PRETTY AS A PICTURE

(With apologies to Rodgers, Hammerstein, and Carousel)

Stone cutters cut it on stone/ Woodpeckers peck it on wood/ Pretty people/ Make pretty couples....

Enjoy some new photos, above of ATWT's Luke (Van Hansis) and Noah (Jake Silbermann).

And for all the folks who've been e-mailing to express their fears that ATWT is backing away from "Nuke" as a couple because Noah is currently dating Maddie.... Come on! It's a soap! It's not supposed to be easy.

Think of all the supercouples who didn't connect right away. Luke's mom and dad, Holden and Lily, were obviously destined to be together for all time -- but she still slept with Dusty first (not to mention married Luke's biological father, Damian, in between Holdens).

Kim may have loved Bob from the first moment she saw -- and slept with -- him (while he was still married to her sister, no less), but even she had two other loves of her life, Dan and Nick, prior to their happily ever after.

Tom and Margo each took their share of wrong turns with other people only to end up back together in the end. And Jack and Carly... what's there to say about Jack and Carly? Except that everyone knows they're each other's soul mate, for better or for worse.

So for all those people who want Luke and Noah to be treated as normally as any other soap couple -- how about letting them be treated as normally as any other soap couple? Asking for them to be treated with kid gloves, without the complications everyone else gets, just suggests they aren't the same as any other pair. And that's the exact opposite of what this story is trying to do, isn't it?

(To play devil's advocate for a minute, sometimes a soap thinks their money couple is one pair of characters, but then the short-term third party spoiler turns out to have better chemistry than the leads. GH's Luke and Laura are the most famous example. Luke was supposed to be a minor irritation for Laura/Scotty. Oops. A similar thing happened on AMC when Maria was supposed to briefly get between Brooke and Edmund. It didn't quite work out that way. Even Holden and Lily were originally supposed to be Lily and Dusty. Daytime is a perennially evolving medium. That's why fans are so passionate about it. Unlike a movie or a novel, daytime fans know that their opinions can actually affect story. That's the nature of the beast, as well....)