It's 1936. Allentown, PA. After being deserted by her mother, fourteen-year-old Jesse Mae Maundy lives with her abusive father.

Jesse dreams of running away to New York to become a Ziegfeld Follies Girl and lies about her age to get a job at a drugstore with her best friend Alice, so she can save enough money to escape her father.

She hears about a burlesque show at a nightclub in Easton, NJ and thinks this could be her ticket to eventually getting to New York. And as the abuse at home gets worse, she finally packs a small suitcase, and runs away.

Arriving at the nightclub, she becomes a stripper, and finds the mafia runs it.

Eventually she is sent by the mafia to Redding, PA to work in a brothel. After getting pregnant, she is beaten so badly she loses the baby.

Bleeding to death, she is rescued by Joe, another mafia capo, who takes her to a hospital to heal.

Pulled into the fringes of the mafia underworld, Jesse is a tragic, but eventually uplifting story of forbidden, but enduring love.