One of Canada’s leading playwrights brings us this wildly funny and sharply ironic comedy. The play draws a revealing social commentary from its story of a woman who wins a million trading stamps in a lottery, then invites her friends to a riotous stamp-pasting party. Germaine Lauzon has just won a million trading stamps in the local lottery. To get them pasted into books, she invites her four sisters and a variety of close friends to assist her. While Germaine dreams of things she’s always wanted and can now buy for herself, her sisters and friends scheme to thwart her, as they turn jealous with no understanding as to why Germaine should win anything. Each sister explains her view of Germaine’s life while they scheme to pilfer stamps away from her. Thrown into the wacky group is Germaine’s daughter, Linda, who, going through the dramatic changes of a misunderstood teenager, needs help dealing with her mother, and invites her friend Lisette to the house. But Lisette needs advice too, being newly pregnant, and finds Dear Aunt Pierrette, the black sheep of the family, to advise her on whether to have an abortion, put the baby up for adoption, or any other alternative. Germaine battles with Linda, when she suddenly realizes some of her stamps are missing and catches the ladies in the act. A wild and raucous stamp-throwing melee ensues which triggers Linda to decide that this is a good time to get out on her own. Germaine’s sisters make off with as many stamps as possible and Germaine is left with shattered dreams and only a fraction of the million stamps she had when she started.

The time is 1999, the place an island off the coast of Norway. Stony McBride, a young movie director and adopted son of an aging Hollywood star, is writing a film about Marco Polo, in which, it is hoped, his father will make a comeback. Stony is also attempting to deal with his attractive wife, a former concert pianist whose lover, a dynamic young politician who has gotten hold of the cure for cancer, is also on hand. Adding to the rapidly multiplying complications are Stony’s mother (a transsexual, as she later confesses); a friend named Frank (who has been in space orbit for the past five years); a maid (who is impregnated astrally by Frank); and another friend, Larry (who is fitted with a set of mechanical legs). There is also an earthquake; the discovery of a planet; and the birth of a new hero (Stony himself?); all coming together, within the bizarre action of the play, to yield some chilling, albeit very funny, glimpses of the future that may await us all.

From the Publisher: “Me, Candido!” is the defiant battlecry of a homeless eleven-year-old shoeshine boy, who is unofficially adopted by Papa Gomez, a poor Puerto Rican with a large family recently arrived in New York; by truculent old Mr. Ramirez, proprietor of a restaurant locally known as “The Garbage Pail”; by Mike McGinty, an eloquent and thirsty ex-longshoreman; and by Yetta Rosenbloom, a lonely old woman whose family has drifted away from her. But the simple, kindly act of taking a boy in from the street comes up against the red tape of officialdom. Candido can’t work in “The Garbage Pail”; he must go to school; he can’t go to school till he has been legally adopted. They need a lawyer—for free; money is for rice and beans. But Candido is a boy, not a case history, and his fathers are determined to keep him out of an institution. The law does not concern itself with love. But the neighbors do, and the struggle spreads to the entire neighborhood. Candido becomes a cause celebre. Amid humorous entanglements, the situation is at last resolved in a poignant and moving scene in the courtroom.

From the Dust Jacket: Mrs. Howard V. Larue III lived at Larue Towers on Van Tyne Road with her son, Howay, and numerous maids, guars, chauffeurs, cooks, and gardeners. Howay had a pony, a swan boat, riding lessons, a tutor, and a toy train especially made for him, In spite of every precaution, however, things were happening at Larue Towers: toys disappeared, and a strange, untidy little girl got into the grounds. Naturally, Mrs. Larue told her to leave at once.

It seems that the little girl was the daughter of a witch, Mrs. McThing. Mrs. McThing was angry because of the way her child had been treated, and to avenge herself on Mrs. Larue she spirited Howay away to a poolroom where he worked for a gang of would-be thieves. In his place she put a stick that looked, but did not act, like Howay.

With this situation, it is easy to see that complications would ensue. Mary Chase’s play is already known to those who have been fortunate enough to see it on Broadway. Here it is presented in book form just as it appeared on the stage. One must read it to follow the hilarious and extraordinary adventures of Howay and his mother brought about by the Machinations of Mrs. McThing.

