MEET NORA (IN HILLARY B. SMITH'S OWN WORDS)

Emmy-winner Hillary B. Smith is bringing Nora Hanon Gannon Buchanan to General Hospital!

To find out how fans feel about that, click here.

And those who never watched her on One Life to Live, read on for an exclusive interview about what made Nora and Bo so beloved:


This interview was initially posted on January 11, 2012


LIVE STRONG!

As One Life to Live approaches the end of its ABC Daytime run, Soap Opera 451 takes a look back at some of our favorite show memories.

When I interviewed Emmy-Award winning actress Hillary B. Smith for my book, Soap Opera 451: A Time Capsule of Daytime Drama's Greatest Moments, she talked specifically about Nora and Bo's first wedding (with Little Richard!), and more generally about the couple's appeal as whole, telling me:

They were friends first. I think the key to a couple working is you’re just having a good time, and you’re not thinking about the results. We just were having a good time and having a lot of fun, and the writers were having a good time writing for us because there was no big agenda on the scene for these two. The writers were allowed to write whatever they wanted to. And the network kind of stayed out of it. It happened and it was perfect. The audience was rooting for them. The audience wanted them to be a couple before they were a couple, before Bo and Nora knew they were destined to be a couple. Hillary and Woodsy knew where we were going, but Bo and Nora didn’t....

It was an honest relationship. You saw them at their worst, and you still saw them as a team. It was an enviable relationship. Everyone wanted a relationship like that. Bob Woods tells the story of women going up to his wife, Loyita, and saying, “Oh, you’re so lucky, I wish I was married to Bo Buchanan.” And she says, “So do I.”...

People hang on to Bo and Nora because it was romantic. And it still is. We try to bring in as much romance as we can. We try to bring that aspect of marriage and that aspect of life back into play.

Click here for more OLTL memories and interviews with:

Headwriter Michael Malone

Judith Light (Karen)

DAYTIME EMMY WEEK SPOTLIGHT: EILEEN DAVIDSON (DAYS OF OUR LIVES)

I've shared how I'm back in the soap game, writing for SoapHub.com and SoapShows.com.

One of my recent posts featured a poll asking viewers which Eileen Davidson character they preferred.

Find out the answer at this link.

And read my interview with Eileen talking about her multi-character Days Of Our Lives run, below!

This post originally ran on June 22, 2012

Monday: Julia Barr (Brooke; All My Children)

Tuesday: Linda Dano (Felicia; Another World)

Wednesday: Michael Malone (Headwriter; One Life to Live) 

Thursday: Susan Dansby (Scriptwriter, As the World Turns)

The rule of thumb in daytime - usually - is: Play a dual role, win an Emmy.

It worked for David Canary.  And Julianne Moore.  And Anne Heche.  And Ellen Wheeler.  And Martha Byrne.

Days of our Lives' Eileen Davidson did not win.  But, then again, she was not playing a dual role.

In 1998, Eileen played Kristin DiMera.  And Susan Banks.  And Sister Mary Moira.  And Penelope.  And Thomas.

For all of whom she received her first Daytime Emmy nomination.

Eileen Davidson: As a lead actress who’d always been known as a dramatic actress, it was just such a hoot for me, and so freeing to just let go and have fun.  I had a tape recorder and I would read the scene and turn it off when the character I was supposed to be talked.  I ran lines that way.  The major way that I knew it was working was because the crew was laughing, and I was laughing, we were cracking up all the time. 

They worked me to death.  I was at the end of my contract, I was going to leave after the first year I played Susan. And they asked me to stay an additional year to finish off the storyline, so I did.  James (Reilly; Headwriter) actually ended apologizing to me at the end of it.  He knew he’d worked me sixteen-hour days, Saturdays, I was really exhausted.  He apologized to me.  He said he couldn’t help it, he felt inspired by me.  He had no reason to apologize, it was a great, great, great thing for me.



