Preview

_Have you ever sat in a movie theater and permitted your imagination
to take you far beyond the events depicted on the screen? Perhaps we
all do this at times. But this tragedy in minuscule should give you
pause and cure you of the habit forever._ The flying saucer folk may
just happen to be watching you.

=Mr. Scanlon had reasons of his own for insisting on a preview. But
what they were nobody knows!=

“What every discerning theatergoer is searching for,” said Mr. Scanlon, “is a kind of sixth-sense heightening of perception. I choose to call it a superseding experience—a blotting out of the mundane and familiar and the substitution of the totally unexpected. In short, a superior vision of reality. Stella, you see, is a ‘stripped’ actress.”

Mr. Scanlon looked about him, and smiled. “No, gentlemen. I’m not being Rabelaisian, or thinking of the burlesque stage. She’s a ‘stripped’ actress in the sense that the kind of realism I’ve been talking about is her guiding star. Everything else—every shred of romantic or sentimental tinsel—has been stripped away.”