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About the Author: Mary Chase lives in Denver, where her husband, Robert Chase, is managing editor of the Rocky Mountain News. They have three boys, which explains, in part, how she came to write Mrs. McThing. These boys and their friends were her sometimes-reluctant guinea pigs. The laughter which can be heard in the theater where Mrs. McThing is playing comes largely from boys and girls, proving that Mary Chase and her young critics knew what they were doing.

Mary Chase is the author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning Harvey and of several other plays.

Cookbook author Bess Lapin and her husband, Jeffrey, live in the Hamptons with their three adopted children. Jeffrey, newly retired is also writing a book about the connection between business and art. Two of the children return from a European trip and the family gathers for a reunion. Neighbors Elaine and her mother-in-law Sadie crash the welcome-home party. The returned children announce that they plan on getting married. The play was commissioned and initially produced by the South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, CA, in 2005,with Linda Gehringer as Bess and John de Lancie as Jeffrey. Subsequently produced on Broadway in New York City at the American Airlines Theater (Roundabout Theater Company) beginning on October 6, 2005, starring Jill Clayburgh (Bess Lapin), Richard Thomas (Jeffrey), Matthew Morrison (Thad), Susan Kelechi Watson (Juliet), James Yaegashi (Bill), Leslie Ayvazian (Elaine) and Ann Guilbert (Sadie).

From the Publisher: Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth is the emotional story of a woman’s struggle to acknowledge her birth family.

Grace, a Native girl adopted by a White family, is asked by her birth sister to return to the Reserve for their mother’s funeral. Afraid of opening old wounds, Grace must find a place where the culture of her past can feed the truth of her present.

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About the Author: Hailed by the Montreal Gazette as one of Canada’s leading Native dramatists, Drew Hayden Taylor writes for the screen as well as the stage and contributes regularly to North American Native periodicals and national newspapers. His plays have garnered many prestigious awards, and his beguiling and perceptive storytelling style has enthralled audiences in Canada, the United States and Germany. One of his most established bodies of work includes what he calls the Blues Quartet, an ongoing, outrageous and often farcical examination of Native and non-Native stereotypes.

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By the Same Author: Someday (1993, Fifth House Ltd.) and 400 Kilometers (2005), among others.

With an extraordinary one-woman multi-character performance by Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, Original Skin is a riveting autobiographical narrative about a mixed-race baby whose white Australian mother decides to give her up for adoption in Verwoerd’s early 1960s South Africa. Told with humour and compassion, this richly poetic script traces echoes of bigotry in Australia while also representing South Africa’s own “big racial tension story” through one child’s often ironic and remarkable journey to adulthood. This brilliant memoir reflects South Africa’s present struggle with ongoing prejudice.

From the Back Cover: “An adoptee searches for her natural mother in Sybille Pearson’s PHANTASIE, but that search is less for a new parent than it is for clues to the character’s buried self. Without knowledge of the circumstances of her birth or of her parentage, the woman has had to fantasize possibilities. In her imaginative musings, she is everything from the child of a mother who was raped to the unacknowledged daughter of a Rothschild.

“... this perceptive new play ... is inward and elliptical, at times enigmatic. The central character’s quest will continue long after the play has ended. There are no sudden emotional outbursts or last-minute revelations. The drama remains interior...that intensifies the interest.

“... touching ... truthfulness within a natural reserve ... quietly affecting ... [an] intimate journey of discovery.”

Mel Gussow, The New York Times, 4 January 1989

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About the Author: Sybille Pearson is the author of the plays Sally and Marsha and A Little Going Away Party, and the librettist of the musical Baby. She is a teacher of musical theater at New York University.

Evelyn Murtaugh has traveled to Morganton, North Carolina from Chicago, Illinois to see Mrs. Heidi Traub on a very important matter. Evelyn’s adoptive father passed away unexpectedly, and in his will left instructions that Evelyn was to receive a package. In the package, which Evelyn was told was twenty years old, there was a sealed envelope containing a cardboard puzzle piece. The game piece looked like half of a heart pendant. There was also a note inside, from Evelyn’s biological father. In the note, he instructs “Evie” to seek out and return the missing piece of the heart.

