Speed Racer

Happily, I disagree with you on that one, PJ. I can easily envision Van saying something like that to Reva, naturally with considerable tact. Which would make it even funnier. Better still would be if Kincaid could say something like that with a faint air of superiority. Maybe have HB Lewis overhear it and have him start silently laughing... Vanessa says outlandish things at times, like when she told Maureen that she thought it perfectly okay that an ex-wife acts upon the idea that her own ex is better off with her (Vanessa) than with his current spouse (in this case, Nadine). Maureen was a tad astonished by Vanessa's comment and told Vanessa that an ex doesn't get to do such things. To which Vanessa said, "Why not?" Incidentally, I could see the honey/whiskey-voiced Alexandra say the same thing to Reva. Maybe Alex and Billy should have had a fling. Why not? LOL

I haven't been around much lately, so maybe this has been discussed...but, it's a shame there weren't numerous scenes between Vanessa and Reva comparing notes on Billy. It would have been lots of fun to see the two women get into a fight, with Vanessa coyly telling Reva that Billy's repertoire was actually quite limited when Vanessa and Billy first got together, and that she taught him plenty of things that he was clueless about <grin>. Having Vanessa insult Reva in such a manner would have been fantastic.

PJ: "What drives me crazy about the Nadine/Billy/Van triangle is how Nadine makes a chump out of the both of them." I bet it did, noting your disgust with all things Nadine. LOL. Whomever here said maybe 1-2 months ago that Nadine should have been a real estate agent was right on the money! A truly excellent idea!! Nadine's personality and social dis-acumen (lol) would have been perfect. A lower-class broad, wheeling and dealing with the movers and shakers, and making boatloads of cash. Especially if she was both a residential and commercial licensee. The bs that could have come out of her mouth could have been at times hilarious and vomit inducing. Sleeping around to get a deal done, wearing garish clothes, sharing all of Springfield's gossip. Think about it PJ: Nadine. Springfield's Highly Apropos Real Estate Agent. Tacky billboards up on every arterial roadway in Springfield! TPTB could even display the billboards outside of car accident scenes. Or, maybe Bridget could have given birth to Peter in her car...with Nadine's billboard plastered in the background! Lovely thought! A highly desirable side benefit: No Buzz Cooper required.

Well, Soaplovers and PJ, I am going to disagree with you both to an extent regarding a perceived sterile and repressed take on early 1990s GL. Why? Note that during the early 1990s, a sizeable portion of the show's plot protagonists were shorter-term, intentionally disposable characters against whom the "contract" characters responded to. That laundry list included: Rae Rooney, Gary Swanson, Daniel St John, Jean Wetherill, the Vizinni mobster family, the guy who tried to rape Vanessa, Vinny Morrison. All of them moved plot. Some quite significantly. There are significant advantages in having bit players move plot. Smart scribes can better protect the integrity of long-term characters through the use of short-term movers and shakers. Additionally, short-term invaders of the landscape can impact any character significantly (even Roger or Alexandra, say) as the invaders might be total unknowns to all. And, even the bittiest of bit players can have significance. Think Elvis, Bridget's brief boyfriend. My take? I would agree that early 1990s GL may have been somewhat plot-sterile where "contract" characters are concerned. But the show overall being sterile? No way. Not even close. I was fascinated, easily four days a week.

