The sequence in which our group, plus others who were collecting around us, would appear was worked out so that pathos would alternate with entertainment. The idea was to hit all the emotional chords, with sympathy the main theme and comedy, love songs, dancing, etc., hitting the minor notes. Now an emcee appeared to get the show started.
He was indistinguishable from Bud Collier and Art Linkletter in the same way in which they’re indistinguishable from each other and all the other professional hail-fellows-well-met of that TV ilk. He started out high-key and went higher. His good humor was a whine to give-give-give working up to a promise of fabulous entertainment to come and ending with a whimper that introduced the evidence of the heinous effects of acne.
The camera took over the stage then. A screen was dropped and a short-short motion picture began. The film was of various sufferers who’d been laid low by acne and the emcee kept up a running bath of bathos in the background.
A pimple-face child in a playground was shown being shunned by his playmates. “Childhood's fondest memories destroyed by the psychological impact of this dread disease . . .” intoned the emcee.
The scene switched to a high-school dance. A young girl with a cratered face right out of All Quiet on the Western Front was shown sitting alone on the sidelines while all around her youngsters were having a good time. A handsome boy approached her, looked, shook his head sadly and turned away and asked another girl to dance instead. “Adolescents who are social under-achievers frequently trace their deprivation to the all-too-visible symptoms of America’s number one skin disease. . . ." the emcee commented solemnly.
Again the scene changed. A groom was shown carrying his bride across the threshold into their new-home. They embraced, simpered, and then the bride left him for the privacy of her bathroom where, presumably, she was getting herself ready for their wedding night. But the bathroom wasn’t that all private since the camera followed her inside. Dissolve to show her in negligee and robe -- demure, but suggestive. Then close-up to see her removing her make-up with cold cream. Revelation! The bride has a pox on her. Acne from ear to ear. She leaves the bathroom and there’s another dissolve to a close-up of the groom's face, horror-struck as the acne’d truth is revealed to him. “Three out of four marriages end in divorce,” the emcee said in a quavery voice. “And who knows how often acne has been the culprit behind the destruction of connubial bliss? . . ."
A lonely old man sitting on at park bench came next. He was trying to feed the pigeons. But when one flew up to accept the old man's breadcrumbs, the bird took one look at the acne-cragged face and took off without a nibble. “No segment of our society-is spared the effects of this dread disease, no age group, no economic bracket,” the emcee pointed out as the film ended. “But it can be licked through your contribution to the Acne Foundation. Now, I can tell by the cash-register-jingle of those telephones that those contributions are already beginning to be phoned in. Do we have a total yet, girls? . . . Well, while the girls are figuring the total, the early total attesting to your generosity, let’s listen for a few moments to Dr. Alphonse B. Scabrous, head and guiding light of the Acne Foundation. Dr. Scabrous, the floor is yours.”
A slight man with the furtive appearance of a floor-walker given to pinching salesgirls materialized in front of the hanging mike. His voice as he spoke was official AMA bedside manner all the way.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. It’s a pleasure to be able to talk to you tonight about the great strides being made by the Acne Foundation in fighting America’s number one skin disease. Before I get into facts and figures about our activities, I'd like to tell you a little anecdote which, I think, will serve to illustrate the human side of our work. Not so very long ago in the remote mountain country of the Ozarks there was born to a family of twelve children a thirteenth child. Now, within a very short time it became obvious that this thirteenth child was different from the others. The first twelve were all clear of skin and erect of posture. But this thirteenth child, a girl, early developed a mottled flesh and hung her head and stooped and shuffled her feet because of it. As she grew older, her condition worsened and the family began to take notice of it. Her father whispered to her mother ‘How come the brat’s so pimply?’ and the poor child overheard and that night sprouted a dozen new pustules and developed a tic in her left eye and tripped over her feet even more than she had been doing. Her mother sighed and shook her head and tried to embrace the poor child with a mother’s love, but always she had to close her eyes because she could not bear to look at the ravaged skin of her youngest offspring. And the child was aware of this and tried to hide her face from her mother and ate sweets compulsively to make up for the lack of love she felt, which only made her skin worse and gave her cramps and resulted in an embarrassing flatulence. Her brothers and sisters noticed the flatulence and, on top of her blotchy condition, this made them view her even more askance and poke fun at her. So she trailed along at the end of the family line whenever they went places, and she hung her head, and she sniveled, and her tic quickened, and she tripped over her feet, and her stomach growled in public. In short, by the time she reached adolescence, this child's self-concept was so low that her ego envied worms--at least, worms without acne. She looked at her brothers and sisters with their clear skins, their untwitching eyes, their silent stomachs, their graceful gaits, their confidence in their own attractiveness, and then she looked at herself and life stretched before her as an unending series of pimples waiting to be squeezed. So it was when she was sixteen years of age, and then came a miracle. A team of specialists from the Acne Foundation set up an out-patient clinic in the Ozarks not far from where the girl lived. One day one of the doctors spied her slinking past and seized upon her as a subject in need of help. And help she got! Within a year her tic was gone, her flatulence reduced to a dull rumble, her posture proud and straight, and—miracle of miracles—her skin was as clear as the petals of a water lily. Her father looked at her with new eyes -- almost Oedipal eyes, if I may be permitted a small witticism by way of illustrating the difference in attitude. Her mother recognized that her ugly duckling had become a swan and perceived that she was ready for the world—and the sooner the better, because her mother didn’t really like the look, in the father's eyes. Her brothers and sisters stopped poking fun at her; indeed, they were jealous of her new, swanlike beauty which was so pronounced as to relegate them all to the shadows by comparison. Yes, she was ready for the world, and the world embraced her with open arms. Now I would like you to meet that little girl, grown to flowering clear-skinned womanhood thanks to the Acne Foundation. Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to present the one and only Voluptua!”