In the play the young heroine Carnelle, having grown up with abandonment issues and living with a checkered past,  she longs for acceptance. 

She thinks that winning a local beauty contest will restore her soiled reputation and make her into somebody in the small Mississippi town where she lives.  Family and friends who try to help her along the way are a dysfunctional bunch who tackle life in their own peculiar ways. A former beauty queen cousin, Elain, comes to offer advice but also to run away from her husband and children. Elain’s brother, Delmount, has come home from a mental institution to sell the family home and provide Carnelle another way out of her unhappy life. Carnelle’s seamstress, sweet and strange Popeye, also enters into the chaos to offer advice, but falls in love with Delmount. What Carnelle and the others learn from the chaos they create, is that fulfillment of one’s hopes and dreams comes about if one is truly willing to accept oneself for who they are.