SYNOPSIS
Place: the Homeways Bus Company station, Paris, Missouri. One wall carries the company slogan — Homeways…Your Way Home. The other carries the town’s: The Friendliest Town in Little Dixie. Time: the early hours of a single foggy morning.
Tony, the station clerk, opens the day the way Tony opens every day: neat, punctual, and cueing up a vinyl copy of 1950’s crooner between announcements. The only occupant is Desmond, asleep on a bench. Desmond awakes and holds out his hand to Tony, who dutifully approaches Desmond with a rainbow-sprinkle doughnut — clearly a standing ritual — and Desmond shuffles off toward the restroom with a duffle bag.
Sammy blows in with Clem close behind. Sammy wants out of Paris and doesn’t care where the bus is headed, only that it’s headed away; Paris is a town where nothing interesting has ever happened and, Sammy is certain, nothing interesting ever will (Anywhere But Here). Clem, who loves the place, doesn’t argue so much as wait. Tony has exactly one seat left on anything leaving today: an aging 1953 Crown SuperCoach bound for Bird-in-Hand, Pennsylvania — a route Homeways keeps running because the owner is fond of the destination. Sammy buys it. Tony mentions, mildly, that the fog may have opinions about the schedule.
Clem goes for snacks. Desmond returns and falls into conversation with Sammy, speaking about Bird-in-Hand with a tenderness that lands as odd — a beautiful Pennsylvania valley, described by a man asleep on a bench in Missouri.
Chip enters, visibly unwell, and asks for a ticket to Bird-in-Hand. There are none. Chip takes the news hard; Tony talks Chip down with unhurried kindness, and Chip retreats to a bench deliberately far from everyone else.
The station fills. A New York–bound coach out of Los Angeles unloads its passengers — among them the novelist Barry Simone and a boisterous contingent of senior citizens — while locals and travelers drift in to wait out the fog: teenagers, families, and four singers in matching 1950s vocal-group sweaters, each bearing a different letter: The Alphabets. Sammy recognizes Barry and pounces for advice. Barry offers one word — crowding — the practice of watching the people already in the room. On cue, the seniors launch into a competitive round of who-had-the-poorer-childhood. Barry takes notes. Sammy begins to see it.
Adlai arrives, a local political hopeful running several cups of coffee ahead of the conversation, fixated on the incoming bus from Burlington, Vermont, and one passenger in particular: Bernie Sanders.
Hank hauls in a bag of baseball gear, San Diego–bound. Pressed by Barry and Sammy, Hank explains: the two greatest hitters who ever lived, Ted Williams and Tony Gwynn, both came out of San Diego, so that’s where a person goes to learn to swing. The seniors, who know a thing or two about swinging, take the project personally — and teach Hank to dance (San Diego Swing). The hitting mechanics improve considerably.
The Burlington bus arrives with Bernie Sanders and Secret Service Agent Cooper. Adlai lays out the scheme: Bernie takes the mayoralty of Paris, one year in Missouri all but locks the state, the state opens the road back to the presidency — and Adlai, as Deputy Mayor, inherits the office when Bernie moves on. Agent Cooper listens closely, with plans of another kind. Bernie signs on only after learning what comes with the job: a little white house (Little White House).
A youth basketball team and Coach Billings crowd in for the Joplin bus and a tournament. One player, Laine, is already homesick; the coach produces a small toy house for Laine’s pocket. With the fog still down, the team starts a pick-up game out back against the taller seniors.
Chip’s distress deepens. Barry’s curiosity finally overrules Barry’s manners, and the two talk. Chip has electromagnetic hypersensitivity — an intolerance of the invisible electronic weather everyone else lives inside — and Bird-in-Hand, with its Amish quiet, is the one place Chip might simply exist. Homeways runs the only old bus that goes there. It’s full (Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity).
Sold on crowding, Sammy starts asking. Barry’s premise holds: everyone has a story. Sammy asks Tony — a man who spends his life behind a microphone — what the dream is. The dream is crooning (Croon), and The Alphabets, in their letter sweaters, fall in behind Tony in four-part harmony as the ballplayers come back inside and, outside, the fog begins to thin.
Sammy asks Chip what Bird-in-Hand would feel like. Chip’s answer is one word: home. It moves through the station — the seniors, the teenagers, the team, the travelers, each with a different picture of the same thing (Everybody Needs a Home / There’s a Light in a Window / Apple Pie and Puppy Dogs / Prairies and Plains / Everybody Needs a Home — Reprise).
The fog lifts. Departures are called. When the Bird-in-Hand coach is announced, Sammy tears up the ticket — and Chip is on that bus. Bernie and Agent Cooper head off with Adlai to see the town and the little white house. The team boards for Joplin, but not before Laine quietly hands the toy house back to Coach Billings, who suddenly seems to need it. The Alphabets invite Tony to come to Los Angeles with them; Tony hesitates — the owner would never understand. Desmond says the owner understands perfectly. Tony boards the LA bus. Sammy and Clem walk out into a town that turns out to have had something in it all along. Desmond steps behind the ticket counter, drops the needle on another crooning record, and the station opens for business.
THE SONGS
Anywhere But Here
San Diego Swing
Little White House
Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity
Croon
Home Medley