By Susan Bennett Holmes
This article originally appeared in the June 1949 edition of “Woman’s Day” magazine. Other articles that month included “Lard for Baking” and “Waltz Me Around.”
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May is glamour month in our lives. To others, May is for moth prevention. Tugging tired woolens out of one closet, whacking them and sealing them up in another is called moth prevention. You must have seen it going on in the springtime. A lot of people gather nuts in May, although no one we know happens to. May is the time to be ready for a fresh crack at the world. There’s an expectancy in the air; something terrific is just around the corner, a wonderful, wonderful guy for instance. (There are probably other examples -- this one just came to us!) Little tiny flowers blossom out. Why can’t you? And so we are going to devote this column entirely to your coming out.
How are you going to make him notice you? One of the most despairing moments in your life is the one in which the man you could die for walks across your horizon for the first time. One look and you’re gone. First your heart stands still and then you come to: why on earth would he notice you?
He will, but it is going to take action.
We choose the word action. We use it with emphasis. For it is our conviction that your chances of success lie in what you do, the things you’re interested in, the fun you create around you, more than in how you look. Of course you want to look your most gorgeous, of course you love clothes and want them to really show you off, but the problem of making yourself stand out as an attractive person, a gal to be reckoned with, will be more easily and better solved by action. Because men are doers. Men play football, take machines apart and put them together again, paint boats and make scale models of airplanes. Rarely do they just look. Or if they do – it’s only for a minute.
What can you do first? Essential to the whole campaign is your being within seeing, and preferably speaking, distance of this character. Dumb admiration in the depths of your room will prove your devotion, but it won’t move him. You are not as helpless as you feel. You can create a few chances to see him. This does not mean lurking deliberately, casually in the hot-fudge-nut dispensary for two hours in the hope of just running into him. But you can include him in some plans. You can suggest to your date, if you are arranging a gang gathering for Saturday, that he get the victim for Mary Jo as her date. (Don’t be too unselfish about this – but pick somebody nice.) Or you can find out what he does and pitch in on some of the work yourself. Maybe he runs the Saturday-evening parties at the church and a girl to string crinkle paper around the rafters is just what he needs.
Never set up what you hope will be a situation for two. At your age you travel in groups. He’s going to think it’s abnormal and faintly tedious if he is singled out. Stick to your original purpose – to be within noticing distance.
TOMORROW
Excerpt from Part 2: You can help put together the eats in the kitchen and nonchalantly offer him a tasty hot dog.
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