Ralph Holmes

This lively, spirit-lifting musical celebrates the sheer joy -- and survival -- of black music, song and poetry since the days of America's Civil War. With utter grace and ease, the gifted eight-member singing ensemble glides from gospel to disco and from slave-quarter sermons to contemporary black poetry.

This lively, spirit-lifting musical celebrates the sheer joy -- and survival -- of black music, song and poetry since the days of America's Civil War. With utter grace and ease, the gifted eight-member singing ensemble glides from gospel to disco and from slave-quarter sermons to contemporary black poetry.

While at an impromptu reunion lunch, five women reminisce and relive their college days at Mount Holyoke, and weigh their goals and aspirations against their lives.

A Wild West cow town is starving for entertainment and it falls upon Calamity Jane, a rowdy, gun-toting tomboy, to go to Chicago to bring back a famed stage actress. She brings instead the star's maid, who settles in the town, but Jane's "Secret Love" falls for her. This television special was based on a stage adaptation of the film that was playing regional circuits at the time it aired.

Helen Lester is in love with a man she has known just 24 hours, a playboy who spent time in jail for passing bad checks. Though the man has promised to change, most of her strait-laced relatives are up in arms. But Clare Lester, Helen's grandmother, says the girl is free to join the man she loves. On one condition, that she listen to the story of a day in Clare's own life and of a man she tried to change.

Theodore Hickman, a hardware salesman, makes by-yearly visits to Harry Hope's 1910-era waterfront bar for his periodical drinking binges. But on this visit he has decided to try to save the bar's patrons from their "lying pipe dreams."

A sinister criminal known only as "The Bat" attempts to locate a fortune in stolen securities supposedly hidden in the rambling mansion owned by spinster Cornelia Van Gorde.