While renewing Annual Passes for myself and Alice a few minutes later, I heard a huge explosion. In the nanosecond I considered ducking and decided not to, I looked over and noticed a huge, black cloud of smoke billowing out of the chimney of Number 2 on the Disneyland Railroad, the Fred Gurley. "Oh, no, the train blew up" I thought, and, with geeky journalistic instinct, grabbed my camera.

A few small wisps of smoke cleared the chimney, people gathered around the engine, and then the train was cleared of guests and shortly thereafter rolled out of the station. My ears rang for an hour. I called Doobie and some other folks I know who know about trains, but didn't get an answer about what had happened until the next day. Very simply, the fire had gone out in the firebox. All of that noise and smoke, and, fortunately, it was something very small. If I hadn't known Alice as a baby, I wouldn't have thought something so small could make so much mess and noise.

Wait Willey (Jackson Montgomery from All My Children), host of Casting Call
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Sunday was day two of my Super Soap Commando experiment. I arrived, met M. and John the host, and had Alice with me. We got lunch reservations and Millionaire tickets, then grabbed something at the Bakery before heading off to the Golden Dreams theatre for Casting Call with Walt Willey of All My Children and Timothy D. Stickney as the resident hunk. If you didn't read about it last week, in Casting Call, three people are selected from the audience to read a scene with Walt, and the winner gets to do a scene with the hunk of the show. For this morning's performance, Tim was It. The performance coincided with the big breakfast event of the weekend, Breakfast With the Stars at Soap Opera Bistro, so the last couple of rows were empty. I set myself up in the back and watched, and was so glad I attended that show in particular: The show started with Walt Willey coming out and announcing that this was the First Annual Super Soap Weekends, to cheers from the audience, and the tryouts began.

Acting with Guests
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The winner was a young woman named Stacy, who was remarkable in that not too long ago, she had breast cancer and it was not known if she would survive the illness and treatment (many people don't know that sometimes the cure is as bad as the cancer; my own brother died from complications of his chemotherapy for treatment of lymphoma) and the thought of coming to an upcoming One Life to Live event kept her going. "Remember, no matter how bad it gets, there's hope!" she told the audience upon winning. Timothy spoke about her later in the Llanview Live! Q & A session and how much hearing her story and seeing her attitude had meant to him.

Timothy also talked, in the Q & A session, about how difficult it was to find parts in daytime when you look like him. He said he was always getting the parts of Jamaicans, because obviously <sarcasm>there was no one in America who looked like him</sarcasm> and he was pretty happy to be cast as an American guy in OLTL. "But I'm dark, so of course I'm evil" he added. I did a quick run-through of good and bad characters on the show and to my shock and sadness found that what he said was true.

But the cast made sure that things lightened up quickly: "Why is RJ so bad? "Well, he hasn't had a love interest in years - the only one he had left him for the serial rapist!" - much to the audience's loud disapproval of the tragic situation - Timothy went on to claim that RJ is "all backed up"! It was great to see the cast laughing and joking together. There were many more serious questions and less requests for hugs than at the All My Children weekend, and a more...cerebral...atmosphere over the whole weekend.

I wonder if there will be a supernatural feel to the General Hospital/Port Charles weekend with everything that's been happening on those shows. We'll have to wait and see!