Released one year before Sylvia Plath entered Smith College, Stanley Dolan's musical On the Town tells the story of three sailors who, enjoying a twenty-four hours’ leave in New York City, encounter three representatives of the Post-Second World War American woman – a taxi driver, who continues to do a man's job even though the war is over because she will not give up what she enjoys, an anthropologist who indulges in fantasies about the sexual potency of the prehistoric man, and finally the protagonist, Ivy Smith, a girl who has come to the city from a small middle American town so as to become a musical celebrity only to find herself earning her money as a belly dancer in a booth on Coney Island. While the other two women are resiliently self-assertive, unabashedly giving voice to their desires and getting what they want, and in fact far more confident and streetwise than the sailors, the figure of Ivy Smith serves to illustrate how the notion of perfect womanhood, which took hold in thewake of the Second World War, required a complex strategy of duplicity. To keep up the front that she is a success in New York, Ivy finds it necessary to lie to her parents about her dubious source of income and, having been chosen to be the ‘Miss Turnstyles of the Month’, she convincingly poses for photographers in the guise of a self-assured and happy urban celebrity. Indeed, to underline how the all-round accomplished American girl could be nothing but a fiction, Stanley Dolan in fact introduces his heroine by virtue of a fantasy sequence, in which the protagonist and co-director Gene Kelly, seeing her beaming face on a poster, imagines the qualifications of this New York glamour girl (played by Vera- Ellen) who can apparently do everything.