Geri, a seventeen-year-old Vietnamese-American girl raised by wealthy adoptive parents in the United States, has taken time out from a rigorous touring schedule as a piano prodigy to stay on her Aunt Geneva’s Redwood plantation in Northern California. She’s been coming here for years, but recently she’s become obsessed with approaching the homeless Vietnam veterans who retreated to the forests because they couldn’t cope with society after returning from the war. One such veteran she interviews in the forest, Lyman, she detains against his will and tells him lies about what she does know to be true about her nameless natural father in hopes that maybe Lyman knew, or even is, him. Lyman acts guilty and tries to flee, but Geri, who says she’s been studying the mysticism of the East, casts a spell over him that she says will bring him back to her. Geneva is horrified at Geri’s actions, and while she warns her of the dangers of approaching these homeless men, she also sympathizes with Geri’s predicament: Namely, as an Asian woman, Geri feels a deep need to know her ancestral history (and in particular the history of her father) in order to structure her life. Tired of the classical music circuit and recording contracts, Geri wants to establish a new life for herself based on knowledge about her biological parents. Her adoptive father, who encouraged her in music from an early age, has since died of alcoholism while her adoptive mother has taken to world travel and has no time for Geri. Geneva gives Geri some details about her natural father that makes it seem like the man Geri met in the forest is indeed him. She persuades her aunt to come with her and they finally meet with Lyman where the shocking and moving truth of Geri’s heritage comes to light.

Katie Delaney, an upright, hard-working widow, struggles to keep her three grown sons from falling into the clutches of “designing women.” The sons, all members of the New York City police force, are far from pleased by this parental tyranny, but filial duty (and their mother’s good cooking) conspire to keep them in line—at least to outward appearances. But natural impulses and the urgings of their various fiancees begin to tell. It turns out that one son has already married his sweetheart in a secret, civil ceremony, and while he has been fearful of revealing this fact to his rigidly Catholic mother, his wife’s approaching motherhood soon forces the issue. When the truth is known Katie orders her son from the house and, despite the fact that her first grandchild is born soon after, refuses to acknowledge his existence. Before long another of the impatient girls threatens to accept a rival proposal and, to add to the growing confusion, a Puerto Rican urchin becomes embroiled in Katie’s increasingly tangled affairs. Despite her dislike for his kind Katie is drawn to the boy, and in her zeal to help him soon finds herself of all things, in trouble with the police. For the widow of a policeman this is a disturbing turn of events, but beneficial too in the happy transformation it works in Katie. She adopts the boy, forgives her son and starts life over with a lighter heart.

When Bridget, a successful businesswoman who has always longed to act, receives a letter from the child she surrendered for adoption 20 years ago, she is shocked into confronting memories that may help her reconcile herself to the life she has led in the intervening years, memories already stirred up by the processes used in the acting class she has recently joined.

In Toronto, 1961, Sarah Grosberg prepares tea she will serve to her future daughter-in-law, eighteen-year-old Rochelle Bloom. Vincent, her Polish housekeeper arrives, puts on his dress (he cleans in drag), and gets to work. Rochelle arrives, and Sarah begins questioning her. Sarah does not think she is good enough for her son, Artie. Rochelle is poor, her family has terrible genes, but worst of all, they live in a house but can’t afford to pay for the wedding. Rochelle stands up for her family and for her love for Artie, whom she will support while he is finishing his philosophy degree. Philosophy? Sarah thinks her son is studying dentistry. Just then, Artie arrives. Sarah confronts him and demands that Rochelle give him his ring back. At this, Vincent interferes and confronts Sarah about her own past. She does not come from a rich, educated family in the old country but is an abandoned orphan. Sarah, broken and ashamed, begs Artie not to ever tell anyone her terrible secret. Act Two jumps forward forty years to the industrial city of Hefei, China, where Jeannie Grosberg, Sarah’s single granddaughter has come with her father Arthur (Artie, all grown up) to adopt a baby, whom she will name Sarah, after her grandmother. After she gets the baby, she calls her mother and worriedly tells her that Sarah is sick and weak. Another couple, Miles and Maggie, goes to the orphanage and brings back information about Sarah. But Arthur will have nothing of it. He thinks that Jeannie should give the baby back. Late at night, Jeannie stands up to him, and Arthur finally accepts the baby as his granddaughter. On the Great Wall of China, Arthur speaks to Sarah about the woman she is named for. Sarah, from Act One, appears. Arthur tells his mother not to be ashamed. Sarah holds Sarah.

