Xanthe

Thank you. Is there an efficient way to find specific actors/characters though, or is it just hunt and peck trial and error?

That isn't really much help unless you know which episodes she was on. I find searching for Rhonda Lewin pretty challenging because unfortunately the Google algorithm seems to have linked her to Victoria in general so I get a lot of results with Ellen or Anne Heche. And Rhonda's Vicky didn't have much of a storyline, so it's hit or miss whether she is actually in any given episode between September 23 and December 29 1986. Most of the time I rely on the Another World Home Page Character Guide to find the date range for a character/actor and then search for episodes in that date range, and then scroll through the episode looking for likely scenes. Finding Rhonda was a bit challenging because that era was full of blondes (Nancy, Cheryl, MJ).

Searching for 1986 episodes I found the one where Reginald shows her Tops for the first time. No piano, but he sings a bit of You're The Top and she ... doesn't quite. If I recall correctly there was another time when Reginald terrorized the family by playing the piano in the Love Mansion in the middle of the night.

For some reason I have two very vivid memories of Rhonda as Victoria. One is her naming Tops and exultantly not-quite-singing-not-quite-shouting "we're the tops!", possibly while Reginald played the piano. The other is of the lead up to her entrance at Jake and Marley's wedding. They didn't show her face (because Ellen Wheeler was still playing Marley), just her legs, as she rode in Reginald's car. Marley threw her bouquet at the end of the episode, and then she and Jake left as faceless Victoria caught it -- and the next day they showed Rhonda's face as Vicky with no Ellen around. Rhonda's Victoria was very close with Reginald as I recall.

Victoria named Tops in the brief period when she was played by Rhonda Lewin. And don't forget the Northwoods Inn, which Felicia bought after Tallboys was destroyed and then it too was destroyed in a fire around the same time as Reginald was opening Tops.

Are the titles of the books on the shelf meaningful? I couldn't make them out but their presentation looked like some kind of dramatic irony. Why would Louise be sneaking around like that? Is she a spy for Iris? The contrast of Steve's calm demeanor with Alice's trembling emotion along with a lot of the dialogue gave me the unpleasant feeling that if only silly girlish Alice hadn't made so many foolish mistakes everything would have been fine. Steve appears to admit to no errors. Forgot to mention how nice it was to see Ada talking to Alice. The only drawback was that because I didn't know the context when I started watching I couldn't be sure why Alice was upset and what Ada knew.

They had plenty of options to accommodate Sharon Gabet without soliciting and then ignoring audience input. If they didn't want Brittany to go to prison, they could have just written her acquittal. Letting the audience find her guilty and then hand-waving the verdict away as irrelevant because it was being appealed (plus layering on top of it a happily-ever-after where she and Catlin and their baby moved to Montana) felt like one of those Choose Your Own Adventure books where option 1 takes you to a dead end where the only option is to go back to the previous choice and choose option 2 anyway. Who knows what they would have done if Thomas Ian Griffith had not been ready to leave anyway. But Brittany was handled terribly and ruined Catlin -- if I recall correctly he didn't keep Kevin, just handed him off to Aunt Liz.

I would love to know what they thought they were doing when they decided to let the audience vote on the verdict in Brittany's trial, and then essentially ignored it to have Brittany and Catlin leave the state (!) together while Zach appealed it. Regarding whether Britt was conning Peter, there was no doubt that she deceived him into thinking he was the father of her baby. I wonder if Nancy would have lasted longer if any of her boyfriends had been tied to other core families. Perry was Donna's stepson and Carl's son but Chris and Greg and Tony were all outsiders. It wasn't long after Nancy left town that they SORASed Amanda to fill that slot.

I loved Ed Fry so much in the role that I find it hard to agree that he was unnecessary. At the time there was a void in the place where Jamie had been. Both he and Sandy had been gone for a year or so. I don't think they could have rebooted MJ and Jamie's relationship with the prostitution storyline. The new MJ paired with a new Cory with no baggage made sense.

