Kane

I've been crossing my fingers that the musical episode will turn up on that channel eventually. In late 1993, when the show is toying with a Clay/Gwyneth/Buck/Stacey quad, there's an episode where Stacey hosts a birthday party for Heather that Clay and Gwyneth both attend - and Clay spends most of it openly wondering to Gwyn why they even have to be there. In general Gwyn and Clay are pretty hands off grandparents, even with Christopher, who you'd think they'd be obsessed with given how obsessed they were with Trisha. They sort of did do a Stacey/Trucker/Trisha triangle in 1992, with Stacey confessing to Trisha that she had fallen in love with Trucker and Trucker briefly having amnesia and thinking that he and Stacey were together.

Victoria now. That is very sad. She was such a lively presence onscreen and her enthusiasm for soaps was so great.

No, that must be someone else. The details are a little fuzzy without looking it up, but if I'm remembering correctly Leo gave Kate and Louie a stock tip that didn't pan out and they lost their nest egg (which was the lottery winnings that Kate inherited from Harry). Leo felt bad so he rigged a contest at Burnell's in Kate's favor and part of the prize was being interviewed on TV. Cindi played the reporter doing the interview.

Killing off Janie was such a shame because there were so many possible avenues to take her as a character. If they had to kill someone off (which I guess they did in order to fulfill the three "predictions" that Ava was given during her trip to heaven) and had to swerve away from it being Dinah Lee, I feel like the obvious character to sacrifice was Gilbert at the end of his storyline. When Ava was given her visions I believe it was said that she was seeing things that would happen over the next year, so there was no urgency to killing someone off, plus it being Gilbert would fit with her briefly being convinced that it was Jeremy who was going to die. The answers to her three predictions were revealed while she was being held captive by Gilbert (and her response to finding out that the person who died was Janie was basically ".... Who?"), which I think also makes Gilbert the more natural character to fulfill that prophesy. That's funny, I grew up in Duncan! Were you also a dedicated watcher of Cindi Reinhart on Northwest Afternoon? She appeared on an episode of Loving in 1992, which is ironic since I don't think she ever talked about Loving on her own show (although she probably did that day).

My theory is that the Phantom Trisha story was originally conceived as Robert Tyler's exit story. His contract expired in the summer of '94 but he ended up extending it for six months, ostensibly to "wrap up" Trucker's story, which I've always found somewhat odd since Trucker's actual exit just ends up being a variation on this story anyway and the show didn't really do anything interesting with Trucker once Dinah Lee was recast. There's literally an episode during the Gilbert saga where Trucker is tagging along with Alex and Charles and he's just... there, doing nothing. I think the plan was going to be that Trucker would go off to Italy to chase after Trisha and Jeff, and Dinah Lee would get involved with Buck and there would be a brief Curtis/Dinah Lee/Buck/Stacey quad, then Dinah Lee would die in the plane crash. Part of the reason why I think so is that what plays out on screen is Trucker and Dinah Lee return from Italy, they immediately break up, Dinah Lee starts hanging out with Buck (and Philip Brown plays it like Buck is falling for Dinah Lee, and there's plenty of lingering looks between them), and then the crash happens. I don't think Janie was originally supposed to die because the show was doing a great job integrating the character into the cast and having her mix it up with various characters, and Dinah Lee's death would have meant a lot more to Ava (who predicted that someone would die). I think Tyler extending threw a wrench into things because it would have been brutal to have him not find Trisha and then have him lose Dinah Lee in the plane crash, hence the change to Janie being the one to die.

@DRW50 I feel like Clay being an imposter was always the plan. Otherwise why send someone ahead to "warn" the family that Clay had to have extensive plastic surgery and they wouldn't recognize him? I also feel like Rick exists because of the imposter story, since he's the means by which Ava discovers the truth (and this is really the only function that Rick serves that Curtis couldn't have). Alex hating Gwyneth more than Clay ever did makes a bit of sense if you consider that he came to Corinth having only gotten Clay's version of their story, which doubtless sanitized Clay's own misdeeds (and, of course, Gwyneth didn't exactly cover herself in glory with all she'd been up to since leaving the real Clay in France) The show continued to get mileage out of the conflict between Clay and Alex practically until the end, but I've always found it a bit curious that they never seemed to revisit the tension between Alex and Gwyneth later on. When Gwyneth is working with the police in '95, you'd never know that Alex and Gwyn were ever anything other than cordial if you didn't know their history. But perhaps that speaks to the loss of continuity post-1992 that @dc11786 spoke of in an earlier post.

Her IMDB listed age is almost certainly incorrect, as it would mean that she was only 17 when she started on the show in 1984. That said, she was playing a character much older than herself, as Gwyneth would have been born in about 1944, given Rick's stated year of birth. I would guess that she was born sometime in the 1950s and is probably about the same age as Callan White (who was also playing a character about decade older than she was).

