Baker--writer, actress, and stand-up comedian--finds herself at the New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance, a virgin in a room full of virgins. Cultivating an oxymoronic identity as a bold, modern, abstinent, religious comic, Baker test-drives her identity and finds herself in the strangest of

"A wickedly funny debut. Baker is both self-absorbed and generous, whip-smart and naïve; she apologizes for none of it."—PeopleIt's lonely being a Mormon in New York City. Every year, Elna Baker attends the New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance. This year, her Queen Bee costume (which involves a funnel stinger stuck to her butt) isn't attracting the attention she'd anticipated. So once again, Elna finds herself alone, standing at the punch bowl, stocking up on Oreos, a virgin in a room full of thirty-year-old virgins doing the Funky Chicken. But loneliness is nothing compared to what Elna feels when

Five Points (an intersection in lower Manhattan formed when Anthony Street was extended to meet Orange and Cross-today's Baxter and North Streets), was the most infamous neighborhood in nineteenth-century America. Visitors from Charles Dickens to Abraham Lincoln flocked to Five Points to witness the filthy streets, bordellos, gambling dens, and tenements that housed the lowest of the low. A close look at Five Points reveals a hidden world. As one of the most ethnically varied areas in the nation's most diverse city, The Five Points story is a classic American example of immigrant energy and ambition. From "Bowery Boy" culture