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
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—John Dryden (1631–1700)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
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—John Ashbery (b. 1927)