So I was watching Soapnet a few weeks ago – the “I Wanna Be a Soap Star” thing. And the casting director on the panel of judges – OLTL’s own Julie Madison, no less - said something like ‘on a soap, it’s all about sex’. What an absolute crock! She should be ashamed to admit to the world that she’s got no clue about the medium in which she works. Unfortunately for us all, she’s not the only one making decisions at OLTL with no idea about what really makes soaps tick. In fact, two other names come to mind. Hmmm. Now let me see. Who are they again? I’ve got it! Dena Higley and Frank Valentini - Head Writer and Executive Producer, respectively.

If soaps were all about sex, then a scene like the Cristian/Evangeline “love” scene would have resonated with more of us. But it didn’t. Know why? It’s because Cristian/Evangeline, just like John/Natalie, are a manufactured pairing. They are the result of a writer (let’s say Dena Higley, for instance), looking at her cast and the on-screen pairings and saying to herself or maybe even someone else (let’s say Frank Valentini, for example), we’ll slap these two together. If John & Evangeline have such a strong following, surely if we split them up – put John with Natalie and then later put Evangeline with Cristian, we’ll have 2 pairings with strong followings. Trouble is that this kind of thinking doesn't take into account the same thing that Ms. Madison seems not to know. More than anything else, soaps are about relationships and character histories. That’s what makes viewers care about characters and what happens to them – the experiences we watched the characters have, the relationships we saw develop. Sex in a vacuum is just that – choreographed rolling around while three cameras get it on tape. And, for me, sex and what’s sexy are often two very different things.

Cristian and Evangeline have no history – first offense. He is an ex-felon, a confessed murderer, a failed artist, a wannabe boxer, a no-job, unimaginative, low-expectation-and-no-visible-means-of-support-having, overbearing, manipulative, controlling, brainwashed, stifling, energy-draining killer – one who held onto his love for the wretched Natalie all through his two-year-long captivity on that ship, all through his nearly year-long time in prison. It was his love for Natalie that kept him going, so he told the world. So what happens? As quickly as you can say ‘just like that’, Cristian decides that he now loves Evangeline – so much so that he can’t even muster a word of conversation for the woman he supposedly loved so much that the mere thought of her got him through three years of mental torture. This woman was injured in the tornado that hit Llanview, Pennsylvania (?) but he never bothered to find out whether or not she was alright. He neither understands nor cares about what makes Evangeline tick, namely her career. His mind operates on another plane entirely. He feels perfectly justified in physically restraining her from doing her job (back when she actually tried to do her job) and had no qualms about the vicious comment he made to Todd in prison, something like ‘You’ll be dead in five weeks anyway. Don’t take her down with you.’ And when Todd was proved innocent of the crime he was accused of committing and very nearly lost his life for something he did not do, did Cristian apologize for what he said? Nope. Did he instead try to take even firmer possession of Evangeline’s life? Yes, indeed, going so far as to try to find his way into her bed, completely oblivious to the fact that this independent woman was still reeling from the loss of her eyesight and the destruction of the law practice she put her heart and soul into building. Making the commitment to be intimate with a man was just about the very last thing she needed at that moment. And when Evangeline accompanied Todd to the Gala, because he – her friend – had been going through a rough time lately and she wanted to be there for him, didn’t Cristian convince her to walk away from a clearly distraught Todd, saying something profound like ‘He doesn’t want your help. You can’t help him’ (something I wish someone had said to her about Cristian almost a year ago but I digress…). And what was on Cristian’s agenda instead? Why instead of respecting her friendship with Todd and allowing her to support her friend through his latest painful time, he wanted to get Evangeline into bed – period. That’s what. All due respect to all you Cristian/Evangeline fans but, for me, this guy is nothing more than Natalie’s cast-off, a total sleaze.

By the way, do you wonder why you haven’t seen a hint of either Mama Lisa or Uncle Clay? Why wonder? It’s painfully obvious. Lisa Williamson and Uncle Clay would never approve of Cristian Vega and his ‘own gym” for their precious “Cookie”. Never say ‘never’? Well, I’m saying it - NEVER, NEVER, NEVER - at least not if they were written as the characters they were back when they first appeared in 2005. In fact, I’ll go even further. If Mama Lisa came to town and found out about the man her baby was rolling around with, her next stop would be the LPD and John McBain’s office, trying to re-unite him with her daughter. While I’m on the subject, here’s a side note. They’d never approve of Todd Manning, either. A rapist? Nope – don’t think so.

More importantly, here is a “connection” that was manufactured – assembly-line chemistry is what I call it. That’s the kind of “connection” between characters that springs to life in some writer’s imagination and nowhere else, based on what they ate for dinner one night or the wind velocity or the price of tea or who knows what. Usually, though, the primary motivation comes from the arrogant and disrespectful attempt to manipulate the viewing audience, trying to maneuver viewers into seeing what they want viewers to see, to think what they want viewers to think. Little storyline tidbits are released as “spoilers”, focused articles to support the agenda begin appearing in the soap mags and rags. Polls spring up where the only available options are the ones they want viewers to consider and options that viewers may actually want are left off the table, forcing those who respond to choose from what’s allowable only. This, of course, gives the folks in charge the excuse not to develop stories that viewers may really want to see, saying, ‘But you chose this. Don’t you remember? We’re only giving you what you said you wanted.’ Why, even Executive Producers – Frank Valentini, for instance – start giving interviews, pimping only the angles they want to push, totally ignoring ones that the viewers want to see. And then what happens? The whole thing fizzles when we see it play out onscreen. It’s been that way forever with John and Natalie and it’s that way now for Cristian and Evangeline. To quote Marvin Gaye in ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’, they say believe half of what you see and none of what you hear. I’ll take it one step further. In cases like this, it’s best to believe none of what we see or hear, period, because what we see and hear is a manufactured, packaged, pre-processed, adulterated, slapdash, held-together-with-bubble-gum-and-string, completely unsatisfying series of unrelated plot points - especially because we know that we’re being manipulated. And that makes some of us very, very angry. It's even at the point where actors and actresses are blamed for the twists and turns in the stories they're paid to act in when it's really the writers and producers who allow the travesty to continue without end. Not fair.

