i friend loaned me a dvd of a re-release of an old 'bbc' production of honore' de balzac's 1846 novel "cousin bette" starring a very young and fetching dame helen mirren.

it was produced sometime in the early seventies so it totally has the same 1970 does 1840 look that the 1840 time period has on d.s..the fashions,hair and make-up styles are very similar.

it was also filmed in a similar way.almost like a filmed version of a live play.

i'm imagining clarice blackburn as the spinsterish bette and lara parker as the coquettish valerie.

anyways if anyone catches a copy of this it's quite an entertaining little mini-series in the 'masterpiece theater' tradition.

from what i understand(and someone please correct me if i'm wrong)by the time of the brief return to 1971 the show had already been canceled and curtis and company had decided to go out in a parallel time period with little or no thought to the characters they had introduced five years earlier...

so they probably didn't care that the continuity would be thrown out of whack(since they'de never be returning to the "present" again anyways)and just wanted to wrap things up quickly before they moved on to the final time period.

i know that paul stoddard was the ghost that was originally supposed to have haunted jeb and that dennis patrick became unavailable hence the character substitutions...

but if they had to wing it anyways almost anything would have made more sense than dragging vicki and peter out of mothballs and then "killing-off" two characters who were long since departed anyways.

it was just kitchen-sink storytelling that didn't add anything meaningful to the plot.

so la alig was a fan?

that's pretty hot.i actually knew alig's partner in crime 'freeze' quite well back in my college days in boston.he dated a classmate of mine and even then was a total creep.whatev.

sometime ago i read andy warhol "superstar" and drag legend 'holly woodlawn's' autobiography 'lowlife in high heels' and she wrote an amusing passage about how back in the day she and her fellow east village freaks used to shoot up heroin,pile onto a bed and watch d.s..

the visual was just too much!

so alexandra was channeling V on the witness stand?

that's hot.perhaps she was imagining that the prosecutor was reverand trask!

just saying hi...

haven't been feeling particularly chatty lately.

a few years ago during a fest Q&A i foolishly asked kathryn leigh scott if she remembered the riddle sarah had used to help maggie escape during her imprisonment in the old house basement(..."one,two,away they flew...three,four,near the door"...)and of course she acted like i was from outer space...

so as much as i'd love to know the true nature of maggie's quilted garment i doubt she'll remember whether it was in fact pants or a maxi-skirt...but maybe i'll ask her anyways.
personally i prefer to think of it as a skirt and i would be somewhat crestfallen to discover that it's pants.

on her making her own clothes they do have that "butterick pattern #17" feel.i always think it's nice to think about a young kls sitting at the sewing machine in her cute little studio apartment,trying on the finished garment,twirling before a mirror and smiling to herself at a job well done.

soap operas in general...and d.s. in particular...have a peculiar habit of introducing a villianous character who does really dreadful things but if that character becomes extremely popular and cannot be killed,jailed or otherwise done away with they try and soften that character up...often going so far as making that character a hero or heroine.

if i may get a bit o.t. here back in the 1990's i used to watch "the young and the restless".

there were three characters i remember as being particularly loathsome...michael baldwin,lauren fenmore and phylis newman.michael was a rapist,lauren a vixen and phylis a murderer!

imagine my surprise when i tuned in recently and found these former scoundrels re-cast as the shows central figures and all-around-do-gooders.

enter d.s.

the show often introduced really nasty villians and once that character became "popular" and could no longer be effectively disposed of they softened them up and even made them "nice".
that's what i think became of the complex,duplicitous julia of 1967.barnabas was going to boil her in oil or something to that effect but once she became popular they recast her as the newly virtuous barnabas' partner in saving the collins family from every sort of calamity imaginable.

i remember watching the 1970 episodes when gerard was cast as the villian-du-jour.there were lots of scenes of barnabas,julia and quentin sitting around collinwood trying to figure out how to save everyone.
i also remember thinking boy were these three really dull characters.they lost their edge along the way to popularity.

julia doesn't exactly have the blood on her hands that barnabas and quentin did but those were two total fiends before they became the show's warped "anti-heros" but still she wasn't exactly physician of the year.