Read more from Eileen, Susan, Michael, Linda, Julia, and dozens of other actors, writers, producers, experts and fans in Soap Opera 451: A Time Capsule of Daytime Drama's Greatest Moments enhanced ebook, available on Amazon and B&N.

Plus, today is the last day to buy Alina Adams' Counterpoint: An Interactive Family Saga, When a Man Loves a Woman: Enhanced Multimedia Edition, and Skate Crime: Multimedia for only $.99 cents as part of the BookLoversBuffet.com promotion.  Prices go back up this weekend!

SNARKY SOAP SPOILERS

As I mentioned last week, I am now writing The Young & the Restless and The Bold & the Beautiful spoilers for SoapShows.com.

They started out nice and straightforward, but, somewhere along the way, I began getting snarky.... and opinionated... and bringing up past character misdeeds that the show itself kind of wishes you'd forget.

So if you like your Y&R and B&B spoilers with a bit of an attitude (and a lot of respect for soap history), consider checking mine out at: https://soapshows.com/author/alinaadams2016/.

And make sure to let me now what you think!

'THIEVES AT HEART' NOW AVAILABLE AS AN EBOOK

Though it was my second Regency Romance novel for AVON, 'Thieves at Heart' proved to be the last one of my books to be turned into an ebook (don't ask why, the answer is long, complicated... and, in spite of that, ultimately uninteresting).

What's special about 'Thieves at Heart?' Well, to start, it was the book that finally killed off AVON's Regency line. Yes, I'm very proud.

Turns out that my involvement in it not only destroys soap-operas and primetime televised figure-skating, but also an entire literary genre for a major publishing house.

Check it out for yourselves, here.

BACK IN THE SOAP BIZ

I'm back in the soap business, writing for SoapHub and SoapShows.

I'm doing commentary for one, and spoilers for the other.

So if you've been missing my those-who-forget-history-are-doomed-to-repeat it take on our beloved genre, please check both out and let me know what you think!

HOW TO GET INTO GIFTED NYC SCHOOLS

Applying your child to a gifted NYC school for 2017?

Hear everything you need to know (that the NYC Department of Education doesn't want you to know - and won't tell you) in the podcasts below! And make sure you sign up for the NYC School Secrets mailing list to receive all the latest NYC schools news as soon as it happens, including G&T prep, Kindergarten Connect & more!

The Difference Between Citywide & District G&T



Test Prep Tips From Testing Mom & Bright Kids Inc.



Test Prep Tips From FasTracKids



How To Transfer to a G&T From General Ed



How to Transfer to a G&T From Private School



The Difference Between Public and Private Gifted Schools



For more exclusive information to raise your odds of getting in, visit www.NYCSchoolSecrets.com.

SOAP NEWS & POLLS

Some recent soapy pieces of mine:

Y&R Fans Vote on How Dylan Should Get Back at Hillary

Should This Be End of 'Days' for JJ and Gabi?

Soap Siblings Showdown (Y&R Edition)

Y&R Reed Recast - With a Teen!

HOW DO I GET INTO NYC KINDERGARTEN?

Kindergarten Connect 2017 is officially open!

Experts offer tips for surviving NYC's kindergarten application season
By Amanda Mikelberg

Parents of 4-year-olds have more on their holiday-patterned plates than wrestling for the Hatchimals in the toy isles: It is now kindergarten application season in New York City.

The Department of Education’s online application system, Kindergarten Connect, is open from Wednesday through Jan. 13, with placements released in March. And while Requests for Testing (RFT) for the city's gifted and talented programs were due on Nov. 14, insiders say the window is still open for special requests for a test date in January.

“It’s unspeakably important to know all of your options,” Alina Adams, author of "Getting Into NYC Kindergarten," and a private coach for families in the process, told Metro.

She stressed that the law does not at all guarantee placement in a local school.

Much like the daunting high school application process, rankings of 12 choices must be submitted for each of the 70,000 kindergarten-age kids. Ignoring this process is taking a major risk of convenience and quality.

