Radio and television mirror (July-Dec 1942)

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NATIONAL ART STUDIOS, Dept. 28 Douglas Bldg.,LosADgele9,Cal..orIUE.6thSt..CiPCuiDati.O -It works while you walk Helps \emov asfer • A painful, nagging corn needn't lay you up. No sir.' As shown in the diagrams, this simple, sensible treatment works while you walk. BlueJay Corn Plasters cost very little — only a few cents to treat each corn — at all drug t and toilet goods counters. *Stubborn cases may require more than one application. BLUE -JAY BAUER & BLACK CORN PLASTERS 74 Because You Need Me Continued jrom page 13 but somehow, instead, I heard myself being perfectly straight-forward and serious. Because he was nice — he was so terribly nice. And I hadn't forgotten him, at all. You know about the Stage Door Canteen, don't you? It's the basement lounge of a big theater just off Broadway, and it's the favorite and tremendously successful project of the actors and actresses, writers, and technicians of radio and the stage. It's open seven nights a week, and any man in the uniform of the United Nations is welcome there. We serve food and coffee and soft drinks, and the biggest stars in America come — sometimes to entertain the boys and sometimes just to work in the kitchen or wait on tables. And it's all perfectly free. No soldier or sailor has ever spent a cent of money in the Stage Door Canteen. I'm not one of the biggest stars in America — not by any means — but I do my share at the Canteen. Mostly, I wait on tables, although other times I act as a hostess, dancing with the boys and making them feel at home. The sweet and lovely actress who runs the Canteen told me, when she was assigning duties to everyone, "With your figure and your blonde hair, we'll have to keep you out where the boys can see you. Let the actors and stagehands wash dishes — your job will be to build up morale." Which was nice of her, but I didn't take her seriously enough to shirk real work when there was some to do. I belong to the radio division, and it was my part on the air that first seemed to impress Private Blakely. "You're Marcia Manners on the air!" he'd said, that first time we danced, two weeks ago. "What d'you know! Just wait until I write and tell my mother — she listens to you every day and she thinks you're swell ... I do, too, of course," he had added shyly. His home was in Iowa, he told me, but I might almost have known it from looking at him — that and the fact that he'd been born on a farm and lived there all his life until the Army came and took him away. He exactly fitted the picture that comes into your mind at the words "farm boy" — big and friendly and honest and unspoiled and . . . decent. And here he was back again, looking at me with, an expression that said plainly he'd been anticipating this moment for the two weeks between his last leave and this one. It was an expression that sent the blood pounding up into my cheeks, because it said, as plain as spoken words, "I adore you." That's what it was — adoration. Something so simple and pure and lovely that it humbled me and tied my tongue, making it impossible for me to do what should have been so easy — speak the single sentence that would have sent him away. "I'd have written," he was saying, "but — well, I didn't know your address and I'd have had to send the letter here or to the broadcasting company, and I was afraid you might not get it. So I just came along, hoping you'd be here at the Canteen." This is ridiculous, I tried to say to myself. You're imagining things. A boy doesn't meet a girl once, in a noisy place like this, and fall in love with her. He's just dazzled because you're an actress, and because he's heard you on the air. And besides, he's — he's only a kid. He may be your age as far as years go, but in experience of the world — well, Lois Neale, you could be his mother. All this I said to myself, and it made excellent sense. But all I could say to him was, "I'm glad you came. It's nice seeing you again." "I was thinking," he said carefully, "maybe you could get away from here and we'd go somewhere else — somewhere we could — well, have something to eat and dance a little." It would have been cruel to remind him that right here in the Canteen was more food than either of us could ever eat, and one of the most famous bands in the world playing if we wanted to dance. "I don't know — " I said doubtfully. "I'm supposed to stay here, helping out, until midnight." "I'll wait," he announced. Abruptly, he held up the package. "I brought something for you, but I guess I better not give it to you here." He smiled again — what in the world was that special, heart-breaking quality in his smile? — and retired to a corner of the Canteen. I could almost feel him watching me for the next hour or so, before he presented himself again, right on the dot of midnight. Oh, I tried to be sensible. I really did. I said as we left the Canteen and emerged on the street, eerie in its unaccustomed dim-out, "I ought to be going straight home to bed, you know. After all, I am a working girl." "But tomorrow's Saturday," he said quickly, "and you don't broadcast on Saturdays." "All right," I said, laughing — and then, trying to keep the conversation severely impersonal, "Do you have a long leave?" "Why — no," he admitted. "Not so very. Fact is — it's not a leave at all, just a pass. I have to be back in camp by eight o'clock in the morning." "Eight o'clock! But why in the world! — " "My outfit's — leaving — in a day or two. So this looked like the only chance I'd have to see you . . ." Suddenly he looked around him, at the stone and concrete towers black against the night sky, and he cried, "Isn't there any place in this town we can be quiet and just talk?" We were just passing a parked cab. I didn't want to go to a night club, and anyway a soldier's pay doesn't run to that kind of entertainment. "Let's take this taxi up to the park," I said. "It's cool there — and quiet." It was. We got out of the cab at the Sixth Avenue entrance and walked for a minute, and then we were in a long tunnel of dusk that stretched from one dimmed-out lamp to another. "It's nice here," he said. "It smells like the country." That wasn't true, of course, unless country smells include the fumes of gasoline and hot tar, but I understood how he meant it, as the greatest compliment he could pay the place. Near one of the lamps was a bench, providentially empty, and we sat down there. "Here," he said, thrusting the RADIO AND TELEVISION MIRROR