An irritable marketing executive, Neal Page, is heading home to Chicago for Thanksgiving when a number of delays force him to travel with a well meaning but overbearing shower curtain ring salesman, Del Griffith.

Teenage orphan Jenny Yates becomes starstruck when a revival of an old Victorian melodrama passes through her small New England town, to the disapproval of her stern grandfather, Uriah. Stowing away in the car of Philip Greene, a wealthy young man working with the theater troupe, Jenny talks her way into the play's lead role. But director Archie Fisher doesn't tell her that the new version of the play is meant as a spoof.