This whole discussion makes me wish for a graph showing the number of family members in the cast for arguably core families and how it changed over time. My sense is that the Frames gradually swamped the Matthews, and maybe also families with more women were at a disadvantage -- Alice and Sally used Frame; Julia was Shearer; Rachel and Ada and Nancy get lumped in as if they were Cory. One thing I thought was shabby about DePriest's conception of the core was that she essentially obliterated black characters from the scene. In the early 1980s we had Henrietta and Roy, Leo Mars/Abel Marsh, Quinn, Lily, Grant, Carter, and Thomasina.

It was Wayne Addison, not Dwayne. This reminded me of the Soaps & Serials novelizations. Another World volume 2, "Love's Destiny", included the murder of Wayne Addison. He dated Aunt Liz! I also see among his credits Horatio in Richard Burton's Hamlet. I have been failing to watch that DVD for too long now -- I should get it out.

Zane was much more appealing than Mitch. (Or perhaps I should say that Patrick Tovatt was a more charismatic performer than William Grey Espy.) Zane was also a much better friend than Brittany deserved. Zane was killed off almost immediately after Mitch came back to Bay City. It seems likely that they thought that, as Matthew's father, Mitch had ties to the Cory family that would serve their priority of focusing on their idea of the core families. I had forgotten this but according to the Another World Home Page synopses, Mitch was also secretly working for Reginald Love at the time. It's really weird reading about all of Mitch's villainy when my memory of the character at this point is just as an emotionless blank consort for Felicia.

Carl's plan was to kill only Mac. He was very particular that he didn't want any harm to come to Rachel. But the plan didn't really have any safeguards to protect Rachel or anyone else, and it dragged out over weeks. Nancy bought the jar in Egypt as a present for Mac. Carl filled it with toxic "tomb dust". One of the maids at the Cory mansion opened it and died. No one suspected the jar had anything to do with it so the jar floated around to different people and places for a few weeks before Grant breathed the dust in. And no one suspected the jar in Grant's illness either, so Nancy just incidentally recognized it and took it back to give to Mac again. By the time Mac got the jar, since it had already been opened twice, its poison had been diluted, so he wasn't as badly affected. Also I believe Dr Chris Chapin was able to use what he had learned from Grant's illness to cure Mac.

I thought that MJ and Jamie were much better suited than MJ and Larry. There wasn't much soap-level drama in their relationship and that was probably what I found refreshing in it. Larry spent a lot of time supporting Catlin's murder trial and I think there must have been a about a year between the time MJ moved on to Jamie and when Larry's Plains Motel story started. Larry was sort of undercover and I remember he was in a position where Clarice thought he was having an affair because the wife (girlfriend?) of the head criminal thought he was available.

I think from a story point of view, when MJ was introduced she was dealing with not being perceived as sufficiently feminine because police detective was "traditionally male". So the little detail that she had been saddled with a masculine name was to flavour that. In the May 4 1984 episode which is on YouTube, when MJ arrives at Larry's dressed for the party, he makes a comment about how much of a sensation she would create if she dressed like that at work.

Cass was always a lawyer from day 1. He arrived in July 1982. According to the synopses on the Another World Home Page, he came to town to work for Cory Publishing and within a few weeks he had agreed to represent Cecile in her divorce. He didn't think of poaching Felicia until January 1983.

I have no idea who it is, but if it helps the scene where Mikey's parents meet Michael and Donna is in an ep online here (at about 21:45):

The Loves and McKinnons existed and thrived before Margaret DePriest started in 1986. What she did was create characters for Donna, Peter, and Nicole's dead father and MJ and Kathleen's dead mother and bring them back from the dead to create a vast historical family entanglement. And she completely rewrote MJ's backstory with the recast. I guess she also made the decision to create the character of Cheryl. In theory she could have recast Ben and made Mary and Reginald's adopted child a female love interest for Ben. It was certainly odd that Ben never came to see his mother.

The scene with Scott physically restraining Cheryl comes across as creepy to me even though we're clearly supposed to be thinking about how erotic Cheryl finds it. Scott was not written as a creep but he does seem too old for Cheryl. Not as much too old and as creepy as Chad Rollo, Cheryl's sister's former pimp, though.

