Studio Dates

Hollywood's version of Manhattan's Stage Door Canteen (TIME, April 6) is a radio job called Your Blind Date. Two months old, it graduated last week from a Coast hookup to a half-hour on the national air (Blue, Mon., 9:30 p.m. E.W.T.). Pleasing to Army, Navy and Marines, Your Blind Date not only puts on a weekly show for a service audience (no civilians admitted) but afterward turns Studio B of Hollywood's Radio City into a dance floor, with a free juke box and a detachment of beautiful blondes.

This agreeable use of Studio B was the idea of a jolly scriptwriter named Frances Scully ("Scully-Wully" to her good friend, W. C. Fields), who had little to put her heart into before but a Sunday morning fashion program, Speaking of Glamor. Blonde, plumpish Miss Scully, thinking of Los Angeles' lonesome "soldier boys," decided she could do better than speak of glamor; she could hand it out.

Performers on Your Blind Date include a perky songstress, Connie Haines, a funnyman, "Tizzie Lish," a band, the Melodates, recruited from John Scott Trotter's Orchestra, guest comediennes and starlets from the studios. Music and patter are not all. To one lucky mother each week, Mistress of Ceremonies Scully gives a chance to read her own letter to her own son. Distant sons can hear the program by short wave from San Francisco's KGEI. This part of the show is one big reason the soldiers like it.

About 400 servicemen attend each week. While the show is on the air, Miss Scully's "blind dates," assembled from NBC's stenographic staff, from U.S.O., from other sources, form a part of the stage decor. They are told to dress "fluffily, but not elaborately or formally." The dance afterwards lasts until 11 or 11:30, and under the knowing Scully eye no unfortunate incidents have yet occurred; no girls have wept; no fists have flown.

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