THE LUCKY SPOT
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This will not be easy. For one thing, the Lucky Spot, as Hooker has christened his venture, is located a full 60 miles from New Orleans. For another, a local businessman named Whitt Carmichael exhibits a strong, almost obsessive interest in gaining ownership of the property. There is also the matter of Cassidy’s advanced pregnancy–the father is Hooker–which she accepts with serenity only because she believes that he will marry her once he has divorced his wife, Sue Jack. On this Christmas Eve, the grand opening of the Lucky Spot, all but one of the dancers-for-hire have fled the premises upon hearing that Sue Jack, who’s notorious for her jealous furies, is being released from prison, where she has been serving a three-year term for pitching a rival (who just happens to have been the sister of Carmichael) off a balcony.
The characters created by Mississippi-bred playwright Beth Henley have sometimes been described as eccentric, and her portrayals of life in the rural south may indeed appear strange. But the eccentricities could be explained by the fact that before mass communications and sweeping government programs brought a uniform standard of living to isolated areas, there existed throughout the United States (and still exists, albeit to a lesser extent) pockets as remote from the niceties we take for granted–hospitals, schools, courthouses–as any 19th-century frontier settlement. Or eccentricity could be a regional characteristic; as fellow southerner Florence King once wrote, “Build a fence around the South and you’d have one big madhouse.”
