Like weaving in and out the paper strips of our kindergarten mats is the story of the Ring sisters and Tommy. For Los Angeles beckoned, with Blanche headlined at the Orpheum, Frances in stock, and Tommy playing somewhere or other. Blanche and her husband, Charles Winninger, a member of her company, were invited by Louise Orth for a week-end out Las Palmas way. The week-end proved very significant in results; for through their hostess, who was leading woman at the Elko Studios, a meeting between Mr. Winninger and Mr. Lehrman was arranged the next week which led directly to Charlie’s signing on the dotted line at the fabulous salary of two hundred and fifty dollars a week--to do comedies. But Charlie’s pale blue eyes did not register well enough on the screen, and the comedy note in his characterizations thus being lost, the good job just naturally petered out. Then Miss Ring, who had now taken over one of Los Angeles’s show places, on the Fourth of July gave a party--a red, white, and blue party at which were gathered more notables than had as yet ever been brought together at a social function in Los Angeles. It was Broadway transplanted. There were David Belasco, Laura Hope Crews, Charlie Chaplin, Edna Purviance, Julian Eltinge, Geraldine Farrar, Jesse Lasky, Mr. Goldwyn, Wallace and Mrs. Reid, Mr. Morris Gest, then representative for Geraldine Farrar and Raymond Hitchcock, who viewing from the back piazza the distant lights of Los Angeles was supposed to have said something when he remarked, “This reminds one of a diamond bar pin.” It was an illustrious and patriotic party. Before the festivities were over, Mr. Gest unwound the maline scarf from Miss Orth’s neck while Charlie Chaplin sang the Spring Song, and Mr. Gest danced on the lawn waving the scarf and crushing the slimy snails that in droves were slowly creeping up to the house. The party was illustrious in that it was here voted that Tommy Meighan would photograph well in pictures, and Mr. Lasky invited him to the studio and offered him, perhaps, fifty dollars a week, and he made a hit in his first picture with Geraldine Farrar and was then given a substantial raise. At which Blanche, the astounded sister-in-law said, “And to think that at times I’ve had to support that Irishman.” There had been enough job uncertainty to discourage her, so that she had wondered sometimes whether she would have him on her hands for the rest of her life. Even after Mr. Tommy Meighan’s advent into pictures, sister Blanche rather expected, every now and then, that he would be “canned.” And so Tommy evolved from a liability into an asset, and became the idol of innumerable feminine hearts. It was a colorful paper mat the Ring family wove. * * * * *