Applicants must research the DOE's kindergarten directory. Public kindergartens are not created equal — there are small schools and big ones, gifted and talented schools, magnet schools with attractive features, dual language programs, as well as traditional or progressive teaching approaches.

“Many parents don’t know that they may not be able to get into their zoned school, or that they are welcome and have a right to apply to unzoned schools.”

Read the entire article, here.

Or, if you'd prefer to hear everything you need to know about zoned, unzoned, district, magnet and dual language public schools - how to apply and how to get in, listen to the below podcast from 2015.



For a step by step guide that you can refer to over and over again as you go through the process, check out:

HOW TO PROMOTE YOUR BOOK

Pose a Question

Alina Adams, author of The Figure Skating Mystery Series, says “the best tip I have for writing strong book descriptions is to pose a question the reader desperately wants answered – but can’t unless they read the book.”

Adams set up her question with this intriguing book description:

At the World Figure Skating Championship, the Ladies’ Gold medal goes to Russia’s dour Xenia Trubin over America’s perky Erin Simpson thanks to the vote of one judge, who then promptly turns up dead.

Who killed Silvana Potenza? A skater? A coach? A fan? An official? A parent?

Emphasize Enhanced Content

Adams’s mystery series also includes professionally made videos of The Ice Theatre of NY as part of the story. “In my book description, I make sure to highlight this unique feature, and – this part is critical – explain exactly what that feature is and how it works. Enhanced ebooks are still so new, customers don’t expect them, and don’t exactly understand what they are. It is my job to make that clear – and enticing – in the book description.”

More tips (from writers who are not me) at: Writing Effective Book Descriptions to Sell More Books.

END OF THE (SOAP) LINE

For my last Entertainment Weekly Community post, I did a round up of the Top 10 Soap Opera final episodes - with clips!

Check it out here and join the conversation about your favorites - and which ones you think I unfairly left out.

SOAP TREK

The original Lieutenant Uhura herself, actress Nichelle Nichols, will appear on the 11,000^th episode of The Young & the Restless, September 1, 2016.

But turnabout (intruder; bonus points if you get the ultra-geeky reference) is fair play. Go to EW Community for a list of our top 5 favorite original Star Trek guest-starts who went on to play meaningful roles on soaps - plus classic video clips!

SOAP OPERAS & THE OLYMPICS

The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat….

No, that’s not the Olympic motto (they’re all about their Faster, Higher, Stronger…). But it is the tagline that ABC’s Wild World of Sports came up with for turning athletic competition into, well, a soap opera.

Faster, higher, stronger is awesome, but it’s the personal stories that keep viewers in front of the tube, cheering for athletes who don’t have a shot at a medal… as long as the story is a good one. Quick, name the folks who actually beat Eddie the Eagle in skiing, or the Jamaican bobsledding team. There. See?

But turnabout is fair play. If the Olympics are now just a multi-week soap-opera (that, ironically, is preempting an actual soap-opera, Days of Our Lives) with periodic bursts of running, swimming and tumbling to break up the tear-jerking but ultimately uplifting tales, why shouldn’t Olympians get the chance to periodically pop up amidst the tear-jerking but ultimately uplifting tales on soaps?

Check out our Top 5 favorite appearances at Entertainment Weekly!

SOAP OPERA JUSTICE

On The Young & the Restless, Victor is out of prison. Well, that was a stressful ten minutes. OK, fine, it was a couple of weeks… months, tops. Definitely not the decade-long sentence he was originally saddled with.

We all know that, in the real world, justice is rarely blind – or fair. Some people get the book thrown at them, while others escape with a slap on the wrist for the same crime. In the real world, your race, gender, religion, and socio-economic class play a big part in how Lady Justice feels like treating you. This would be true on soaps, too, if there were enough racial and/or religious diversity to accumulate multiple data points. As for social-class, when even the so-called “poor people” can jet off to Europe at a moment’s notice, one starts to suspect “I do not think (that word) means what you think it means.”

