Lu Ann Hampton Laverty Oberlander

The place is Bradleyville, a small town in West Texas, where Lu Ann Hampton, seventeen and a high school cheerleader, dreams of far-off places, but settles for marriage with a friend of her Korean War veteran brother. In the following act, ten years later, now divorced and working as a "beauty technician," Lu Ann meets and marries Corky Oberlander, only to lose him in a fatal auto accident. Then, a decade later again, we find Lu Ann still in Bradleyville, with her teenaged daughter, her now alcoholic brother, and a mother who has been enfeebled by a stroke. In a moving scene she is visited by her high school sweetheart, who has become a successful preacher, and as they review the past it becomes eloquently clear that Lu Ann's life has come full circle—with her hopes and dreams sacrificed to the realities of everyday life, and with only her resolute spirit to sustain her towards the inevitable grayness of the future.