Thank you! I was feeling a bit incompetant.
I'm up to level 140 but I'm needing some friends to unlock my ticket into the next section. Apparantly, not too many of my friends have gotten addicted to the Crush yet and I'm just too danged cheap to keep buying these freakin credits.
While I'm patiently waiting for someone to bail me out, I'm going through the past levels that I've gotten only one star. I WILL get all three stars on every level... I WILL!!
I'm stuck on level 140 now.

There are no Time Bombs, no Chocolate. But, they want you to collect so many of 3 different colors that it is nearly impossible unless you make striped, wrapped candies or chocolate sprinkle balls with each move.

And it's hard to try to get two striped or a striped and a wrapped next to each other.
As for getting more "Friends," my Facebook account is ONLY used for Candy Crush. I never got into Facebook for anything else. I went to a Candy Crush forum once and made a few "Friends there. Then found a bunch of people whose profile pic is a Candy Crush pic.

This signals to the rest of us that they are Candy Crushers, and YES, invite them to be "Friends." They need Friends too, to gift lives or unlock levels.
So I changed my Profile pic to a Candy Crush chocolate ball, invited several people who have Candy Crush pics, while others invited me to be their Friends once they saw my profile pic. I now have about 400 "Friends." I don't know
any of them, but every time I play, I always have people automatically gifting me Lives or I get the next section unlocked within 10 minutes of "Asking Friends" to help me unlock the section. All I have to do now when I run out of Lives is to refresh my page and someone has gifted me a Life without asking. (Or I asked hours ago, and people are only now coming on line to gift me a Life.) Usually, the automated system has already asked people if they want to help give me a Life. So I usually have about 6-10 people gifting me with Lives each time I refresh my page.
I just wish the computer version would save all those extra Lives for me. I read the mobile app does. What a waste I only get 5 Lives when 10 people gifted me. Once in a while, I actually have to
ask for Lives. When that happens, there is a tab to check to only ask from fellow Candy Crush players. So there is a way to NOT bother non-Candy Crush (real life) friends with requests for Lives and unlocking.
The best part is, I usually play late at night before going to sleep. If I am out of lives, I click on the players with Asian/Middle Eastern names or names from the other side of the world where it's daytime. I figure they are up and maybe online, to gift me a life. It has worked each time.

It's great having so many "Friends" that I don't even know on FB, round the clock.