The Silent Scream

Behind his newspaper, the man in the train is having a fight with his face. First his mouth wambles in a wild Watutsi, then it gapes wide in a silent scream. All at once his eyebrows make a break for his brainpan, the tendons of his neck bulge in sudden constriction. Apoplexy? Withdrawal pains? Hangover? Not at all. Only a commuting executive giving himself his morning facial. Back home, blessedly unobserved, his wife is doing the same thing at the bathroom mirror.

Both grimacers are converts to the latest twist in isometric exercises, which hitherto--and short of the jowls--have been used increasingly in the past decade as a means of strengthening muscles by making them push, pull and strain. Now a Manhattan nurse named Clara E. Patterson is out with a book showing how the same type of exercise, performed five minutes daily, may replace "the usual 'face-lifting' job" in slimming chins and smoothing wrinkles.

Nurse Patterson's idea, to tighten and tone up physiognomies suffering from middle-age sag, is presented in Facial Isometrics. The $1 paperback is illustrated by the faces of a male and a female model who both look as if unspeakable tortures were being performed on their lower extremities. No wonder. The author's instructions urge practitioners to:

> Contract the muscles on either side of the nose as if sneezing, wrinkling the skin over the nose upward as hard as possible.

> Dilate the nostrils. Flare them.

> Pull the right and the left corner of the mouth down and out--separately.

> Purse the lips as if for kissing or whistling, very vigorously.

> Make both sides of the neck contract at the same time to the maximum ex tent; hold for six seconds, with head, neck and chest rigid. The skin should rise over the upper chest.

> Open mouth as wide as possible in all directions. Hold it.

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