Another olive, Barnabas?

[Gothick]

Today's montage (8/12) has me in stitches! Barnabas looks as if he just unintentionally swallowed his martini olive in that upper right hand corner snapshot!  way to go MB!

So... are we all ready to party like it's 1995?

Gothick

[Mysterious Benefactor]

Today's montage (8/12) has me in stitches! Barnabas looks as if he just unintentionally swallowed his martini olive in that upper right hand corner snapshot!

As soon as I saw that capture, I knew it had to be a part of the montage.

So... are we all ready to party like it's 1995?

Definitely. besides being one of my favorite sequences on DS, I have fond memories of that year on the Internet. I'd already been online for a year back then, but 1995 was the year I went from lurker to active poster in online fandom. And the rest, as they say, is history.

But geez, 4,800 and 14.4K baud modems - it's hard to believe that we actually managed to do anything at those sluggish speeds - especially with computers than only ran at 75MHz. How times have changed! Makes you wonder what innovations the next 8 years will bring...

[Raineypark]

YOU lurked?

Can't picture it.....you, just reading other people's comments and not jumping in, with your encyclopedic recall of DS details.

How long could you have kept that up?

[jennifer]

wow i've missed the past few weeks can't wait till it's 1995!
it's so eerie!

jennifer

[Nancy]

Barnabas looks like he has the olive pit in his mouth and is about to shoot it out at a target.   

[Patti Feinberg]

1995 is when I got online.

Whoosh, what a difference 8 years makes.

For me....the 1995 means we (albeit for a short while) get to see Clarice Blackburn!!!

(but, we also see someone else...who knows, maybe I'll be able to tolerate that Quentin wanna be!!)

Patti

[Cassandra]

For me....the 1995 means we (albeit for a short while) get to see Clarice Blackburn!!!

It was good seeing Mrs.Johnson again.  She seemed like the only sane one left out of the bunch too.  I haven't seen these episodes in years so Im hoping that we'll get to see more of her in the 1970 current storyline.


Cassandra

[Gothick]

Hi Cassandra,

sad to say, I believe Mrs. Johnson only appears in one episode during this storyline--Clarice Blackburn's final appearance on the series.

Clarice was such a wonderful actress. At the time I didn't appreciate the quality she brought to the shows in which she appeared.  I hope to have time to watch some of her 1966 episodes, as I have heard they are so wonderful.  I about died watching this one a couple of years ago where Mrs J had come to Maggie's coffee shop, told her she was a good girl and gave her a dime for her trouble.  The expression on both actress' faces was to die for!

[Cassandra]

Hi Cassandra,

sad to say, I believe Mrs. Johnson only appears in one episode during this storyline--Clarice Blackburn's final appearance on the series.

Clarice was such a wonderful actress. At the time I didn't appreciate the quality she brought to the shows in which she appeared.  I hope to have time to watch some of her 1966 episodes, as I have heard they are so wonderful.  I about died watching this one a couple of years ago where Mrs J had come to Maggie's coffee shop, told her she was a good girl and gave her a dime for her trouble.  The expression on both actress' faces was to die for!

LOL!! Yes I remember that one well Gothick.  What a great scene.

Im sorry to hear that Mrs. J won't be in too many more future scenes.   I wonder why they started leaving her out of more and more episodes?   She was so good with the kids during the Quentin's ghost haunting Collinwood story and I would think that out of all the adults there at Collinwood she would be the one to notice just how strange they've been acting, especially since she went through this same ordeal with them back then.  What a big loss.


Cassandra

[Mysterious Benefactor]

I wonder why they started leaving her out of more and more episodes?

