King Dave Flaherty has everything a guy could wish for: all the overtime gigs, all the waitresses, and, if not the universal friendship of his peers, at least none of them dares try anything on the son of the president of the Chicago stagehands local. King Dave wants more than that, though, and it’ll save him in two ways. One, it’ll save him from having to be an old-fashioned stagehand in a modern world, where a collitch degree and skills with fancy equipment are called for. And two, it’ll save him from the fate worse than death threatened by Nadine Fisher, a nineteen-year-old small town preacher’s daughter who’s run away from Texas to wait tables in the diner next door to the Auditorium Theatre. Nadine wants to make a better man of King Dave. But that’s not the fate worse than death.