Petticoats and Pants

A cocksure campus flapper in plus-fours, Bobby Vernon, is exiled to his uncle’s clapboard Eden where silos outnumber speakeasies, yet the joke is on the hayseed horizon: the moment his two-tone oxfords hit the loam, the pastoral mirage begins to unravel. Flanked by a pair of collegiate jesters whose waistcoats seem stitched from pure mischief, Bobby stumbles upon a duo of chorines—Elinor Field and Helen Darling—touring a moth-electric revue and hungry for local color. Mistaking the slick-haired trespasser for a genuine plowboy, the hoofers decide to toy with this “rube,” spinning a flirtatious masquerade that smells of talcum and bootleg gin. Undaunted, Bobby dons the bib overalls like war paint, infiltrates their seamstress shop, and detonates a chain-reaction of slapstick anarchy: corsets bloom like parachutes, sewing machines jitterbug across floorboards, and a single rogue goat becomes the unwitting critic of modern dance. The barnyard, once a cathedral of calm, metamorphoses into a Keystone tableau painted by Fragonard—hayloft trapeze, cream-pie communion, moonlit elopement on a hayrick. By the time the final reel flickers, identities have swapped more often than partners in a square dance, and the only certainty is that the silo’s shadow knows everyone’s secrets.