Soap Opera Magazine
June 25, 1996
The Gossip

Catherine Hickland (Tess, The City) is a real trouper. She performed her cabaret show at the Triad despite a personal tragedy and a strangling case of strep throat. "I got a steroid shot in my butt so this is a drug-induced performance," she confided during her act, which she'd titled "Boys on the Side" and explained was "a retrospective of my life as a woman." Dry one-liners ("The men in my life have made me what I am today: f------ insane") and ironic musings about her romantic history (herstory?) threaded together her songs. One, Time Heals Everything, summed up the relationship she'd had with her first husband, "the man I once had a restraining order against," who later became such a close friend that he named his daughter from a succeeding marriage after Catherine, and she, for her part, rushed to be with him before his death in Florida just a few weeks before this show.

There were no pretty songs--only sly jokes--about her second marriage, to David Hasselhoff. But her third marriage, to Michael E. Knight (Tad, AMC), was celebrated with Love Changes Everything. Unfortunately, Michael was working late, so he didn't get to the Triad until after the show. But Felicity LaFortune (ex-Laurel, AMC), Phillip Brown, Debbi Morgan (Buck and Angie, The City), Susan Haskell, Thorsten Kaye (Marty and Patrick, One Life to Live), Rosie O'Donnell and Nathan Fillion (Joey, OLTL) holding hands with Vanessa Marcil (Brenda, GH), were there to applaud Catherine; her three partners, Broadway's Keith Buterbaugh, Craig Rubano and Sean McDermott); and her accompanist, Matthew Sklar, of whom with characteristic candor she quipped: "If I were 22 and single, there'd be nothing left but his sneakers, baby."