Rescuers are searching the waters off the coast of Forster, Australia for 30-year-old Paul Rossington and 26-year-old Kristen Schroder. (Surveillance camera footage shows the pair falling from their Carnival deck on Wednesday night.)
Remember when Regis and Kathy Lee were shilling for the Carnival “fun ships?”
Listen, if you get on one of these poop cruise extravaganzas today, well, you get what you pay for!
And you know what? Back in the day, they weren’t all that fun either.
Here’s a true story for you. My partner and I had only been dating a few months when we went on a Carnival Caribbean cruise with another couple. One night, some binge-drinking “WOO!” girl was in the ship’s piano bar. She leans over to the piano player and says “HEY! I’ll show you my tits (TEEEEE-uts) if you play ‘The Stars Fell on Alabama!” Lee whacks me on the arm and says, “We’re leaving.” That’s the moment I knew we were destined for each other!
Rhode Island became the tenth U.S. state to legalize same-sex marriage Thursday with a 56-15 vote.
Just before he signed the legislation into law, Gov. Lincoln Chafee took to the steps of the Rhode Island State House, where he told a jubilant crowd, “Today we are making history … we are living up to the ideals of our founder.”
He went on to note, “When your belief and heart is in something, it’s easy work. I am proud to say that now, at long last, you are free to marry the person you love.”
By the way, the official name of the smallest state in the Union is the longest: the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations. The state bird is a chicken: the Rhode Island Red hen, and the state drink is “Coffee Milk,” which, I believe, is something like a coffee flavored milkshake.
The state motto is “Hope.” We hope that the next 4/5ths of the United States will follow Little Rhody’s lead down the trail of equality.
(4.29.13) — Today is Welcome Back to Pine Valley Day. (Or if your preference is just down the road, it’s Welcome Back to Llanview Day.) It’s the day that the Internet reboot of All My Children and One Life to Live begins.
It took me awhile, but I pinpointed my first viewing of AMC to the spring of 1982. I was a senior in high school and I had been, since before I even knew any better, a viewer of CBS soap operas — As The World Turns and Guiding Light, specifically. I couldn’t help it. That’s what my mother and my aunt and my grandmother watched. I couldn’t go anywhere, it seemed, during my childhood without having a CBS soap playing in the background.
That spring, a friend of mine called me on some holiday from school and demanded I turn on All My Children. (There was a lot of watching television while on the telephone in those days; just go with it.) She said that I had to watch this one crazy character because it reminded her of her mother. The actress was Dorothy Lyman, the role was Opal Gardner, and I thought it was hilarious. (And yes, Opal was a lot like her mother, as scary as that may be to contemplate.)
If Opal, Glamorama and all, got me to open the door, the rich, multi-generational tapestry of characters in Pine Valley invited me to the party and demanded that I pull up a chair.
The cast of the “new” All My Children includes many familiar faces, including original AMC cast member Ray MacDonnell and longtime co-stars Cady McClain, Jill Larson, David Canary, Julia Barr and others. Image: Ferencomm/The Online Network.
Creepy Billy Clyde Tuggle, assayed brilliantly by Matthew Cowles.
Watching AMC in those days was not just about watching the hot youngsters —Jenny and Greg and Angie and Jesse and Tad and Liza — it was also about watching Benny Sago spar with “The Duchess,” the one and only Phoebe Tyler, it was about the Charles/Mona/Phoebe triangle, it was about Langley and Phoebe and Myrtle and Opal, it was about hooker-with-a-heart-o’gold Donna Beck and Chuck Tyler, it was about Erica Kane and Tom Cudahy, Brooke English and Tom Cudahy, Palmer Cortlandt before Adam Chandler came to town, Nina and Cliff, Ellen and Mark, Joe and Ruth and Grandma Kate Martin, the best soap opera villain ever, Billy Clyde Tuggle. And “Bonkers.”
Great memories of stories well-told, but they are the stuff of television lore. They are the stuff of history as much as this iconic show opening:
When ABC announced the cancellation of AMC, I started to watch it again. I hadn’t watched much in the decade before the cancellation and I have it on pretty good authority that it was nothing like the Agnes Nixon-penned salad days of the 70s and 80s. The first thing I noticed was that Tad Martin had grey hair! Tad the Cad got old? What the hell? I just couldn’t get over that. I mentioned it to a friend and fellow viewer. He suggested that I should look in the mirror. Oh. According to the AMC bible, Tad and I are the same age. Dammit.
Still, I can mourn my lost youth, I suppose, but, then again, I don’t actually want to see the same things I saw in 1983. I don’t want to watch the same stories again and again. I want to be excited about new stories and new ideas. Isn’t that really the point?
(And the other point is that Michael E. Knight and I both aged gracefully and we still look fabulous, grey hair and all!)