Annette - I agree, and Vanessa/Holly could have found mutual respect/camaraderie in pursuit of practical advice/opinion in business matters especially. The two may also offer each other up as a useful, early detection system. Not sure if the two could eventually warm up to each other on a deeper emotional plane as Holly's highly neurotic/erratic nature would undoubtedly be anathema to Vanessa's earthy existence. (Although it would be awesome to have Vanessa learn from Holly directly that the latter's nuttiness has been largely a ruse. And for Holly to prove it. Now that is something Vanessa would understand and glom onto immediately. That, and catty conversations about all things Nadine.) kalbir - thanks for the article. I have not seen that. I like the last observation a great deal...about Holly's barbs and bemused detachment toward everything Roger. There was a lot of that portrayed on GL. However, I would think that would only increase Holly's sexual attractiveness to Roger, enticing him and egging him on. Certainly, it's a means of keeping your friends close, but your enemies closer, where you can keep your eyes on them. Holly sure loved to thread that needle! Always dancing on the edge of the cliff, wasn't she? PJ - That's a good response, too. Holly does offer the ultimate redemption to Roger (especially after Roger fails to obtain redemption from his father Adam). As a foundational source of his fascination with Holly, I could buy that. Especially since Holly's hell-bound to keep him at arm's length away as a means of self-protection. I think as important, Holly's really the only person that can grant Roger a modicum of self-respect. It's pretty wild that it is Holly who offers Roger the best shot at anything resembling stability. That's some crazy she-yit, isn't it? Gotta love it! Aside from that, PJ, it's a real shame that Vanessa and Holly didn't have a lengthy sit-down chat about Billy. With Holly's experience with pins and cliffs (no wonder she had so many migraines!), she would have been a great ear and perhaps an excellent source of advice to Vanessa as she dealt with Billy. There should have been a very strong heart-to-heart between Van and Holly in late 1993 right as Billy was going off the rails and the Peter custody battle was heating up. An opportunity blown by TPTB. The two could have had a helluva tete-a-tete regarding Ed, Bridget and Ross at the time, too. (It's interesting that later, in 1995, both Vanessa and Ross push Holly to have a conversation with Dinah in an attempt to deter Dinah from marrying Roger. It's the first time I remember Vanessa summoning Holly's street smarts. Holly does have that talk with Dinah - a fantastic and well written scene where Holly warns Dinah about her future with Roger. Watch it sometime.) AlwaysAMC probably ran across that scene a few months back. Any idea when that took place? Maybe Summer 1995?

And another question to address "Holly": Why was Roger fascinated by Holly? Roger's sexual attraction to Holly was both obvious and understandable...was that the sole source of his fascination, or was it some other tangible or intangible? After all, Holly was hardly the only enticing seductress in town.

I'm liking the recent discussion about Holly, but I am not yet satisfied. It appears that Holly throws a lot of us for a loop. Me included. (Which means that "Holly" was actually very well written in general, given that she was always intended to be a neurotic. A very unusual character in soap-land). Here's a question that I don't know how to answer myself. Had she had a real opportunity, would Vanessa ever purposely befriend Holly? Why or why not? What qualities does Holly possess that would appeal to someone like Vanessa?

Oh - and one other thing while I'm thinking about it: With HIS family history, it'd be tempting to turn Phillip into a raging alcoholic. Grant Alecsander in a liquor-induced rage would be pretty frightening. Who in Springfield would have the gonads to stop him in that state? Making the story more interesting in that case.

Had Beverlee McKinsey stayed on, one could have created a helluva triangle between Eric/Alex/Nick. Especially if Alex was away for a period of time so that a strengthening tie could have been formed between Nick and Eric. That's where GL should have went if the show was determined to extend the triangle theme. Think of the unbelievable history that could have been mined with that kind of set up! Wow. Memories/discussion of Brandon and Lujack could be a featured part of that mix. (No flashbacks or ghosts tho - yecch.) Alan who?

Yes!! Finally, another fan of Warren Andrews. What a smarmy jerk...a weasel...and what a fun character! Eric Luvonoczek was Warren's successor, whom I liked even more than Warren. I also was a big fan of Floyd Parker. And I liked Eve Guthrie as well. Reva was always horrible. Mike Bauer was almost as bad (but to be fair, I started watching GL in 1978/79, so I am not familiar with Mike's earlier, non-jack@ss persona). There. All sorts of unpopularity in one post!

So, Brandon was a Nazi? Figures. All evil white men are. I wonder what the typical Scottish/English GL viewer thought of that development? "Spaulding" is hardly a German sir name. A shame that we didn't see Brandon Spaulding often donning tennis whites, bragging about the high quality of his tennis racquets. Now THAT might have been fun! Souring the Spaulding name during the tennis craze of the late 1970s/early 1980s might have generated a small brouhaha in the real world. Imagine Nazis Brandon and grandson Phillip prancing into a room asking, "Tennis, anyone?" LOL. If anything, Brandon should have been a Stalinite. With a real name of Ilya Vasilievsky or some such. A name that even the great Maureen Garrett would have difficulty pronouncing.

PJ: Wonderful writeup re: Van/Reva. Yes, theirs should have been a full blown-up rivalry. Can't have that though, not with Reva and Zimmer on the canvas. I mean, how would it look? I always thought that numerous GL characters should have been regularly snickering about all things Reva behind her back, just like people would do in real life. Characters laughing at Reva, lots of eye-rolling, comments made about how it's best simply to avoid her, etc. Reva was *always* so entitled, wasn't she? Yeesh.

