ALL MY CHILDREN Quickie: What the heck was that on my screen the other week, Ryan threatening Greenlee with bodily harm? Or, at least trying in vain to look remotely threatening. Cameron Mathison is a sweetheart in real life; alas, the man cannot do menacing, as a straightforward maneuver or in context of Ryan reining in his aggression. If I were on the set, I’d have burst into laughter. 
 

This show drives me crazy. One day, it’s riddled with inconsistencies, driven by incidentals and total crap; the next, it’s almost a soap opera again. I’m half-convinced two different sets of writers – none of them head honchos Pruza – take turns. 

On the 15^th and/or 18^th – sorry, I’m behind a bit on catching up – I watched what amounted to an intimate stage play about relationships, misunderstandings, let-downs, tentative resolutions, assertions from desperation and desire ... as Lorenzo, openly wounded, openly wondered if maybe he wasted his hopes on Carly in the face of another deception chasing after Sonny via Reese, Lucky fell to his knees, gazed openly upon the woman who gave him validation as a man, Elizabeth, in a surprise marriage proposal, Nikolas commiserated over his failure as a man in love with Emily, still fighting off the visage of her dead rapist in her besotted husband. 

Most of the dialogue came off as juvenile, clichéd, forced, rushed, especially Nikolas and Courtney’s. It’s no secret portrayer Tyler Christopher wants this pairing; he made that clear at his GH Fan Club event on Sunday, July 17 (some reported that the attending crowd kept silent, then erupted into boos at the thought of Courtney instead of Emily). Alicia Leigh Willis, on the other hand, hasn’t said a word about it to my knowledge; rumors, however, has her just wanting an end to the GH tenure already. 

With scenes plucked seemingly out of nowhere, without character development, any sense of history – even week to week is all I ask – or common sense, I don’t blame Willis. Her character Courtney does sparkle with Christopher’s Nikolas, just as Maurice Benard’s Sonny had with Sarah Brown’s Carly and Nancy Lee Grahn’s Alexis. See the similarities? 

But my advice to THE POWERS THAT BE [TPTB] is to use that spark to slowly introduce the pair to each other, allowing them to converse beyond sharing sob stories about their current love lives, maybe even show them in each other’s elements – he in the stables, riding horses, teaching her multiple foreign languages, fending off Helena, mourning Stefan, she at her foundation office, saving children’s lives, arguing with exes and her mob brother. 

The impromptu punching bag scene went a long way toward cementing Courtney and Nikolas as friends, with the potential for more. Courtney accidentally socking Nikolas in the nose, instead of the makeshift bag of wheat, had me rolling and revealed more sides to these two usually dour, intense beings than any meaningless conversation with their significant others. 

Only... that scene followed a series of others, within a span of ONE EPISODE, serving as the flirting courtship phase, boy meets girl again, boy and girl gripe about each other’s main squeezes, boy and girl counsel each other, boy and girl engage in some spontaneous horseplay, joking and bantering afterward. Normally in soaps, the one episode accounting for maybe 15 minutes of airtime would span at least a year. 

This week, boy and girl will find themselves tempted to take their friendship (in my world, friendships took longer than two five-minute encounters to be legit) to the next, lusty level, a stolen kiss, a desire for another one on a rainy rooftop, maybe more. 

Nikolas and Emily barely talked themselves about what he’d overheard her confide in to Jason about not feeling the same, about it being a struggle still to connect after the rape. One conversation, zero scenes leading up to Nikolas confiding in Courtney about his marital troubles, save for one blow-out in front of Sonny (to test Sonny and Emily’s chemistry) and a few furtive, disappointed looks, hardly development...and all of a sudden, Nikolas is giving Courtney a second look? 

Most of Nikolas and Emily’s ongoing love story has been through Nik’s narratives to Courtney – foreplay in the eyes of TPTB. 

The situation is worse between Jax and Courtney. They’ve had fewer development, just a quickie marriage and constant, obsessive talk of having a baby (nobody in real life does this) ASAP, with a few plot twists along the way to spice up the recast Carly’s fairly new introduction – How far will Carly go to mess up Courtney’s walk down the aisle! Watch Jennifer Bransford in action, and accept her immediately! 

