Swing (Feb-Dec 1951)

December, 1931 Mrs. Kirsten Sergei. The book: "I Just Like To Kill Things." What sort of things, Mrs. Sergei — ideals, hopes, illusions? Or just people? The New Vitamized Cotton Mather THE closest thing around to Cotton Mather these days is Charles D. Kasher, a pitchman. His eye, I should say, is at least as formidable as Mather's; his upraised finger is almost as disapproving and his fanaticism for N. H. A. Vitamin com' pound approaches that of Mather for soul-saving. The boys had rather different articles to sell but I feel they would have gotten along well. Kasher's pitch is delivered on a halfhour film which belted around the country long before it hit New York. I know because we got letters from people who were overcome with astonishment for two reasons: (a) that there was such a thing as a half-hour commercial; (b) that they sat through it. After experiencing Mr. Kasher — you don't just look at him, you sort of suffer him like an electric shock — I see what they mean. I was paralyzed from the waist down. Some sort of hypnosis which I thought, was a violation of the Federal Communications Commission rules. Kasher's pitch is a straight half-hour scolding without any trimmings, props, pictures, charts, diagrams, movies. Nothing. Just Kasher, a rather scrawny piece of goods with receding hair and a small mustache. Other advertisers may woo you, flatter you, frighten you, or turn on the big bright smile. Not Kasher. He just gives a half-hour of unterrupted hell for the way we eat, the way we sleep and even — so help me hannah — the way we make love. We make love too fast, says Kasher. Take your time. Come to think of it, we do everything too fast (says Kasher) especially eating and even — if my ears weren't playing me tricks — sleeping. Me, I'm a slow sleeper and always have been. I sleep along at about four knots. But I suppose there are fast sleepers who go screaming down nyctitropisra eighty miles an hour, taking the curves on one elbow. While belaboring the rest of us, Kasher takes an occasional poke at some really sacred American institutions. The comic strip advertisement, for example. John doesn't love me any more, says the weeping girl. Next cartoon: a babe whispering in her ear about Bathseba soap. So she bathes. So they get married. I don't know how the soap people, who underwrite so much of our broadcasting, are going to take this attack on fundamental American principles. If the right soap isn't the answer to all our problems, what is? Well, Mr. K. supplies the answer to that, too. N. H. A. complex. Incidentally, his lecture on food and our bad habits seems to my laymen's ear very sound. We do overcook vegetables, rely too heavily on sandwiches, eat too fast, drink too many cold liquids. But in the payoff Mr. Kasher, if I understood him correctly, condones all those malpractices — provided we take his vitamin complex, a rather startling deviation from his original premise and one which Cotton Mather would never have committed. That's the trouble with your contemporary fanatic. He has to wrestle with the sponsor where Mather hal only his conscience to quell. Of the two, the sponsor is infinitely more menacing. There is another more fundamental de ] feet in the hypnotic approach. When I was invited to go out and buy the stuff, I was still rooted to the chair. Couldn't move for three days and by that time I'd I done a bit of thinking. Kasher took the j complex, didn't he? Kept saying he never | missed. And — to paraphrase a line written by George Kaufman and Moss Hart — three days after I'm dead I expect to look better than he does now. There are a lot of pitchmen on television i these days. Kasher being only an example I of the evangelical or God-help-you-if-you ; don't variety. There's one fifteen minute ( spot for Vitamix. A pitchman demonstrates a mixer which reduces egg shells, apple core."; and all sorts of things to liquids | and does it very entertainingly. I keep wishing he'd sort of accidentally drop Kasher in there sometime. After all those years of vitamin pills, Kasher, I bet, would reduce to a liquid more powerful than the atom f bomb. i