At this point Clarice was also appearing on The Secret Storm. I never saw her on TSS, but this excerpt from an interview Clarice did with Afternoon TV makes it seem as if TSS was using her a lot, so she probably wasn't available to coordinate many more appearances on DS:

...she plays a character named Mary Lou on Secret Storm. "Mary Lou is a woman living in the past, twenty years in the past," Clarice explained. "Because of some terrible experience--some overwhelming shock--she remains fixated at that point in her life. She can't get beyond it. It's as if time has stopped for Mary Lou. She still wears the clothes of the period, about 1950, I guess. She plays the records she liked at the time. One of her favorites is an old Jo Stafford recording called You Belong to Me. Playing it so often has made it worn and scratchy."

No, Clarice laughed, she couldn't tell me Mary Lou's secret. As the show goes on the secret -- the thing that happened to Mary Lou will be revealed, but for now it must remain a deep, dark secret. "Actually, I don't quite know myself," Clarice said. "The producers explained something about Mary Lou's problem, then left me guessing."

I said it must be something pretty terrible. Clarice laughed again. "I still can't tell you," she said. "Watch the show and find out for yourself."

We both agreed that Mary Lou sounded something like a Tennessee Williams' creation. "Yes," Clarice said, "there are elements like that. Mary Lou is a completely new character on the show, and absolutely fascinating to me. Highly complex as well; that's why I like her. She is married to a psychiatrist, which makes for an interesting situation in itself, and even with all his knowledge and skill he has been unable to help her. But he refuses to give up; in fact, he has dedicated his life to removing the trauma--the shock--that has made her what she is."

I asked Clarice if she thought the husband-psychiatrist would succeed. "That remains to be seen," Clarice said. She paused and smiled. "However, there are other complications. The husband has fallen in love with another woman."

Wow! I said. It was complicated.

Since Mary Lou was such a special character, Clarice said, there were special problems to be solved before putting her in front of the television cameras. The clothes, for one thing, had to be exactly right. In 1950 The New Look was in full flower. The long skirts were no problem, since long skirts are coming back into style. "But the costume designer, George Drew, had some trouble getting those sweater sets," Clarice said. "But you know designers--they get what they go after."

Not so easy was finding a picture of Clarice herself taken in the same period. Finally, after a lot of rummaging, she dug up an old snapshot taken near Lake Dalles, Texas, during her college days. Now the snapshot has been blown up to portrait size and stands on the desk of Mary Lou's husband. The 1950 Mary Lou had long black hair; the 1970 Mary Lou has greying hair. "I have a thing about wigs," Clarice smiled. "In Dark Shadows I wore a white wig; now I wear a grey wig as Mary Lou."

[Gothick]

Wow, this sounds like a fabulous role for Clarice.  I wish these had been saved, but I think I read somewhere that all the tapes had been wiped.  Maybe some will turn up, somehow, somewhere...

now which was the soap on which Humbert Allen Astredo played an interior decorator?  *that*, I would crawl over broken glass to see.

G.

[dom]

I watched the Secret Storm for a spell and the only thing I can remember from it was the first scene I ever saw. It was Clarice's character playing that Jo Stafford record. I never knew it was Clarice. How interesting! I remember that she was playing the record and then I belive she was murdered and when she fell to the floor (or during the struggle) she knocked into the turntable and the record started skipping and the scene faded to black. It was the saddest thing I ever saw on TV to date and I remember being somewhat depressed about it. Either Clarice's acting was so good that I knew from that one scene that she was a sympathetic character or maybe I had seen a few episodes before that one to know enough to feel sorry for her. I started watching the show to see who killed her or to see if he got caught. I can't remember if we saw the murderer at the time of the struggle. I've never forgotten it, or the song. It wasn't until six years later that I finally learned the song title and that it was recorded by Jo Stafford. Now 33 years later I find out the actress who played the part; Our very own "Mrs. Johnson". Too cool. Thanks MB. Another childhood mystery solved.

dom (who has to go play that song and remember when)

OT

PS - This must be my week. Yesterday I received a .wav of the Peyton Place TV theme which I've been humming for the last 35 years but have never been able to locate.

Anyone interested in hearing an old TV theme you never thought you'd ever hear again, click here: http://freespace.virgin.net/m.ashall/Themes.htm and you won't be disappointed!