‘But what about character history?’ you counter. ‘John and Natalie have history.’ Yes, they do. But the history of John and Natalie is that they are a pairing that NEVER WORKED - for whatever reason. She feels more like a wayward surrogate kid sister to John McBain – someone who’s just as misguided as Shannon McBain was – only way, way, way less engaging and way, way, way more irritating. But she most definitely does not feel like a girlfriend or anything of the kind. What a monumental waste of the progress that John McBain was making during his time with Evangeline Williamson! Natalie is a setback for John and excruciating to watch. And, make no mistake. Cristian is a setback for Evangeline and just as excruciating to watch. And both are setbacks for viewers like me who came back to OLTL because of John and Evangeline and the promise they represented - that there was finally a soap that was ready to tell a front-burner story about a man and woman in a relateable committed, adult relatioship who were falling in love and who just happened to be of different races, the connection between them being the sole reason for telling the story in the first place. And OLTL lived up to its promise for a little while. Only then we were repaid for our faith by being slapped in the face with what would have to step way up in quality to be dismissed as crap. And we're told that we're supposed to like it. Well, I don't like it. And even if we don't like it and we say so over and over again, the folks in charge do everything they can to ram their decisions down our throats over and over again - no matter how loudly we scream and beg for them to stop the torture. In my book, what’s been done to the characters of John and Evangeline as a result constitutes grounds for dismissal and nothing less than a five to ten year suspension from the medium for Valentini and an outright lifetime ban for Higley, who clearly wouldn't know an actual story (one scene that builds to another that builds to another and so on and so on...) if it came up and bit her on the nose.

Unfortunately though, soaps make this mistake all the time. They put so-and-so with so-and-so and insist to us that they’re the couple to beat – the new Super Couple. We see it in all the soap rags and mags. We hear it on commercials. Sometimes we even see it on billboards around our towns. Who are they to tell viewers who a Super Couple is? How presumptuous. They’re not watching this stuff. They’re just making money from it. We – the viewers - are the ones who tell them who a Super Couple is. And back in the middle of 2004, more than a few of us told them that that Super Couple was John McBain and Evangeline Williamson.

And no, it wasn’t because of the unexpected love scene in the basement of Mary Barnes’ house. It wasn’t because of the love scene in John’s room after Rex watched him pull Evangeline inside. It wasn’t because of the scene in Evangeline’s office when she and John went at it that day.

It was because of all the little things that came with that surprise relationship - all the little things we all saw with our own eyes and felt with our own hearts. It was the sweet way that John draped his jacket around Evangeline’s shoulders after what happened between them in her office that day – the way he held her in his arms as she held onto him and cried over the death of her aunt. It was the slow and tender build-up from Mary Barnes’ basement to the scene with the strings at the Country Club and every stop along the way (back when John was actually allowed to go places and to do things without having Natalie attached to his hip). It was the aftermath when Evangeline was attacked by the bigot and her gift to John of the football to replace the one she threw into the river. It was the never heard ‘I think I’m falling in love with you’ from John to Evangeline on the night of his birthday. It was the gift of his mother’s pearls on her birthday. It was the way John snuggled next to a sleeping Evangeline in bed that day, the way they leaned across the table at Carlota’s Diner and kissed, reassuring themselves and each other that their relationship was strong enough to withstand any and all attacks from the outside. It was in the way that John admitted to Evangeline that she made him feel things he never thought he’d feel again, the uncertain way that he looked into her eyes and told her that he didn’t know how to change all the ways he’d let her down during their relationship. It was the football game and the way they walked hand in hand - a united front - into that funeral home for her aunt’s service, ready to face together whatever her family wanted to throw at them. It was in the way Evangeline told John that, as long as they had a chance, she would stick with him forever. What about the way they sat on the sofa in her office (yes, she actually had one once – and she actually used to go there from time to time), his arm around her and her head on his shoulder, saying nothing with words but saying so much just the same? How about the way that just the sound of John's voice seemed to comfort Evangeline while she was under hypnosis or the emotion in his voice when he told her that she'd saved him? The tears that glistened in John’s eyes when he insisted that she not give up on him – that they were worth fighting for? The way that John massaged Evangeline’s wrists after the handcuffs were removed after she was arrested – the look in their eyes for each other? How about the way that all other characters faded and still fade from view whenever these two are in a scene together – every bit of it accomplished in a fraction of the screen time we’ve been forced to endure, listening to endless stream after stream of meaningless words between John and Natalie, between Evangeline and Cristian, so many in fact that even the promise of one moment of shared screen time between Evangeline and John will likely be an oasis of quality in a sea of the virtually un-watchable, words or no words – simply because of the emotional power that still exists between the two of them?

Now that, dear OLTL, is chemistry – real, organic, not-manufactured chemistry. That’s passion. That’s sexy.

That’s a Super Couple.