Still, different people do get treated differently when it comes to crime and time-served. Check out the most grievous examples from the four soap-operas still left on the air at Entertainment Weekly!

SOAP OPERA BAD BOYS REFORMED BY LOVE OF A GOOD WOMAN

“I thought I could change him,” whimpered pretty much every woman on daytime over the past few weeks, be it General Hospital’s Sabrina about her low-level mobster baby-daddy or Alexis over her high-level mobster one-night stand/baby-daddy turned husband. It also applied to The Young & the Restless’s Meredith who, as a prison doctor, should have known that maybe inmates are sometimes not the most straight-and-narrow of citizens, and The Bold & the Beautiful’s Katie, who’d seen Bill cheat on a multitude of women, but was shocked — shocked! - when he did it to her.

You can’t really blame the ladies. Soap operas are chock full of tales of very evil, kind of evil, and vaguely evil men reformed by the love of a good woman. If it happened once, it can happen again, right? Check out our top three favorite examples of when it worked … and when it didn’t at Entertainment Weekly!

SOAP SISTER V. SOAP SISTER!

Remember when The Bold & the Beautiful’s Bill had that awesome idea where he and Brooke would have an affair so that Bill could be a better husband to Brooke’s sister, Katie?

Well, that didn’t work out so well. Now Katie knows, and though Bill tried to pin the blame on Katie’s recent fling with alcoholism, she preferred to hold him and her sister responsible.

B&B’s Katie and Brooke aren’t the first pair of sisters to fight over the same man. (Though is it truly fighting if neither is particularly sure they want him anymore?) Heck, Bill isn’t even the first man Brooke and Katie have in common. There was Ridge. There was Nick. (To be somewhat fair, B&B is a half-hour show with a smaller-than-average cast.)

A sister versus sister love triangle is a soap-opera staple. Read some of our favorites, past and present, at Entertainment Weekly!

WHEN NY SCHOOLS GENTRIFY

I am quoted in an article about NY schools and gentrification:

Alina Adams, the author of Getting Into NYC Kindergarten, works with many parents of color who are trying to get their children into New York City-area elementary schools; she also helps parents adjust to the schools once they’re there. According to Adams, many parents of color express concern that they won’t be listened to at the school. “[Reluctance to speak up] gets magnified when it’s someone of a different race than you or different ethnicity or different economic background,” she said. “Maybe you don’t speak English so well and you feel intimidated by that. How do I challenge this person on this issue when I know that she’s a lawyer and I [just] have a high-school diploma?”

The data bears out some of Adams’s points about disadvantaged parents’ lack of involvement. Lower educational levels are a factor in their limited engagement, as is having a lower socioeconomic status and being an underrepresented minority, a 2013 study on Parental Readiness Empowerment Programs shows. Meanwhile, a 2014 paper that analyzed black parents at an urban middle school found that perceptions of racism and hostile parent-teacher interactions were significant barriers to their engagement at school.

Read more at The Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/07/how-marginalized-families-are-pushed-out-of-ptas/491036/

And to hear more from NYC parents about all aspects of NYC schools, listen to Secrets of NYC Schools podcast.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: DOES VICTORIA ROWELL HAVE A CASE AGAINST Y&R?

Updated 6/28/16: The lawsuit is back on!

Updated 11/12/15: A judge has dismissed Victoria Rowell's retaliation suit against The Young & the Restless, CBS and Sony.

Here is what I wrote for Entertainment Weekly when she first filed....

Originally published 2/25/15

On February 11, 2015, actress Victoria Rowell announced that she was suing her former employer, The Young & the Restless, and its parent company, Sony. Rowell contends that the show won’t rehire her to play the role of Drucilla, a part that Rowell vacated in 2007, due to Rowell’s outspoken activism regarding Y&R’s dearth of African-American actors, writers and directors. The suit also alleges that Rowell faced racial discrimination during her 14 years of starring on the soap, and that she was never offered the opportunity to either write or direct the program. Rowell is seeking back pay, and a return to playing Dru.

