Asking For It

Seventeen-year-old Bernie O’Connell runs away from home on the same night that her father kicks her out. It’s not like Bernie will die if she doesn’t become a Radio City Music Hall Rockette, but when she blows the big audition due to 10 extra pounds and ends up sleeping with the hippies on the lower level of the Port Authority Bus Terminal, death starts to look inviting.

Dieting and desperate, she accepts a job from a helpful stranger that leads to a violent assault for which nothing in her Catholic school (abstinence only) sex education could have prepared her. Shaken to the core, she drops the weight, becomes a Rockette, and puddle-jumps her way through the primordial gunge of American culture en route to a spiritual awakening and the discovery of what she should really be asking for.