Based on what I see in the synopses and character guide on the Another World Home Page, Donna saw the photo and went mad in November 1986. She came home from the hospital in February 1987. Donna couldn't remember what had been in the photo but for some reason she and Michael and Nicole knew that a photo had triggered her illness and spent a lot of time trying to find it or help Donna remember what had been in it. (That's why she started seeing Dr Glaser.) In March 1987 we found out that John Michael had had a younger brother, John, who was missing and presumed dead in Vietnam. Someone had sent a photograph to Michael's mother that appeared to be John alive in the present day, so Michael (followed by Donna) and Mitch (who invited Felicia to meet up with them) went looking for John. They found him in April 1987 and around the same time Dr Glaser helped Donna remember that John had raped her and that the mystery photo had been of John and the infants Marley and Victoria. Rhonda Lewin played Victoria from Jake and Marley's wedding until the end of 1986. There was no Victoria in Bay City when John was brought in in April 1987. Vicky was brought home, played by Anne Heche, in July 1987, and introduced to John in the Love Mansion, so there wasn't really any opportunity for her to flirt with him unknowingly. Peter stoked her suspicion of John and Donna for months and she disliked John for Michael's sake. The triplets were never canon. The photo was "mysterious" because the audience hadn't seen it and Donna couldn't remember it. I seem to recall reading that they were planning on doing the triplet story until they cast Philece Sampler and decided that she seemed too young to be Scott's mother (or indeed Marley and Victoria's mother, which perhaps should have influenced them to cast an actress with a more appropriate age?) and changed it to the John story. Of course Clara and John didn't quite fit with the info Marley found when she had first gone looking for the Garrison family and found out that Michael had changed his name to Hudson. I have no memory of Nicole wanting to go to medical school. I remember Anne Howard's Nicole being a fashion designer. I don't remember if Lauri Landry's version was supposed to be doing any type of work (either modeling or design) but I have a dim recollection that she sang. Based on the synopses she didn't seem to have any type of storyline of her own -- just support for things either Jamie or Michael were doing. I wonder if she talked about med school with the Doctor version of Jamie Frame (Laurence Lau). I also don't remember any details of Reginald not being Donna and Nicole's father. There wasn't any follow up to find out who their father really was (unless it was supposed to be Jason?), so it might just have been a mind game (he loved psychologically abusing all of his children) or a way to excuse his infidelity and treatment of their mother. IIRC they showed photos of Elizabeth Love using Anne Howard as a model, but I remember very little of Nicole's relationship with Reginald.

Donna's mother was supposedly in Europe during her pregnancy with Marley, I believe. I think people in Bay City were supposed to believe that Donna was with her. When they layered on the story of Reginald and Mary/Marissa that really did limit the window in which Reginald could maintain control of Donna in Marley's early years, but even before that I think they wrote it that Donna's father had died when Marley was still very young. Bridget was calculating only in the sense that her allegiance was to Victoria. Once Victoria was accepted as a member of the Love household she was loyal to the Love family. The Carsons (Victoria's adoptive parents) had supposedly been rich long enough to employ Bridget. By the time they died Bridget was emotionally invested in Victoria and therefore stayed with her even though the money was gone. I don't think Bridget was (at least originally, before Reginald) supposed to have known that Reginald was separating twins without Donna's knowledge or consent. If the family didn't want the baby and Bridget was making sure that the baby was well cared-for then she wasn't to blame for taking her away. And when Victoria revealed herself in time for the bone marrow donation she had a fake story about where she had been raised that didn't include Bridget. I'm not sure what you mean about Perry's death being out of the blue. It was a sudden tragic accident, but the setup was there in that Perry had been suspicious of Jake and Bridget and was trying to find out what they were up to. Victoria arranged to meet him in the stables as Marley but when he wasn't taken in by her impersonation she told him that she was Marley's twin and just wanted her fair share. He refused to believe that she was a legit twin and insisted that she must be a scam artist who had had plastic surgery, and accidentally fell. Victoria spent quite a while worried that someone would find out that she had been there, and Nancy in particular was suspicious -- but when the Loves were so kind and generous to her (Marley voluntarily splitting her trust fund), Vicky eventually admitted to them that she had been in the hayloft when Perry died. (However she did lie and tell them a version in which Perry had been totally fine with her as Marley's twin, not that he had been threatening to expose her as an imposter.) Since Victoria hadn't killed Perry, just been present when he fell, there wasn't really anything more to it. I don't remember whether Carl ever found out -- he was into all the Egypt/Arizona/Chapin stuff at the time, and Nancy was dependent on Ecstasy and falling in love with Chris Chapin.

