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I forget what precisely became of Smiley's but it was essentially replaced by Mary's Place and Maisie went into partnership with Ada and Vince.

I had that exact thought but I couldn't find any credit for her on AW on IMDB or on the AWHP so I was doubtful. The resemblance is there in face and I think voice though.

Perry's grand reopening of Smiley's was in July 1984. I found this -- it's Maisie's first day (as well as Peter's!) and there is some kind of criminal intrigue involving a man who apparently frequents Smiley's. Around 15 minutes in a woman who works at the museum (I guess she must be "Mary Lou" -- not sure who plays her) gives a vivid description of the greasy spoon Smiley's. And about 24 minutes in we meet Smiley's and Maisie. And then in 1983 Alma worked there as "Nell" and lived in Happy's Motel before her murder.

Lily had been a prostitute and when she told Grant about her past he decided he couldn't date her. Even that sounds more dramatic than it played out. Lily worked for Felicia at Tallboys and/or the Northwoods Inn as a hostess, and I believe she co-hosted Felicia's TV show with her as well. Lily got Grant a job at Tallboys, a step up from Smiley's, and he was working at the Northwoods Inn when he inhaled the tomb dust that killed him. Smiley's was originally pretty seedy. It featured heavily in the Alma Rudder murder mystery. Then Perry took it over and fixed it up and made it popular with the teen set. Maisie rented out a room at Smiley's and first Catlin and later Jake lived there.

Jamie talking about his "male ego" makes my heart go pitter-pat. John Hutton's Peter Love was I think too alpha to even consider that type of chatter. One of the things I loved about AW of this era was that scenes could have idle chitchat that made the characters seem real -- not everything was important to plot mechanics. You need both and I thought AW handled the balance very well.

Richard Bekins was Jamie until early 1983 so only he could have dated Julie Phillips, Jennifer Runyon, or Dawn Benz's Sally. Only Stephen Yates overlapped with Mary Page Keller. I'm really all about Stephen Yates and Kathleen Layman. I love him here about 20 minutes in.

I absolutely cannot condone murdering Joey Perrini. Not that it makes a difference in the way retcons work, but did Sally at the time succeed in seducing Joey onscreen? I have a vivid recollection of her drugging him and staging a scenario where Eileen caught them apparently in flagrante in the back of a van, but I have been scanning the AWHP synopses for 1979 and 1980 and I don't find any description of Joey and Sally actually having sex even though the character guide does list them as lovers. David Thatcher made a good murder victim as a villainous outsider nobody cared about who had already murdered Uncle Kevin. My enjoyment of Kevin boiled down to Sally's clear love for him and a comment that Mary Page Keller made about how much the child actor looked like her as a child. And if he had remained on the canvas he could have been SORASed and interacted with Maggie (and Cory and Jeanne and whoever else) and been integrated with the Matthewses, come to terms with his parentage, and so on. (But I would also have moved Brittany out of Catlin's orbit sooner so that her baby was Zane's or Peter's or Mitch's or Michaud's or whoever's.)

Mary Page Keller's Sally was definitely portrayed as having put her wayward past behind her. If she had been the version that Julie Philips or Jennifer Runyon portrayed Donna's resistance to her might have been more than snobbery. However I remember there was at least one little nod to Sally's past during Majorca when Sally had to hotwire a car or something and when Catlin commented on it she said that Phil had taught her how to do it. When I found out that Gary Tomlin who was headwriter in 1984 had been playing Morgan Simpson around the same time that Sally was mixed up with Phil Higley that cast that reference in a bit of a new light for me. I don't think Taylor Miller's Sally behaved as though she had any past whatsoever. She became a pristine princess whom all the Lesoleil boys adored and whose middle class life was so far removed from Catlin's rodeo past that they started to seem fundamentally incompatible. Of course even Catlin's past had been sort of sanitized in 1985 by turning his sort of shady drifter past into a little true love marriage and tragic [presumed] death of his young wife and child.

Just double-checked the AWHP. Steve was last onscreen in March 1975 and Sally first appeared in April. Alice got Steve's long-distance approval to adopt orphaned Sally before he died but he was dead by May. So Sally never met Steve really [before he returned from beyond the grave when she was an adult and she sulked that he was all about protecting Diana's virginity and didn't care what sin Sally was living in] and was not raised with Jamie as her brother. That part doesn't bother me. But I did like their quasi-sibling relationship in 1983/1984 and it does seem a pity to blow that up to replace it with a romance, especially given that Catlin and Sally were so successful pre-Brittany. It's only my hatred of Brittany and Lesoleil that made me entertain the hypothesis.

Whose baby is Aunt Liz holding in the September 6 1984 episode? Is it Stacey Winthrop and Mark Singleton's daughter?

Didn't Alice adopt Sally after Steve's death?