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Jax and Courtney really date, get to know one another, at work and at play, follow through outside of the S&C and Jason distractions. Now, they’re all about another outside obstacle, what the surrogacy with Elizabeth will do to their quickie marriage. 

When Courtney poured out her heart to Nikolas about feeling inadequate compared to a pregnant Liz, and how she further felt as if she and Jax were drifting apart, I had to question my recollection. When did this drifting apart and rise in insecurity happen? It surely didn’t happen in front of me. 

The danger of basing much of a new story on the characters’ individual motivations and feelings is that writers must back them up – with scenes showing motivations and feelings – beforehand, or else Courtney loses credibility, and is viewed as a shallow, whiny idiot that the audience never really knew after all. Having the audience as a whole question their recollection, doubt a major female character TPTB had invested so much time, energy and story after story in, and thus, forcing this audience to give up on someone formerly strong, confident and brave like Courtney is about as smart a move as a) killing off Billy Warlock’s A.J., b) making a little boy the killer of his biological father then turning around and changing the killer in the middle of the game, and c) heralding a hurricane that did little but waste the participating actors. 

At some point, the audience gives up paying any attention, or caring. And then you have throwaway scenes meant for importance like, Carly wheeled out in a stretcher after falling and hitting her head on the sofa armrest, and everybody in the room hardly noticing. They hardly noticed because minutes earlier, Reese fell and conked herself unconscious (Reese, who has suffered at least three car accidents in a handful of months only to walk away miraculously unscathed) in the stables, but recovered in a flash. And because characters on GH do that all the time, triumph over monumental disasters, danger, threats, some doing so three or four times in a week, without breaking into a sweat or worrying about the outcome, the show disintegrates into a cartoon. 

Used to be, on GH especially, that when a character injured herself and went to the ER, viewers and characters worried for longer than 10 seconds about the dire diagnosis (remember Dominique dying, leaving lasting consequences for Scott and Lucy?, the original B.J.’s Heart?, Stone and AIDS?). No longer. 

Today, nothing makes a dent. 

So, thank God for the clichés. Without them, I’d have been lost, and probably hiding in my hotel room, ordering room service, or sneaking off to a wide variety of cooler than cool eateries on Ventura Blvd., where the Sportsmen’s Lodge Hotel is located. (For another look back on my mostly uneventful 10-day road trip and the oddly comforting, oddly historic, oddly colorful Lodge Hotel, check out cubbyhole[s ic], the other – OT - EOS column I write.) 

Kathy (SNAPSHOTS, On the Soap Box, Get on the Bus) is extremely tall, slim, graceful, beautiful and as accessibly friendly as any Nancy Lee Grahn. No jitters here, I was instantly at ease by her side, as she guided me visually around the Friday Greg Vaughan (Lucky) fan event, introducing me to an important Vaughan fan and manager of the “Lucky & Liz: New Beginnings”  MSN soap community, Chris "Birdie" Hawkins (gorgeous liquid brown eyes), joking about never winning anything while at Nancy Lee Grahn’s (Alexis) Friday evening goddess party (then later winning a signed soap magazine, because of my good luck presence)... Just watching her move around the ballrooms, meeting, greeting people effortlessly, she sees an unfamiliar but intriguing face and goes over to introduce herself, just wowed me. 

KellyB (Kelly's Diner) and Dianna (Dianna's Dimensions) have the kind of natural, full, voluptuous breasts a woman prays for. I believe Kelly was sporting the full-on whore blouse the night I met her, Sage would be proud. Kelly and Dianna seemed to have no fear of meeting the stars or mingling with fans like I did. I so admired them for that. In fact, when the Kristina twins arrived at Grahn’s goddess party, with their baby sister trailing behind, Dianna just got down on the floor with her camera and played with the little girl. I enjoyed listening to Kelly critique each event, before, during and after – most of her critiques I wouldn’t dare divulge, but they made the entire weekend’s worth of events worth crashing. I also enjoyed perusing Dianna’s folder full of signed memorabilia, along with a story she had for almost every one. These two really provided enormous help to Katrina and GH Fan Club’s Debbie Morris for the Saturday luncheon event – the weekend’s biggest – acting as runners and escorts, and generally putting the actors even more at ease. Kelly even joked around with Leslie Charleson (Monica) about her Happy Days role as the older woman who broke Ritchie Cunningham in with a kiss, dating both of them.