Overflowing with good intentions, Rich Meridan becomes a “Big Brother” to Macy Stander, the teenage boy of an ambitious, African-American mother. Rich hopes to inspire Macy to overcome racial prejudice and achieve success in spite of the world being against him. While Macy is initially resentful towards his “Big Brother,” it’s Macy’s actual brother, Paul, who is openly antagonistic towards Rich and what he considers his patronizing generosity. Paul suspects that the “Big Brother” will be unable to deliver on his promises to send Macy through college and law school. Ultimately Rich’s grand idea for Macy’s education falls through, leaving Macy embittered and Rich disillusioned, feeling as if he is just another fervent idealist who has been defeated. First presented by the CBS Playhouse.

A look at the self-help movement, with monologues and sketches drawn from or inspired by recorded interviews, self-help books, “pop psychology” magazine articles, and other sources.

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Compiler’s Note: Produced in October 1994 at West Bank Cafe, 407 West 42nd Street, in New York City, under the direction of the author and Louise B. Cohen. The relevant portion was excerpted in The Best Women’s Stage Monologues of 1995, Jocelyn A. Beard, ed. (pp.69-73) (1996, Smith & Kraus).

From the Back Cover: Someday is a powerful new play by award-winning playwright Drew Hayden Taylor. The story in Someday, though told through fictional characters and full of Taylor’s distinctive wit and humour, is based on the real-life tragedies suffered by many Native Canadian families.

Anne Wabung’s daughter was taken away by children’s aid workers when the girl was only a toddler. It is Christmastime 35 years later, and Anne’s yearning to see her now-grown daughter is stronger than ever. When the family is finally reunited, however, the dreams of neither women are fulfilled.

The setting for the play is a fictional Ojibway community, but could be any reserve in Canada, where thousands of Native children were removed from their families in what is known among Native people as the "scoop-up" of the 1950s and 1960s. Somedayis an entertaining, humourous, and spirited play that packs an intense emotional wallop.

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About the Author: Drew Hayden Taylor has been called “one of Canada’s leading Native dramatists” by the Montreal Gazette. His last play, The Bootlegger Blues (published in 1991), won the Canadian Authors Association Award for Drama. His first book, Toronto at Dreamer’s Rock and Education Is Our Right: Two One-Act Plays, was published in 1990. The first play in that volume won Taylor a prestigious Chalmers Award in 1992 for the production by De-ba-jeh-mu-jig Theatre Group.

Drew Taylor is an Ojibway from the Curve Lake Reserve in Ontario. He writes drama for stage and screen and has contributed articles on Native arts and culture to many periodicals, including Maclean’s, Cinema Canada, and The Globe and Mail. His play Someday first appeared as a short story on the front page of The Globe and Mail—the only piece of fiction ever to appear there—on Christmas Eve in 1990. He is currently working on a movie script for CBC-TV.

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By the Same Author: Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth (1998, Talonbooks) and 400 Kilometers (2005, Talonbooks), among others.

As reviewer John Chapman wrote in the February 16, 1956 edition of the New York Daily News, Someone Waiting is “a drama of murder and revenge which stretches suspense from the first moments of the first act to the final line of the third act.”

Howard St. John plays John Nedlow, “a stuffy English motor magnate with an evil look to him.” Nedlow is married to Vera, played by Jessie Royce Landis. “They have adopted and brought up [Martin, played by Robert Hardy]. Hardy is a problem boy. He has failed in his law exams and he hates his adopted father. He also is upset because his best friend has just been hanged for murdering a servant girl in this very apartment, and he thinks his friend was innocent.

“So in comes [Fenn, played by Leo G.] Carroll, with gentle good manners and a baffled look, as the new tutor hired to get the boy through the law exams next time. He is, one soon learns, the father of the boy who was unjustly hanged for murder. He has come here to administer justice all by himself to whoever it was in this house who really did the killing.

“You can take it from there. Before the evening is over you will find you have been misled several times—but never dishonestly, for playwright Williams has his tidy mind and is an honorable trickster. And if you can guess beforehand what will happen at play’s end you are smarter than I am.”