I'm reeling a bit at the thought of Sally and Jamie but I am not sure whether I like the idea. I loved both characters but putting them together would deprive both Catlin and MJ. Maybe, possibly, if there had to be Brittany and Catlin had to stray, and Peter was being an [expletive deleted], and Stephen Yates stayed, and there was never any Lesoleil, I could have enjoyed a scenario where Catlin's infidelity drove Sally into Jamie's arms. Thinking about how vivid and interesting the 1984 wedding costumes were (not only Henrietta/Roy and Sally/David but also Cecile/Peter), and comparing them to how blah I thought Catlin and Sally's 1985 wedding was, I am wondering what changed. Did the wardrobe department get replaced? Were they creating pizzazz for 2 weddings because they were meant to be disasters rather than romantic? Were they dressing Sally down because Catlin was not wealthy? Or did the budget get slashed in 1985 and they were pinching pennies? There was a lot of activity in the stables in 1984 -- not only did Catlin give riding lessons to Kevin at the Corys and work for Donna, but there was also some scheme Carl had where he disguised a racehorse or something. They might not have had a horse every day but they definitely had them regularly. (Didn't Steve's Australian daughter also do a lot of riding in her day?)

Isn't that Henrietta with the bridal snood and Quinn in snoodless pink?

I thought Sally's outfit for her aborted wedding to David Thatcher was very cute, much nicer than what she wore to marry Catlin which seemed rather generic.

FWIW apparently Blaine was mentioned in 1996 when Maggie was briefly presumed dead.

Was Cecile only a fantasy or was there some reality? The AWHP gives her dates as May 19, 20, and 25. Murder on the Honeymoon Express was May 20. The synopsis for the week of May 24 sounds like Cass might have run into Real Cecile as well. It's interesting that they had Cecile onscreen at the time since Maggie had just showed up as "Joy" right before this. I wonder if they had hoped to keep Nancy around for longer. I think it could definitely have been interesting to see Sandy interacting with Iris and Amanda and Matthew. With Jamie and Larry and Catlin gone it is harder to imagine what they would have done with Blaine to keep her interesting. My mind is so cluttered up with Jamie and Dennis dating the younger generation of Lisa/Vicky/Marley/Olivia that it seems to make Blaine's presence awkward.

According to the AWHP, Cecile was there in May 1993 and Sandy in June & July, so there was no overlap. According to Wikipedia Nancy Frangione and Chris Rich divorced in 1996. Hard to say when they might have separated. Cecile was also onscreen between October 1995 and June 1996.

It's not that David Bailey should be considered irreplaceable, I was just thinking about where Sam Groom would have the most resonance taking into consideration his past with both the audience and the cast. If Sam Groom had previously worked with Victoria Wyndham or any other actor still in the cast I think it would have been easier to have him cameo as Russ in the finale. Or if they had had him for more time and it had been a meaningful storyline for Josie that could also have worked. Of course if it had been a real storyline they could have recast Russ altogether. Thinking about very brief replacements, I have to admit that I found the brief run of Stephen Bogardus as Sandy Cory a bit jarring. I know he was there because it seemed important for Maggie's father to be present, but as I recall he was just a conventional corporate and stern father without any hint of the louche Sandy.

David Bailey had been the only Russ Matthews since 1973. it was his Russ that married Sharlene and many years later learned he was Josie's father. Sam Groom's Russ was married to Rachel but he left in 1971 and never worked with Victoria Wyndham or Irene Dailey. Under the circumstances I think giving him a different minor role that was nostalgic only from a meta-perspective was a reasonable choice.

Was there a hospital room for Elizabeth? I know for the Mary reveal Cass and Adam found evidence that Mary McKinnon had been in a secret hospital room that Reginald had bizarrely kept untouched since Mary's accident. I don't remember the Elizabeth murder. The cellar room was a bedroom where Donna had to hide for months to conceal her pregnancy. She did give birth there but it wasn't a hospital room (at least not in 1984 when she hid Catlin in it). I'm not sure that I would rely on a black market baby doctor to commit a murder for me. They seem like different specialties.

Did Mary ever recover her memory? I thought they avoided dealing with any of that by keeping her in a state of amnesia.

Christine Tucci was a much better actor than Sandra Ferguson and much more convincing as an intelligent professional woman. I never thought of Vicky/Grant/Amanda as a love triangle because it was so much about Grant's need for power and control. And as such Amanda wasn't losing to Vicky (or later, Lorna), she was another woman Grant was abusing. I didn't need Amanda to be a romantic heroine.

Was making him Shane the mechanism to introduce Lila?

I don't mind a return from the dead if they can make the case for how it was faked and why. But in the case of a violent onscreen death it's hard to swallow. I was recently watching the scenes where Cass meets Kathleen in New Orleans after realizing she was alive. Kathleen blamed him for not having tracked her down after the accident and he never pointed out that he had been a prisoner of his evil double Rex for months. On the whole though Kathleen's return from the dead was pretty successful. Was Mitch the earliest back from the dead character on AW? Was his resurrection planned all along? Some characters are introduced as dead with the intention of revealing them as alive as part of that storyline. For example, Brittany, or John Hudson. In other cases the character was introduced as dead but the idea that they could be alive seems to be retconned in for a new storyline, e.g. Mary and Reginald. The classic back from the dead storyline is more like Kathleen or Sharlene where a living character was killed off and when the same actor is willing to come back they go for it. I feel like those are more likely to be successful than the ones like Steve Frame when they also recast, but maybe I don't have a statistically significant sample on which to judge.

Hear, hear! He has been curating the Another World Video Library since before YouTube existed, as well as documenting all kinds of show history. Julie Poll mentions him in the acknowledgements of her 35th anniversary book.