Well, it was very difficult at the time, because basically I had the shovel. Jodie was really the first recurring character, starring character, whatever you want to call it, on network television. It was a different time. It was 1977. So, yeah, it was awkward and it was tough. I remember playing scenes with my boyfriend, Bob Seagren, who, in real life, was an Olympic gold medalist…yeah, it was awkward, and then over the years, you’d see other different characters and so on and so forth. And I’ve seen some stuff recently on TV in different kinds of shows where the language or the explicit sex is really ‑‑ you know, sometimes I get it, and sometimes I have ‑‑ I just feel like, “Ah, that’s too much for me.”…sometimes it’s just pushed a little too far for my tastes and I’m not going to get into which ones they are.
I have to say ‘we,’ because Susan Harris wrote [Jodie], and Paul Witt and Tony Thomas and Jay Sandrich and an amazing cast of that show supported me and let me play those scenes, helped me play those scenes with some sort of courage, in a front of a live audience. See, I did it in front of a live audience and there were times where I would say to Bob [Seagren, who played Jodie’s lover, Dennis], “I love you,” and the audience would laugh nervously, because, you know, it’s a long time ago, and I’d feel this anger. I wanted to stop the tape and go, “What is your problem?” because it made you sort of very self‑conscious about what we were trying to do then. And now it’s just I see it and I just hope people don’t abuse it and shove it in our face ‑‑ well, that sounds terrible [some laugher from the crowd]‑‑ to the point of it just feels like an everyday kind of thing.