From the Back Cover: Presenting an exciting alternative way to share research, this book describes the production of Harriet’s House, a play about transnational adoption in a same-sex family, for the 2010 Toronto Pride Festival. In addition to practical advice for anyone interested in producing their own work, Staging Harriet’s House engages with such topics as the purpose of producing research-informed theatre, writing and workshopping such plays, and the myriad of details involved in bringing a play to the stage. Readers will find references to work by American, Australian, British, and other Canadian research-informed theatre artists. The text includes the script that was performed in the 2010 production of the play, as well as a selected bibliography on research-informed theatre.

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About the Author: Tara Goldstein is a playwright and professor of education at Ontario Institute of Studies in Education at the University of Toronto. She is also the founder of Gailey Road Productions, which produces women-centred, research-informed theatre.

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Description of the Play: In this contemporary drama a mother and her three daughters negotiate the challenges and politics of transnational adoption in a same-sex family. The play begins when Harriet reluctantly gives her 17-year-old adopted daughter, Luisa, permission to return to the Catholic orphanage in Bogota where she spent three years of her childhood. While Luisa tries to find out what happened to her birth mother in Bogota, back in Toronto Harriet comes out as a lesbian and introduces her new partner Marty to her two other daughters: 14-year-old Ana, also adopted from Colombia, and 11-year-old Clare, Harriet’s birth daughter. Afraid of Luisa’s reaction to her new relationship, Harriet doesn’t tell Luisa about Marty until Luisa returns home from Colombia. Heartbroken that she still hasn’t found out what happened to her birth mother, and angry that Harriet didn’t tell her about Marty sooner, Luisa returns to Bogota to continue her search. When Harriet falls seriously ill, however, she travels to Bogota with Marty and her daughters to bring Luisa home. Harriet’s House premiered at Hart House Theatre in Toronto on July 2, 2010, during the 30th Toronto Pride Festival.

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Compiler’s Note: The script for Harriet’s House is available online.

A delightful scatterbrained maiden lady runs a boarding-house. Out of her goodness, Cordelia has adopted two girls—Candy and Gloria—practically adopted a delightful sea captain, and the “Professor” —both of them, like herself, impractical. Chiefly the play revolves round the efforts of an amusing band of bank robbers to elude the police in nearby Boston and get away with $10,000 in cash, which is brought to Cordelia’s home by the Misses Amity and Priscilla Haines, who take rooms as respectable school teachers. To Cordelia’s home also come Smiley, a sad-faced thug, Joey, a petty gangster, and the “Deacon,” a fellow with much false piety and a benign manner. The gangsters, having seized the money stolen by the “brains” of the band, attempt to hide from their leader and keep the money themselves. Boston Benny, the “brains,” unexpectedly appears, and tries to get even with his partners. Up to now Cordelia, vainly trying to organize her boarding-house on systematic principles, thinks that all the nice ladies and gentlemen who have suddenly come to her home are boarders, and she is in seventh heaven. However, the crooks cannot long keep secret who they are, and Cordelia’s next problem is how to get the money, round up the crooks and get the reward for their capture. How she does this, with the help of her friends, provides comedy and suspense in generous amounts and brings all to happy conclusion.

A romantic tale of three ladies who, though penniless, extract from life more fun than most people ever enjoy. In Mrs. Feeley’s junk yard are gathered a rich assortment of young and old, including a Chinese boy, a teacher, detectives, a shipyard worker. Miss Tinkham, elderly spinster with a taste for fine language and singing, wanders into Mrs. Feeley’s precincts in search of she knows not what while Mrs. Rasmussen has come because she is unhappy with her daughter. Both are welcomed by Mrs. Feeley and her adopted nephew, a delightful Asian known as Chinatown. The ladies decide to make their home in the yard and build an addition to Mrs. Feeley’s shack. Mrs. Feeley has difficulties with the tax people and the big scene comes when the assessor, trying to be friendly, gives her the idea he is trying to raise her taxes, whereupon the lady assaults him and is hauled into court. She, with Mrs. Rasmussen and Miss Tinkham, is fined the exact amount of the taxes, which fall due shortly. When it is discovered that the tax money, concealed in the stomach of a wooden Indian, has disappeared, together with the Indian himself, things look dark. However, the erstwhile friend who made off with the Indian confesses his theft and gives it back—the money still safely inside.