To add to the conversation, there's.... Emily Norris. Ken's daughter. Niece of Holly and Andy. Blake's cousin. Papa Camaletti is mentioned several times but never appears. Mallet and Julie used to talk about him. What about India's father? Did he ever appear? I didn't watch much of GL from 1985-1988, but I do remember her speaking about him. The Baron von Halkein. Andorra. Didn't Alexandra know him? (Thank goodness I didn't watch much...all this talk about San Rios and Alex on a hot rod is all brand new to me. LOL.) Conversely, what I was amazed by was the rather extensive detail re: Eleni's family. Ya-Ya, her brothers, her mother. They all appeared.

Always AMC- Thank you!! Found the GL vault. Is the vault and The Archive one and the same? If someday I were to pursue a watch of AMC, where would the best place be to start? What month and year? I don't have your patience to wade through months or years of crapola (lol), but do appreciate watching maybe 2-3 months of crapola immediately prior to when a soap starts getting good. I like watching favorable transitions (kinda like watching Spring erupt after a long winter). Is sometime in 1994 the logical launch point?

Help! This Archive thing-a-ma-jig....how does one get there to watch old GL eps? I'm a bit thick-headed. Thanks. "I seem to recall Ed throwing a lot of it back in her face back in the day. Typical Marland scenes of a Bauer lecturing others about their imperfections." LMAO! Boy, is that ever accurate!! And the lecturing wasn't just limited to the Bauers, either. Think Bea Reardon and Henry Chamberlain (the latter of whom often would lecture people when he wasn't busy ambushing them alongside Vanessa - LOL! Henry was one cool dude). Kelly Nelson, Katie Parker and Hilary Bauer were not beyond lecturing either. How I despised Mike Bauer! A sanctimonious, fussy, prima donna if there ever was one. Typical lawyer. He needed a half dozen upper left cuts to the jaw.

Wholeheartedly agree about the Daniel St John story. If there was a dud of a story during the early 1990s, that was it. I did like the dead woman's sister quite a lot (Jean Wetherill). Both the actress and the character were loose cannons. Holly and St John were a mismatch and Samantha was a pesky gnat. The Chelsea stalker story was okay. I liked the actress who portrayed Dana. A shame she was bumped off. They should have kept her and kept her with Frank for a while. Kim Simms was ahead of where Mindy was early on; Mindy "caught up" with Simms as time went by. Mindy grew a lot more than Simms did, which is reasonably fascinating. Simms comes across as a class act in real life. No ego, no b.s. Well mannered. Generous. Joe Breen was excellent as Will. Really liked him. I get the impression that he was not original signed as a longish-term contract player, but I could be wrong. I didn't watch when he came aboard. I regret not ever watching the period when Maureen Garrett rejoined the show in 1988. I should have. Now, I can't.

Thank you, MLH. Appreciate that. I'm gonna disagree with you on Hart; I liked him. As someone here said, Hart could've been killed off once Phillips left. A-M is a trickier proposition no matter which way you look at it. Yes, Alan-Michael's persona changed between Evans and Hearst, but imo it's not unreasonable given the circumstances. You have A-M getting played by Blake and somewhat by Harley in the divorce. Meanwhile, no one on the Bauer side is looking out for him. Maureen and Ed are not Mom and Dad, so it makes sense that A-M would not spend a lot of time at the Bauer's. Not many people spend a great deal of time with their aunts and uncles. It was A-M's more or less rudderless status at both the Bauers and Spauldings that prompted me to think of having Ed marry Amanda. With a half-sister at the Bauer's and Alan returning to Spaulding, A-M might surprisingly find himself in familial demand rather always be left on the outs. That'd make for an interesting undercurrent story for quite a while - just how will Alan-Michael turn out? Instead, A-M got saddled with Lucy and after he'd had enough, Hearst quit. The End.

MLH - You watched Guiding Light from 1989 to 1998 AND you're a tough critic. Fair enough. What about Guiding Light did you find considerably above average? Which actors, storylines? Details, please. I know you liked Calhoun/Curlee, but the former wasn't around all that long. What caught your nod of attention after Calhoun's departure? Thanks. I watched from 1978/79 to the end of 1983, and from 1990-1998. I didn't see the Dana/Looney Rae Rooney stuff (late 1989) until a year or so ago. I watched all of 1989 retroactively.