Donna went along with Marley being raised as her sister (because the Love family's reputation could not support publicly acknowledging a baby born out of wedlock to a teenager, and the alternative would have been not getting to keep her baby at all). She didn't know/remember that there was a second baby. The scene with the three pillows where she repeated "my baby" was one where she was having a mental breakdown before being carted off to some kind of institution. (It was Anna Stuart's last scene and then she came out of the hospital after a little while as Philece Sampler.) Reginald had shown her a photograph of her and her newborn babies (after his henchwoman had been suspiciously serving her presumably drugged tea) and she went into a tailspin. We didn't see the photograph and there was a lot of speculation at the time that the photo had revealed that there were triplets, but when the alleged photograph was eventually revealed it was of John Hudson holding two babies. There was no explanation for how (even assuming that Reginald had made arrangements for John to pose for a photograph with Donna's newborns without revealing his entire evil plan to give away one and raise the other as Donna's sister) such a photograph could even remotely be considered evidence that John might be the father of Donna's children which was part of Philece Sampler's Donna's anxiety when they retroactively introduced the idea that John had raped (well not *really* raped because how do you build a love triangle on that, I mean how could Donna possibly have known whether she was raped, it's not up to her to decide this when we're trying to present John as a character with redeeming features, Donna probably really wanted it but she knew it was bad because Michael was her boyfriend) Donna before she slept with Michael. I guess the most charitable interpretation is that Reginald intentionally sent her mad by letting her know that he knew that John could have been the father of Marley and Victoria, and that the photograph itself was a fake. But before they turned it into the John Hudson story it seemed very likely that there would be a triplet and that triplet would turn out to be Scott Lasalle who had been raised in South America as Marissa/Mary's adopted son.

Vicky knew that she was Marley's twin but Marley didn't know Vic existed. Vicky's plan was IIRC that she would impersonate Marley long enough to get access to Marley's inheritance when she turned 18. Jake was supposed to keep Marley away from home while Vicky accomplished her plan but then Marley got sick so she had to be admitted to the hospital for treatment. And the donation was bone marrow, not kidney. She didn't really want Jake to seduce Marley -- she wanted him to make up to her so that Marley would trust him. Jake was Vicky's lover. She was bitterly jealous when he actually liked Marley.

Carl and Donna never seemed to have been a love match. Her being kind to Perry had nothing to do with her feelings for Carl. My impression was that Donna had been coerced by her father into marrying Carl, but the story may have changed over the years depending on when Reginald was supposed to have died. Did Donna live with Carl in Europe? I know that's where Felicia found him, but by then he and Donna had been divorced for some length of time.

I don't believe Eugene was ever seen onscreen. When Marley was searching for Michael, she got the name Michael Garrison from Donna's diary and hired Catlin/Larry to search for him. Catlin traced the Garrisons to Barnesville, Massachusetts, which is where Marley met Ellie and Great-aunt Bertha who had no idea where Michael was -- but it turned out that his company New Resources was somehow ruining the town. Marley wrote a letter of complaint to New Resources and when he saw the name Love and location Bay City he decided to come to Bay City in person. Interestingly, Marley's street address on the letter was 986 Edna Dr, which I guess was the place she was living with Dee at the time and not the Love Mansion. I don't recognize the names Joe or Margaret, but depending on when they were mentioned they might have been ignored by other writers. By the time the storyline of John-lost-in-Vietnam was created, for example, John and Michael's mother was Clara. The brother Eugene was never mentioned again. And in early 1985, Donna's father's name was given as Brandon instead of Reginald.