From the Publisher: Anton Korff, aide to a mysterious ailing recluse, who is reputed to be one of the world’s richest men, interviews a young woman who has applied for a position as nurse for the aging multi-millionaire. Korff’s questioning centers on whether the applicant, Hilde, is completely unattached and whether (as she has stated in her letter of inquiry) she would indeed do anything for money. Once satisfied of her qualifications, Korff adds a startling requirement: If she is taken on he will legally adopt her as his daughter; he will also maneuver his employer, Karl Richmond, into proposing marriage to her, and she will sign a letter paying over a large sum of money to him in the event of her would-be husband’s death. Hilde accepts his terms, and thereafter the action of the play moves darkly and deviously to its menacing conclusion—but with so many strange events and tantalizing developments along the way that the truth of what transpires remains clouded until the final, surprising moments of the play.

Lost on his way to Chinatown, Benjamin asks Ronnie for directions. Ronnie, playing his violin on the street for money, is offended that just because he looks like an Asian he automatically knows where Chinatown is. Caucasian looking, Benjamin was adopted by an Asian-American family at birth. He revels in his heritage and is looking for the house where his father was born. Ronnie, on the other hand, throws himself into all things American and finds it hard to sympathize with Benjamin who, when he finds his father’s house, is filled with a special elation.

Tom Ewell played the Broadway part of a suburban husband in a five-year childless marriage. He and his wife decide to adopt a baby, but a loud mouth neighbor upsets the apple cart when the adoption investigator comes to call. However, not to be outdone, Ewell finds himself in the clutches of the investigator, who has suddenly turned color. Later she announces that she is pregnant and is going off to have the baby. She will see that the man and his wife receive the child in due time through the agency. Shortly after the baby arrives, however, the wife learns of the matter and starts packing to go home to Mother. But it turns out that the adopted baby was not fathered by the husband, and also that the wife is now herself pregnant; and matters are mended.

Vernon Early revisits American life in Horton Foote’s fictional town of Harrison, Texas, during the 1950s. The title character, Vernon, is a doctor, in the days when the house call was commonplace. Consumed by his work, his spirit has been eroded by the pressures of his job and the lingering depression he shares with his wife, Mildred, over the loss of their adopted child to its birth mother. Mirroring the tragic existence of the Earlys, many of Harrison’s other residents are also consumed with the self-inflicted wounds of life: aging, individual isolation, love, and racial inequality. Through all of the bleakness of life there still shines a glimmer of hope reflected in the spirit of the town’s sad doctor: Vernon Early.

From the Publisher: As Richard Watts, Jr., writing in the New York Herald Tribune, comments, “Although Mr. Inge is fair and sympathetic to both sides, it would seem that he inclines slightly to the cause of the older generation. This, however, is one of the deftest touches in his treatment of the subject. For maturity, as it may be described at least technically, is represented by two unlikely prospects, a foolish, innocent and bewildered mother and a matronly bachelor unhampered by any illusions of masculinity. Yet how likeable both of them turn out to be! They are confronted by quite a problem, too. A boy, who happens to have been adopted by the bachelor, and a girl, who is the unworldly lady’s daughter, have got themselves married and are about to have a child, and the thought alarms the young pair. The boy wants his freedom and the girl wants to prove her independence by giving it to him, and they have agreed to send the baby to an institution for adoption when it arrives. And it arrives unexpectedly, and amid great alarm. Mr. Inge is good-natured but he is also sharp and can be witty. Instead of getting in the way of the seriousness of his point of view, the humor emphasizes it. The foolishness of the girl’s naïve, mother is made honestly moving, the sentimental reconciliation of the boy and girl is believably touching, and the scenes of the peculiar bachelors are downright hilarious.”

In Final Placement, the middle section of a trilogy of one-act plays written by Mary Gallagher and Ara Watson under the collective title Win/Lose/Draw, the scene is the Tulsa office of a child welfare caseworker. A mother guilty of child abuse is intent on regaining the custody of her son, even though he has been put up for adoption by the courts. Despite her poverty and ignorance she displays a touching eloquence—and a disquieting menace—as she attempts to stave off the inevitable. The other two plays are: Little Miss Fresno (co-written with Mary Gallagher), a light and hilarious piece about two very different mothers whose daughters are competing in a beauty contest; and Chocolate Cake (written by Mary Gallagher), about two secret gorgers, one a simple, country mouse, married to a mechanic and the other a brassy city dweller whose husband is a wealthy businessman, who meet in an hotel room while attending a women’s conference.