Tender is the night of the hunter... a beginning?

Today there is an air of excitement, expectancy even, hanging over The Nurse, for this evening she has a top secret tryst with Benny Crackers - so top secret in fact, he doesn’t know anything about it and she herself barely even suspects.

According to an anonymous telegram delivered by bearded mule, they are to meet at sundown behind ‘Gravelly Hills Home For Incapacitated Hospital Orderlies.’ The Nurse has washed and set her hair, arranged her socks and buttoned her braces; the only thing worrying her is the new hospital Chaplain Handsome Bobby M who seems to have developed a crush on her.

Handsome Bobby M came to the hospital from the Very Deep North which is similar to the Very Deep South but in a different geographical location. He claims to have known The Nurse’s first husband, Mary-Ann the Marvelous, when he was in the Tokyorama Penitentiary For Girls, serving his sentence for Bigamy and appearing to disappear with a miner.

Mary-Ann was a low class illusionist with a high class glamorous assistant named Davy Lamp who bore more than a passing resemblance to Marilyn Monroe in Niagara. One night during a charity performance, on The Nurse’s first wedding anniversary, he had simply climbed into his 'disappearing cabinet' with Davy, The Nurse’s life savings and her third best tiara, and disappeared.

Since then The Nurse has forged a new life for herself, attending Nursing lessons every third Wednesday and training her troupe of Patagonian blue fleas to perform the dance routines of Bob Fosse. She can feel the hope in Benny - she thinks tonight could be the start of something. Meanwhile guess who has been busy making jam for his son, who is currently about to saw something nasty in the woodshed…