Anyhow, today is a new day in Pine Valley. Like Brigadoon, it’s risen again and is ready to let us in. Maybe some of your old favorites won’t be there. Maybe you’ll be looking for The Goalpost or the Valley Inn or the Glamorama. Maybe they won’t be there either. But just like in1970 at the first beginning, Joe Martin will be there (God bless Ray MacDonnell!!).
Dixie Cooney will be there. And Opal Cortlandt. And Jesse and Angie Hubbard. And Brooke English and Adam Chandler. And a whole lot of young people that you don’t know yet. And that shouldn’t scare you away. That should excite you. It’s a new day. In the world and in Pine Valley.
Oft-repeated through the years — and for awhile seen in the opening credits, I believe — is the poem from Agnes Nixon’s AMC bible:
The Great and the Least,
The Rich and the Poor,
The Weak and the Strong,
In Sickness and in Health,
In Joy and Sorry,
In Tragedy and Triumph,
You are All My Children.
Nixon’s All My Children has always been about just those things. Today, they begin telling new stories in a new medium with both familiar and new faces just like always. I have a feeling this day may mark the beginning of a new day of serialized storytelling in this country. That hope — that we can again tune in tomorrow — or at four a.m. or watch from our phone on the train on the way home from the office — makes this a very good day indeed.
__________________
The incomparable Ruth Warrick.
P.S. — I spent many years of my working life in the theatre. I don’t get star struck. I have met and worked with many famous personages, but my autograph collection is very, very small. The only person from a daytime drama I have ever deliberately sought out to meet and to sign an autograph was the late Ruth Warrick. I thought she was an absolutely brilliant actress and there have been very, very few characterizations ever that rose to the rarified level of Phoebe English Tyler Wallingford.
Would that the ‘Duchess’ could see Pine Valley reborn. I’m certain that she and the rest of the Daughters of Fine Lineage would be pleased!
This Tumblr has been one of my guilty pleasures over the last year or so. TFH transcended it’s blog origins and became a full-blown meme with everyone submitting TFH’s all over the place. I love that power of social media to spur creativity on.
Now, if we could just get that pesky world peace problem solved!
Is anyone surprised in the slightest by the election of another anti-gay crusader as pope? The utterly stubborn intransigence of the Catholic Church leadership to bend to modern thought and practice is potentially the reason so many are fleeing the church.
Pope Francis. Image: guardian.co.uk
Pope Francis is a conservative who is anti-gay marriage and anti-gay adoption. He has described same-sex marriage as the work of the devil and a “destructive attack on God’s plan.” He has also said that gay adoption is a form of discrimination against children.
Of course, there’s also the recent analysis of the General Social Survey (GSS) that notes that in 1990 approximately 8% of Americans reported no religious affiliation, while today’s percentage is 20%. A huge societal shift in just over 20 years.
Why is this, I wonder? Perhaps it has something to do with the mule-like insistence of religious leaders to look to the past and not to the future for answers.
Former Senators Bill Bradley, Tom Daschle, Christopher Dodd and Alan Simpson — all of whom voted for the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996 — told the Supreme Court Friday that “the original justifications for DOMA can no longer be credited today,” concluding that “our constitutional commitment to equality does not tolerate such discrimination.”
Australian mining billionaire and professor Clive Palmer — and his Blue Star Line company — held a press conference in New York City on Tuesday morning to unveil the new blueprints of the Titanic II, which was first announced in 2012.
Does ANYONE have a good feeling for this? Here’s what I think: the ship Titanic is known for one thing and one thing only. It is etched into the global consciousness as being synonymous with sinking. What’s their new slogan going to be: “This time we may stay afloat??”
A few years ago I was in Inverness, Scotland and we stayed at the Royal Highland Hotel, whose claim to fame is that the staircase there was the inspiration for the grand staircase on H.M.S. Titanic. Nice staircase. Crappy hotel.
TODAY’S Republicans are very good at tending the fire of Ronald Reagan’s memorybut notnearly as good at learning from his successes. They slavishly adhere to the economic program that Reagan developed to meet the challenges of the late 1970s and early 1980s, ignoring the fact that he largely overcame those challenges, and now we have new ones. It’s because Republicans have not moved on from that time that Senators Marco Rubio and Rand Paul, in their responses to the State of the Union address last week, offered so few new ideas.
This cut is from Ramesh Ponnuru’s op-ed in the Times. It’s a great piece and it’s so similar to the cover story on the Times Magazine that I posted yesterday on the marketing blog in my rant against old white guys and the inability for the status quo to shift on its own.
This is an ongoing concern of mine: how the right wing is not listening to younger people. By extension it’s about senior management of all political stripes not listening to younger people and stifling new ideas because they are uncomfortable with them. You know, things like marriage equality. And social media.
One Last Word 