CBS and Sony have denied all charges, insisted that the lawsuit has no merit, and that Rowell is attempting to “rewrite history.”

Does the actress have a case?

It would seem that the easiest charge to dispute would be Rowell’s claim that racial discrimination kept her from getting the chance to write or direct her show.

True, some actors, like Days of Our Lives Alison Sweeney have directed. Pamela Long went from an actor on Texas to its Headwriter, before assuming the same position at Guiding Light and One Life to Live, among others. And Ellen Wheeler and Christopher Goutman were able to transition from actors to directors to Executive Producers of GL and As the World Turns, respectively. But that’s literally only a handful of people among the tens of thousands of actors who’ve passed through the daytime drama world. It can hardly be considered a common opportunity offered to all, save Rowell.

When I interviewed her for my book, “Soap Opera 451: A TimeCapsule of Daytime Drama’s Greatest Moments,” Rowell asserted, “You don’t stay in a storyline if you’re not selling a story, and if you’re not selling the story, you don’t stay employed.  At the end of the day, this is about keeping a show on the air, and a show that’s selling soap.  You’re selling products.  I understood the business dynamics.”

This is presumably why Rowell’s lawsuit also charges that, by refusing her entreaties to reprise Dru, CBS and Sony are undermining their own financial interests for purely personal reasons. Rowell believes that she is a fan favorite whose return will help raise Y&R’s ratings.

Rowell, however, is not the first actor in daytime history to be fired (or, in her case, not be rehired) despite vocal fan support and to the show’s apparent detriment.

To get the inside story on examples from DOOL, GH, ATWT and more, go to: http://community.ew.com/2015/02/24/victoria-rowell-lawsuit-the-young-and-the-restless/

THE KINDS OF DECISIONS MADE ONLY ON SOAPS....

My good friend, the novelist Kyra Davis, once explained, “You know it’s a soap opera if whatever choice a normal person would make, they make the opposite.”

Nothing illustrates her observation better than the goings-on on all four of the remaining network daytime dramas last week.

Find out what they were at Entertainment Weekly: http://community.ew.com/2016/06/21/only-on-a-soap-decisions/

SOAP OPERA GEEKS!

Will (soap-opera) geeks ever inherit the Earth (while staying geeks)? Find out at Entertainment Weekly: http://community.ew.com/2016/06/14/soap-opera-geeks/

LAST WEEK ON THE SOAPS: NOTHING HAPPENED

Exactly a year ago, I wrote a post wondering WhateverHappened to Classic Summer Love Stories? I name-checked the classics like General Hospital’s Luke and Laura on the run from the mob and, later, stopping an evil maniac set on freezing the world (and saving us all from global warning, but nobody realized it at the time). There was Days of Our Lives Bo and Hope and Kayla and Patch (that’s Steve, to you new viewers) and Kim and Shane and Roman and Marlena and location shoots and prisms buried in ice and Phil Collins music (yes, I realize I’ve compressed several summers and stories into one, but doesn’t it all seem like just one glorious season?). We had All My Children’s Erica facing down a bear and breaking her lover out of jail, and One Life to Live’s Vicky going to Heaven and traveling through time to rescue her husband from the Old West. Guiding Light featured young love via the same rich girl/rich boy/poor girl from a big, salt of the earth, fatherless household triangle writer Douglas Marland would later recreate on As the World Turns, while Santa Barbara contrasted the angst of Cruz and Eden against Mason and Julia’s banter, and Another World threw an Electra complex into its triangle for some very different results.

Let’s all take a moment to recall the 1970s, 80s (and some of the 1990s).

Now it’s summer of 2016. Time for fun and travel and romance, right? Right? Find out what's happening on the last four soaps left standing and how it measures up to the glory days at: http://community.ew.com/2016/06/07/nothing-happened/