Modern Screen (Dec 1949 - Nov 1950)

80 GET FLAME -GLO AT POPULAR PRICE COSMETIC COUNTERS about yourself for awhile and think about the girl you're with and what makes her happy? You'd enjoy yourself a lot more if you would. TJTere are some questions on different sub* jects, but before I go on I want to thank you for being so nice and friendly to me and for believing that maybe I can help. I'd give anything if I could answer every letter personally. I read every letter but if I answered them all I'd be doing nothing else but, and it seems I'm under contract to Mr. Samuel Goldwyn who keeps me pretty busy. "Dear Joan: What did you do to lose baby jat?"—R. H., Bronx, N. Y. For five days this was my diet: An egg and one piece of thin-sliced, slightly buttered toast for breakfast. For lunch a fruit salad or cottage cheese and pineapple. For dinner either a small steak or lamb chops, celery, sliced tomatoes and one green vegetable. I lost five pounds that way. Now I am just careful — no sweets, no potatoes, no bread and butter. Then I did stretching exercises — not exercises to make you muscular but to make you lithe. Good posture makes you seem slim. When I see someone I haven't seen in quite a little while I'll hear, "Why Joan, you've grown taller." I haven't grown so much as half an inch in over a year. It's just that I carry myself better than I did. Try my method, it works. "Dear Joan: Due to illness I was kept back a year in school. Now I'm in high school — first year. I'm a year older than everybody else and I feel strange. Boys a year younger than I am seem like babies." — /. L., Butte, Montana. Isn't it funny about problems? Yours is just the reverse of mine. I skipped eighth grade so in my first year in high school I was a year younger than everybody else. What I did was to find my social contacts outside the school. Can't you do the same? Discover your own age group through church activities or, perhaps, you could join some young persons' club. Or— and maybe this is the best suggestion of all — could you get a teacher to work with you after school and evenings and make up the year you lost so you can catch up and join your own age group? "Dear Joan: Every time I take a girl out she starts talking about going steady. I don't want to go steady. What should I do?" — C. R., Birmingham, Ala. I have just been giving the boys a lecture so now I guess it's time to give one to the girls. As I've said many times I think going steady for teen-agers is wrong. I can't imagine a girl bold enough to suggest to a boy that you go steady. That's the boy's place. If I were you, C. R., I'd just explain to the girls that you're not old enough to go steady and that getting serious at our age is foolish. "Dear Joan: How do you tell a boy you can't go to a certain place without seeming a prude? After the show the boy wants t< take you to a place to eat. But the place i. your parents out-of-bounds region. How cai, you convince him not to go there withou' scaring him away?"— P. T ., Winnipeg, Canada So many problems would be solved if we would all just tell the truth. All you have t< do, honestly, is to tell the boy that your par ents do not want you to go to this particula place and you're sure they have good anc valid reasons. There must be other places tt eat, places your parents would okay. Thei. if he insists on going to the out-of-bound: place you can be sure that your parents an quite right and it's not a good place. I believe that if two people can talk out a problem, i: both sides can be heard that there is ahvay: a solution. "Dear Joan: I will go out with a boy ant like him a lot. Then he will start to likt. me and I find I don't like him. What shoidc I do?" — L. M., Tampa, Florida. The trouble with you is you're fickle. Yoi must have a straight talk with yourself, can't answer your problem. Only you car answer that. You must ask yourself somi' questions. You must find out why you gc' cold on a boy the minute he begins to like you. That's a fault in your nature. I ahvay advise talking a situation out. This time vol! have to talk the problem out with yourself Thanks again, for listening. Editor's note: Do you have a teenager problem? If so. tell it to Joan Write to Joan Evans. Box 93, Bevei Hills, California. HOLLYWOOD, HERE I COME While working as a salesman for a Philadelphia advertising firm, Dan Duryea spent a weekend with friends in Syracuse. He took part in making a backyard amateur movie there. Turning on all the charm he had, Duryea flung himself whole-heartedly into the enterprise. The next time he visited Syracuse, the picture was projected for him. Looking at it he brooded about the same things any other man worries about at such a time — whether he seemed gawkish and amateurish; whether or not his hairline was receding. Suddenly with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, he found himself worrying about something else. Despite the charm he slathered on, the pictured Duryea he saw was a punk he wouldn't have staked to a cup of coffee if he'd found him starving on the street. Through some freak of physiognomy, plus his ability — so liairtriggered that he cannot always control it — to let his projected personality change him into an ugly duckling, he had arrived on that screen looking unlovely and unlovable. — (Pete Martin, from Hollywood Without Makeup)