Plot
Mary Ann "Pookie" Adams (Minnelli) is an oddball, quirky teenager who meets Jerry Payne (Burton) while waiting for a bus heading to their colleges, which are near each other, where they have enrolled as freshmen. Jerry immediately sees that Pookie is different, even strange. She lies to a nun on the bus so the nun will switch seats with her. Jerry is beginning to settle into college life with his roommate (Tim McIntire) when Pookie shows up one Saturday morning out of the blue. They spend much time together over the weekend, and before long are seeing each other regularly.
Jerry slowly falls in love with Pookie, but soon their different personality types pull them apart. They began having sex, and not long after Pookie tells Jerry she might be pregnant. After the pregnancy scare is over, Jerry wants to spend spring break alone to catch up on his studies. Pookie begs and pleads to stay with him, and he relents. The week alone with Pookie makes Jerry realize they need time apart, and he tells Pookie this. He discovers she has left college, and he finds her in the same boarding house where she had stayed on the first day she came to visit. He puts her on a bus for home, and the young lovers part.
Read more about this topic: The Sterile Cuckoo
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)