#beetle ball

They met last summer, when Corny was home from college. But now that it’s autumn, he’s forced to return to his dorm at Princeton. Broadway is a long way from the rural Pennsylvanian town Dot and her mother live in, so Dot starts with gigs closer to home.

Theater is a booming business in the Roaring Twenties. Dot starts her stage career performing "Showboat" on a showboat, with the musical Sapo family. She’s a local hit, billed as "Thumbelina" for her petite stature (greatly admired in the '20s). She writes Ma postcards with pictures of windmills and riverboats, saying everything’s going great. She leaves out how homesick she feels, how little the pay is, and Mrs. Sapo’s not-so-subtle hints that Dot needs to hook up with her creepy toad of a son to get a raise.

While performing on the river, Dot meets Jacq, a gay theater agent from France, who’s interested in being her new manager. That night, Dot leaves her written two-minute notice her old manager’s desk, and departs with Jocq. But even with Jocq’s help, getting to Broadway seems…impossible.

She ends up performing at a speakeasy in Philadelphia called the Beetle Ballroom, under an insufferable manager whose words are as abusive as his screeching parrot-like voice. Her supportive new agent and friend, Jocq, helps her bear through it. That is, until Jocq gets arrested for public drunkenness, leaving Dot on her own.

By winter, Dot has quit the Beetle gig, and is fretting over the fact that she hasn't heard from her boyfriend in a couple of months. Then she gets the news; Corny Springer is missing, presumed dead. Rumors tell of him tangling with the mob, and ending up in the Delaware River.

Dot drowns her sorrows in a speakeasy located in an abandoned underground mining tunnel. In that literal underground saloon, she meets Mousey Fields--a veteran of the vaudeville stage life, and matron showgirl here at the Mole's Burrow. Mousey Fields offers Dot a job as a singer; the only catch is that the atmosphere is dismal, and there’s a “casting couch.” Mousey Fields seems hellbent on pressuring Dot into giving into Mr. Mole’s advances. Dot needs time to think it over.

While Miss Fields performs an off-key song number in a risqué outfit, Mr. Mole shows Dot his “eclectic clientele” of barflies, who mostly appear to be asleep, passed out, or dead. Among them is none other than a recently paroled Jocq! Luckily he’s just passed out drunk, but isn’t very lucid even when he comes to.  Jocq drunkenly declares that he will find Dot’s boyfriend for her, and takes off again before she can stop him.

Her hope gone, Dot walks into the back room, where Mr. Mole awaits. The obese boss is posed seductively on the couch in his underwear, grinning toothily, offering her a martini. As she reaches for the glass, Dot sees the ring that Corny gave her, and remembers her promise.

Withdrawing her hand, she hisses, “Never!”

Mr. Mole blinks. “Wha…?”

“Never!” she repeats.

A new voice—the rat-faced techie, standing behind a primitive video camera, set up to record Dot and the Mole—asks softly, “I beg your pardon?”

“I cannot shag Mr. Mole! I don’t love him!”

“Dot!” Miss Fields scolds angrily, from her peeping hole in the wall.

At that moment, Mr. Berkley from the Beetle Ballroom comes crashing through the ceiling, cackling madly. It turns out that despite Berkley’s insults, Dot was quite the hit, and his profits have taken a dive since she left. Then the Sapo family shows up, also wanting Dot back. And it also turns out that Mr. Mole, Berkley and the Sapos are all involved in organized crime. The Tommy guns come out. Dot makes a run for it.

Where’s Corny Springer been all this time? After the Sapo brothers dumped him in the icy river, he was rescued by some annoying local children, and spent two months half-dead in intensive care. By the time Corny finds Dot, there is no need for a daring rescue, as all of the gangsters have killed each other.

Dot and Corny have an elaborate outdoor wedding. With her new husband’s salary, Jocq’s management, and emotional support from Mother, Dot Springer is finally being billed on the big stage as the Philadelphia Firefly.