NOT SO SIMPLE SIMON

Paul Leyden, who played Katie's first husband, Simon Frasier, is coming back to As The World Turns in June.

This is thrilling for me for a number of reasons:

1) I happen to be a Simon and Katie fan. When negotiations for Paul Leyden's return were going on, I kept asking ATWT's Executive Producer Christopher Goutman, "Is Simon coming back? This isn't a professional inquiry, I just want to know."

2) I've read the scripts now for exactly how Simon is coming back to the show, and it's really, really going to be fun. Vintage Simon and Katie, featuring a wink toward their past history -- with a twist that I totally didn't see coming.

3) While I was writing "Oakdale Confidential," I couldn't quite keep my Simon and Katie preference stuffed like a genie in a bottle and, all along, I've been nervous that my own ambivalence transferred to Katie. I personally always felt that she was doth-protesting-too-much in the way she went on and on about being totally over Simon and madly in love with Mike in the book. Of course, at the time that the book was published in Oakdale, that wasn't the case. This Spring, Katie was totally into Mike. They even got married this May. But now with Simon coming back... who knows? Perhaps my personal ambiguity will end up as a sign of things to come for Katie in the future...