I think Brian Bodine on All My Children and AJ on General Hospital would line up? Phillips started on Guiding Light in 1991, Brian was recast with Matt Borlenghi in early 1991, and AJ was recast with Gerald Hoskins in summer 1991. Or maybe that Eckert cousin? I think he was on screen before Hoskins' AJ.

@slick jones Yes, I think you're right.

@slick jones The two uploads below have an actress temping as Trisha. Voice over (54:12 mark of video #71) announces her as Catherine Lisk (not sure about the spelling).

Anton wasn't in on it. Like @Jonathan I had a vague memory of this storyline and I found the episode below, where Erica and Corvina fight over the leopard and it breaks, revealing a written "confession" that the midwife who delivered both Dimitri and Corvina switched them at birth. The confession is written in Hungarian, so I assume that Corvina must have been the forger, but that the idea for the plot came from Kendall.

It's "Random episodes part 38" and he's in nothing but the shorts for a couple of scenes.

Those shorts were something else. These uploads have come in such a wide variety of eras, it's great!

It's strange because Isabelle doesn't really have any story from 1983-1989. Cabot is involved in plenty of stuff, but Isabelle seems to be used mostly as a talk to for various members of the Alden family and for about a year from mid-1987 to mid-1988 Dabney is taken off contract and I think only shows up for big events like weddings. Then comes 1990 and she gets a bunch of story (in addition to the face cream plot, there's also a plot where she thinks Cabot is having an affair with Ava), and then she's part of the exodus of characters written out in 1991, only to be brought back at the end of the year with a new actor in the role.

The story where Isabelle was burned with face cream was during Dabney's tenure, when Amourelle/Clay was battling Tempest/Jack & Alex. Clay stole the formula from Tempest, not realizing that it was an old rejected formula that Dane had planted for him to steal. He rushed the face cream into production and gave a jar to Isabelle, who got disfigured using it and then for some reason blamed Jack instead of Clay. This was then used to give Isabelle a motive so that she could be a red herring in the "who shot Jack?" story. Barry took over the role when Isabelle was in the hospital after having a heart attack. Holm played the initial part of that story and was in the role when Isabelle convinced Clay and Gwyneth to remarry as her "deathbed" wish, which in turn caused about five scenes worth of conflict between Clay and Dinah Lee before Clay and Gwyneth's hasty remarriage and hastily annulled. Dabney is the only Isabelle for me, too. If they wanted to bring on Holm, they should have brought her on as a new character, Isabelle's sister, maybe, or maybe Cabot's sister who, having lost all her money, invites herself to move back into the family home and starts driving Isabelle crazy by playing lady of the manor. A little easter egg: while watching All My Children on Pluto TV I caught a inter-episode snippet of an interview with Agnes Nixon where she tells a story about once seeing a psychic named Mrs. Quackenbush. During her 93/94 tenure writing Loving, Nixon has Ava see a psychic named Mrs. Quackenbush to try to help her sort out the visions from her trip to heaven, and to perform a seance to try to contact Trisha only to be told that Trisha isn't on the other side.

Thank you! Amazing!

Man, I remember watching these episodes when they originally aired when I was an impressionable pre-teen. It's wild watching that rough Alec/Arlene sex scene today, when shows have gotten so chaste. Loving the stuff they're showing in between episodes. They just showed part of an interview with Agnes where she talks about her time at Guiding Light and how she got pushback P&G over a black character going to a white character's front door and ringing the bell, and how that experience informed how she approached her deal with ABC when she was creating One Life to Live and the Carla storyline.

I think that was Wendy Moniz and Frank Grillo having sex in a dressing room. If I recall correctly, Hunt Block alluded to it in an interview when he was on GL.

Bo and Nora are my favorites. Viki, Dorian, Marty, and Jason are also high on my list and I enjoy Asa a lot, even though he can be jerk.

That would be absolute icon Elaine Stritch. Nice to see your recaps back. I've been digging into this era recently myself (I'm in October '93 right now) and I've really enjoyed your perspective and enthusiasm for the show.

Thanks for the tag!

Wasn't Rocky just a nickname? I think his legal name was Ian.

The only thing I remember about Juan Pablo is an outtake where Rebecca Budig cracked up because his accent made it sound like he was calling her "a work of fart."

Don't forget the other two members of the trio that was going to shake things up at AMC: Braden and Raquel. All three crashed and burned, but 30-some years later I can still remember that promo.

Yes, her husband was a war buddy of Buzz's and Buzz met her when he went to report to her about her husband's death. I might be confusing the details, but I think Buzz may have been accidentally responsible for his death and the army covered it up by giving him a medal. Lucy was born in 1973, as she has her 21st birthday onscreen in 1994.