(pictured: Stacy Haiduk posing with the infamous kitty cat made famous by Y and R)
(update to this post: I just read this little snippet and totally agree...what a waste of Stacy Haiduk's talent on Y&R, which I'm shamefully still watching if only for the amazing job she's doing with such a sorry storyline!)
Back in 1983 "Patty Williams (Abbott)" was a character on the soap "The Young and The Restless"...an actress named Andrea Evans (whom I ended up writing a gushing fan letter to and receiving a friendly reply from) played her with all the unhinged madness you'd expect in a woman who (after discovering she's married to a manwhore*) walks into her husband's office one day intending to kill herself only to shoot him instead.
Her passion was the exact opposite of the "on the verge of womanhood" innocence Lilibet Stern (her predecessor) had given the same role just two years earlier when she had yet to marry Jack Abbott and looked like she should be out on a farm somewhere milking cows while also possibly posing for a calendar of some sort...yet both Evans and Stern knew "Patty Williams" was a very unbalanced woman and let that show wonderfully in their performances.
I had completely forgotten about all of this until last Thursday when, sick in bed with a bad cold, I was flipping through the tv and landed on "The Young and The Restless." It had been years since I'd watched the soap. Andrea Evans had long ago gone on to other roles..."Patty" having run away in the wake of her disastrous divorce, never to be heard from again...until, last Thursday, that is.
The actress now playing her (Stacy Haiduk) is to be commended for doing her best with a character that the writers (for unknown reasons? maybe to get creative juices flowing again?) seemed to have randomly pulled out of the water so many years later.
If not for the insanely insipid (and very much 'been there, done that') "plastic surgery double" plot device used to re-introduce Patty's character, there might be some potential in re-exploring a character that was once so vulnerable in misguided love. (But seriously...I love how only on soaps does facial plastic surgery come with a new voice, an extra foot in height and a new body.)
But whatever talent Haiduk has (and she does have it, especially in oddly touching scenes where her character's only confidantes are a small kitty cat and her brother played by a very bewildered and often sobbing Paul Williams, one of the few Y&R originals still left) is lost in a sea of cliched soap opera theatrics and doppelganger impossibilities.
*"manwhore" is a slang word for the male equivalent of well...you can imagine...let's just say Jack was never a man known for keeping his pants on very long!:)
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