A Big Welcome to Phil: The Anti-Elly

This has been a very busy weekend in my family. My daughter turned 11 and had a sleepover with 8 girls. In order to keep my son busy, my wife invited one of his friends to spend the night. It was the first time I have experienced something like that. The girls liked it, but it was exhausting. My daughter was proud of pointing out that she stayed up until 5:07 am. I cannot say the same. Fortunately the kind of mischief 11-year-old girls get into at night involve fairly mild things like, “See how loud my daddy snores at night.” The next day I found my questioning my wife when the kids were ever going to leave. It took until 1:45 pm to get rid of the last kid, oddly enough the boy who was over visiting with my son.

In the midst of all this, I was doing performances of Handel’s Messiah with the Tucson Symphony Orchestra and Chorus and dragged my poor son to hear his first live performance of the piece. He said he enjoyed it, and the bass soloist for the piece (who could see him clearly from where he was sitting) reported that he was attentive. What this boils down to is not a lot of responding to things on the old Howard Bunt Blog, for which I apologize.

In today’s For Better or For Worse, we see the reprint that leads into the visit from brother Phil. It essentially makes Phil seem like the anti-Elly from Elly’s own comparison to herself. There is also the potential to begin the love triangle storyline involving Phil Richards / Connie Poirier / Ted McCaulay. The real question is whether Lynn Johnston will do it. Lynn has given off some subtle hints that she is focusing on the Patterson family exclusively and not going into the long storylines with the side characters. On the other hand, the updated Who’s Who on the website leaves in all those characters as if they are going to be used. In each case, the character's original biography was left intact up to the point where the romance had been described. If I were just going by the Who's Who, it would seem that romance is imminent.

I think the real question coming up is about the use of new-runs in general. We have gone through 7 reprints of dailies as of today, which is the longest stretch of daily reprints we have had since Lynn started doing new-runs mixed with reprints. It’s too early to call that Lynn has officially gone to straight reprints. We could just be seeing the effects of a long vacation.

Will there be romance? I think there probably will be. The more interesting aspect for me is the new-runs. I saw how brutally unromantic Liz and Anthony’s romance was, and it will be interesting to see how unromantic the new-runs for Connie and Ted will be.