Not Another Cent For Stockings!

“Mums” is such a mean old thing - look at her, jabbing her index finger at her daughter, insisting that she go and mend the runs in her stockings. How’s she’s going to do that in the dark I don’t know - Mums seems to have put the kibosh on the electric lights, too.

And then things get even worse - the daughter turns into a cartoon character, “embarrassed by mended stockings.” There she is, grumping about her “cruel mother” to her friend. The friend has had this problem too. It’s not just about stockings, though, is it?  Ah, it never is. Mothers are just - so, so infuriating ! They just don’t understand about horrid stockings - or anything else, really.

But this is the Ladies’ Home Journal - read mostly by, well, mothers.  So we had better not have the ad say it is their fault. I mean, they are probably already pretty crabby, if the first photo’s any indication.

So the  cartoon friend is made to say: it’s really our fault, for not using Lux on those pesky stockings. Cake soap caused those runs! Who knew that  cake soap was so darned sharp?

By that night, the cruel sit-in-the-dark Mums is just a disembodied voice - and she’s turned the lights back on, too.  She’s all sweet and nice, calling the kid “honey,” shelling out for Lux. Everything’s copacetic! There’s no stocking money, but there is Lux money, honey.

Turns out the cartoon heroine is restored to regular life in the last part of the ad - that’s what happens when you use Lux! It really is magic! 

And the heroine turns out to be an actress named Dorothy Dennis. The IMDB says that she was in a movie called All In Fun in 1940, in which she did a bridal routine entitled “Slowly I Turn.”  Tell me this isn’t “Slowly I Turn” as in the routine Lucy Ricardo does in the I Love Lucy episode “The Ballet,” because if it is - she is going to ruin her stockings all right. And (here comes the pun, I couldn’t resist it) - she’ll be out of Lux then!