Strangers with Candy

46-year-old Jerri Blank is a socially-unaware ex-con junkie alcoholic prostitute. After being released from her latest stint behind bars, Jerri wants to clean up her life and decides the best way is to return to the home and family she left 32 years earlier to embark on her depraved life. When she gets there, her mother has died and her father has married a much-younger woman and fallen into a stress-induced coma in part because she disappeared. She takes the cleaning-up-her-life one step further when her father's doctor tells her that he might emerge from his coma if life could return to the way it was before she left, only better: she must make her father proud. So Jerri returns to Flatpoint High to get her high school diploma. She quickly decides the best way to be the best student possible is to participate in and win the state science fair. In her quest, she gets caught up in the competing agendas of: Principal Onyx Blackman, who needs a winning science fair team so as not to have to return discretionary school board funding, which he obtained through fraud and which he has since misappropriated; science teacher Chuck Noblet, a married born-again-Christian closet homosexual who tries quietly (or not so quietly) to win back the affections of his lover, Geoffrey Jellineck, the sensitive art teacher; and Roger Beekman, the winning teacher of the past nine science fairs whom Blackman brings into Flatpoint as a ringer, much to Noblet's chagrin. Jerri must also also keep her focus on the end goal of her father, which might not be easy for a socially-unaware middle-aged libidinous junkie prostitute who wants to be one of the popular kids, and do it with the big man and the innocent virginal girl on campus. —Huggo