Yeah, Reva saved Holly from committing suicide on the bridge. Of course it was Reva. No one else possibly could have saved Holly. Reva, our Savior. There were some Holly/Josh scenes earlier. Those scenes were passable but not notable. Garrett and Newman working opposite each other was weird, as if the two actors didn't know each other. I found the Holly/Reva bridge scene so inexcusable that I never again watched GL. Literally. Not even the last week in 2009, in real time. Not that giving the heave-ho to the show was difficult in the late 1990s. Apparently, Reva was flushed down a toilet at some point during the 2000s. That would have been worth seeing. I would have enjoyed a Reva-gets-into-a-car-wreck-that-leaves-her-completely-mute-for-an-entire-year storyline. Or a Reva suffers from a real nasty bout of venereal disease storyline. Both simultaneously would have been killer!! Reva needed to suffer in silence. For the good of Greater Springfield.

"One thing I'll say about the writing team in 1989 was how the writers effortlessly weaved Holly back into the canvas even though her primary scenes partners were no longer on the show (other then Ross, Ed, and Alan). There was one episode where Holly was at the country club where she had been put in charge of the tv station and she interacted with Rose, Ross, Josh, Mo, and Will.. and she had great rapport with all of them. Soaps hardly do those types of interactions nowadays." This was one of the best things about Guiding Light during its better eras. The cross-pollination of everything. A much easier task for the writers to accomplish when Reva was off the canvas. I do wish that Ed and Harley had been in a story together, maybe a three-month arc. It would have been interesting to see the two actors and characters deal with one another. Very different from each other. Ditto with Billy (Clarke) and Alan-Michael (Hearst).

Maureen Garrett always seemed to have great rapport with nearly everyone, both professional and personal. (I really liked the very brief two-week interaction between her and the guy who played Kirk on ATWT....Tom something. Those two had fantastic chemistry. He was another Sam if I remember correctly). One thing that must be said: Holly and Reva never belonged in the same scenes together. Two very different versions/ideas of Guiding Light personified between them. A dichotomy. A schism. A ravine. Yuck.

"I also do like the last one that had a bittersweet tone to it, and actually looked like a party in someone's yard. There was one of the "Ed-less years" where Rick and Abby took time out of the party to screw...obviously no writer ever threw a big family party as that is the LAST thing on your mind when you have 50 people in your house." Wanna bet!? How wrong you are...I am proof. I had a great time throwing parties for family, friends, co-workers....lol. People would show up early to my house, not late. I was good with it. Be yourself and everyone will have a great time. Be an uptight/nervous host, serve cheese-and-crackers, onion dip and other staid nonsense, and your party will suck. The Bauer July 4 BBQs were a snore, for obvious reasons.

Yeah, mid-1989 is the timeframe to start watching "modern era" GL. Early 1989 isn't all that great; yes, it's better but what isn't better than 1988? Guiding Light really steps on the gas in March/April 1990. As I've said earlier, you can see and feel the transformation. Some WTF(!) moments, like the one MLH mentioned with Roger's admission to Alex that he raped Holly. The show was suddenly more intricate, with tentacles increasingly spreading in multiple directions, pulling in more and more characters. The rest of 1990 through mid 1992 are definitely worth watching; mid 1992 through mid 1993 is considerably above average. Mid 1993 through April 1994 is good, too, but cracks are appearing. Curlee's last storyline was the Peter custody battle in early 1994. Reva's only good storyline ever was her post-partum story during the first half of 1990. "Reva" was subdued(!) and acting all weird during that time frame. She did her kamikaze act into the ocean off the Florida Keys in July 1990. I was ecstatic!!

Dee - Thanks for the info about Penelope. Barbados must have been 1984 or 1985; I wasn't watching much back then as I was in college with full schedule, two internships and a job. All simultaneously for 2 years straight. I have nowhere near that amount of energy these days, lol!

Regarding Alex: I agree 100% with MLN on this topic, and have stated already that Bev was mistaken in her opinion that "Alex" was a victim of character assassination. Given, the chance, i would have told McKinsey so. That said, upon the dissolution of Nick and Mindy (Simms), Alex left town "for a little while. not forever" to "think about things" and "find herself". I thought that was a great way to backburner Alex while McKinsey took her six-week vacation (which we all know she quit the show). Had McKinsey stayed on, a great way for her to "find herself" would be to learn upon her return that that she would soon become a grandmother, either via Mindy or Eve. Either as mother to Alexandra's grandchild would have worked well. Lots of opportunity for Alex to grow/adapt/find herself in a situation like that. And by the way, what do we know about Alexandra and Alan's mother? We know some things about Brandon, but what about her? Regarding the Blake/two twins story....one of the two should have died as a tot. Whether it was Rick's or Ross', it would've made for some rough drama.