Soap Opera Weekly
June 5, 2001
Crackers for Animals

Catherine Hickland and Darlene Vogel, who play sisters Lindsay and Melanie on One Life to Live, are real-life soul sisters when it comes to their devotion to animals. Darlene recently turned in her ticket for the Daytime Emmy Creative Craft Awards (with apologies to her show's nominees) in order to attend a fund-raiser for the North Shore Animal League at the Garden City Hotel. Catherine donated all the money from on-site sales of her Cat Cosmetics that night to the league and recruited her husband, Michael E. Knight (Tad, All My Children), to join her there, even though he'd already spent the day signing autographs at an ABC promotion in New Jersey and had to sit in traffic for two hours to get to the hotel on Long Island.

Michael told me that he and Catherine have taken to calling their own menagerie of six cats and two dogs, "the tiny livestock." Catherine's mom is moving in to take care of the whole furry family while Michael and Catherine slip off for a vacation in Santa Barbara. He's looking forward to working more heavily on AMC when he gets back. "They've got something going on for me, but I don't know what it is," Michael said. "I played a scene with Greenlee the other day, and I was hoping I'd get into trouble with her." Not romantic trouble, he qualified. "I've got to get Dixie back first."

Catherine's latest animal rescue took place just the week before, when she was out in L.A. closing up her apartment there for good. "I was buying boxes to pack up my stuff," she related, "and before I drove off I found a baby bird under my car. It had fallen out of the nest--it had little twigs in its mouth--and it was so exhausted and dehydrated. I scooped it up in my hand and went back into the bathroom in the box place, and I gave it water off my fingernails. By the time I got out to the car, it was asleep in my hands, and I drove it over to my old vet. I would have paid anything for them to save this little bird, but they didn't want any money, and they promised me they would nurse it back to health. It just made my whole year to know that there are people out there who care enough to rehabilitate a poor little animal.