Tina Sloan: Changing Shoes... and Careers

Actress Tina Sloan made her daytime debut in 1974 as Kate on Somerset. In 1976, she was yet another revolving door Patti (Jo's daughter) on a second P&G soap, Search for Tomorrow, and, in 1980, she played Olivia on Another World.

But, it was as Nurse Lillian Raines on Guiding Light, a role she assumed in 1983, that Tina made her biggest impact.

Now, exactly one year after GL's cancellation, Tina shares a multitude of stories about her thirty-five years spent working in daytime drama in her new book, Changing Shoes, out September 16, 2010.

As a special treat and heartfelt thank-you to the fans that followed her career for all that time, Tina has written a short story offering her opinion about what happened to Lillian Raines Cooper after The Light went out.

Please enjoy it below!

THE SURPRISE UNRAVELING: An Original Guiding Light Story

By Tina Sloan (Lillian)

Well, it has been quite an eventful year for Buzz and me. The most exciting thing for us was THE SURPRISE UNRAVELING .

I was sitting in a booth at COMPANY, reading a book I read to Beth every night when she was little, and later to Lizzie when she was young.

The book is The Little Prince or Le Petit Prince by Antoine de St Exupery.

I was reading it to Beth as it was her birthday, and it's a tradition I read that book every year on her birthday.

Buzz was working nearby and, as I read, he became very still and his face drained of color.

He came over to where we were, and told me how a nurse had read that story to him every night in Viet Nam when he had been wounded and was blinded for a time from a bomb exploding near him. They had covered his eyes with bandages.

We both knew we had been in Viet Nam at the same time, me as a nurse, he as a soldier, but we had never talked about our lives there. We had both seen too much. As a nurse, I had seen boys my age be so brave and had held them as they left the world.

I was stunned by Buzz's story, as I had read that very book to the man whom I had fallen in love with oh, so long ago. He had had his eyes bandaged but his great spirit and humor had made me fall in love with him. I would sneak over to be with him whenever I had a moment off. He never knew what I looked like, but he loved to put his hands in my long hair. He had died out there — or so I had thought — until this minute when Beth and Buzz and I just stared wordlessly at one another.

Buzz and I went over and over the dates we had been there and the place we had been, when Buzz was wounded and I was nursing. It was the same hospital and the same time and here we were, 40 years later, married to one another and finding out we had loved before as young people.

I explained how I had come into the tent one morning to find him gone and how the orderly said he had been taken to another hospital to be operated on and had left me a message he would be in touch as soon as he could. I waited and waited, and then I heard that the hospital had been bombed and everyone had been killed and when I went there on leave, I found no trace of him.

I asked to be sent back to the States. Buzz said he had been transferred to another hospital and operated on and had been moved elsewhere to recuperate, but when he came back to find me, I had gone back to the States — and he thought it was my way of telling him I didn't care.

I, of course, had my maiden name back then, and Buzz, as we all know, changed his name to protect his life. My maiden name was Jarrett and Buzz called me Jarr-Jarr as I jarred his life so.

We couldn't move or speak. Here was a man I had loved and thought dead. And here I was: The woman he had loved and whom he thought had just given up on him and gone home to the States, so he never tried to find me.

AND WE WERE MARRIED.

No wonder our first kiss had made us giddy at Towers. And no wonder we loved to laugh and romp in the woods. And no wonder we felt a total kinship of souls. We had finally found one another after so many years!

Oh, how Alan would have loved this moment. He would have been so happy for us!

Buzz and I were living in the Spaulding mansion so I could take care of Lizzie's baby as only a great grandmother could, and Buzz loved sitting in Alan's study, being his charming, messy self. I could feel Alan saying, "Buzz, please dress up a bit and do use the fork and not a spoon. And could you read the paper instead of watching TV? And could you please put the top back on the toothpaste?"

Alan was smiling as he said this, I am sure.

We all miss Alan, but Beth and Philip are so happy, and so is Lizzie. James is off in LA, having fun I am certain, as every boy his age does.

Reva and Josh are still not back from their trip, though they are surely having the time of their lives again, and making people smile wherever they go with that darling son of Reva and Jeffrey's....

Changing Shoes is available now via the below link:

Learn more at Tina's website: http://www.changingshoes.com/

To get the dates for her one-woman show of the same title,
go here: http://www.changingshoes.com/show.html