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Dramatists Play Service, NY, 1966

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If Publisher (above) is underlined then the play may be purchased by direct click, otherwise
(below) are AbeBooks for secondhand & 1st eds and other Booksellers for new copies

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Comedy

7

5

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written by Eleanor Harris Howard and Helen McAvity

Writing an etiquette column for a chain of small town newspapers does not shape up for Kelly Lewis, as a particularly promising or lucrative career. But Kelly has prospects because of her romance with Bruce Barrett, a successful publisher and television personality who is several years her senior. The snag, however, is that Bruce's estranged wife is a lady U.S. Senator—and she is reluctant to risk the scandal of a divorce in an election year. But as Bruce and Kelly are unwilling to stop seeing each other, the Senator's lawyer suggests that they employ a "beard," or decoy, to accompany them in public. The idea is that people will think that Kelly and the "beard" are the real twosome, and the lawyer assigns one of his junior colleagues to the job. But the young man, an amateur ornithologist, is more interested in birds than ballots and, to add to the complications, his sympathies are soon aligned with the lovers. Kelly's neighbor, a young Swedish beauty who travels between their adjacent apartments via an ironing board balanced over an air shaft, also contributes to the mayhem, as do a unique assortment of zany neighbors and friends. It all ends up in a lively party, with the "beard" dancing about madly as a whooping crane, and the Senator's opposition sneaking in to take some compromising pictures…with the result being that Kelly must be sacrificed if the election is to be saved. When the chips are down she realizes that Bruce is not the man she thought he was, but Kelly's disenchantment is happily reversed when she and the lawyer find that they were meant for each other all along.