been the father of one of the Love children I think I would have preferred it to be Nicole.

About 9 minutes in Donna has a flashback to her youth and the unnamed boy who would eventually turn out to have been Michael. I know later closer to Michael’s introduction they used younger actors to portray young Michael and Donna but here Anna Stuart plays young Donna and Michael is just the back of some guy's head. I really adore Anna Stuart in the later scene with Marley (about 13 minutes in) where she is so uncharacteristically soft and happy. Normally we see the snobbish Donna whose life was blighted and who was terrorized into thinking she needed to make sure Marley didn't fall into the same trap. It would have been better if Reginald had never returned from the dead. He was more frightening as a spectre from the past.