Plot

A burlesque dancer goes to college, where she romances a professor and helps put on a musical show.

Shapely burlesque dancer Hot Garters Gertie aka Angela Gardner meets her former teacher John Palmer, now a professor at Midwest State... where she decides to begin her new college career. She rents a room; her new landlady proves to be the professor's wife. Among romantic complications, Angela helps the downtrodden dramatic arts department put on a potentially popular musical show...but someone's discovered her secret past. Does she have an ace up her garter?—Rod Crawford <puffinus@u.washington.edu>

Under the stage name Hot Garters Gertie, Angela Gardner is the headliner in a New York City burlesque show, she having taken this life path solely to earn enough money to be able to go to college, now as what would be considered a mature student, in a goal to become a writer. Coincidentally on her last day at the burlesque show, she runs into John Palmer, her high school English teacher who transformed her view of academia, and who now teaches in the Theater Arts program at the college she will be attending, conservative Midwest State. Their meeting is good luck for Angela who would value his opinion about the play she's written in her free time. On campus, John has a strained relationship with the football program, which receives all the glory and funding from the Board of Trustees led by Fred Copeland, while Theater Arts gets little notice, especially their sparsely attended term productions of a classic. John has not had a raise over his tenure, and is under scrutiny at every turn while the football team can do almost anything they want. To cap it off, John has an inferiority complex compared to Shep Slade, the star football player when they were students at Midwest, Shep who still seems to have eyes for John's wife, Helen Palmer. John always talks about what an easy life Helen would have had if she instead married now successful insurance businessman Shep. In reading Angela's play, John believes it would be better set as a musical, John and Angela able to convince the college and the students in the program to allow them to mount it as the term production. While Angela catches the eye of many a college boy, most notably star football player and Theater Arts resident leading man Don Weston, her arrival does not sit well with Ivy Williams, the program's resident diva who is not only knocked off the on-stage leading lady mantle, but the leading lady mantle in Don's life by Angela. Thus, Angela and John's life on campus would be threatened if "Poison Ivy" as many of her classmates refer to her found out about Angela's burlesque past.—Huggo