The Sleep-Tite company picnic is the musical centerpiece of Abbott and Donen’s The Pajama Game and is a reworking of Bissell’s 7 ½ Cents, for which he wrote the screenplay.
Once a year, company management and union employees meet on common ground to celebrate at a picnic:
Gladys Hotchkiss (Janis Paige) dances with the factory colleagues Buzz Miller and Peter Gennaro
Oh well, it happens once a year
And this is that once-a-year day/Once-a-year day
Everyone’s entitled to be wild,
Be a child, goof, raise the roof/Once a year!
This year, the picnic is also the moment that Sid Sorokin, the new superintendent, falls for the local union representative Catherine Williams, a redhead called Babe. At the start, Sid says, “Do you want to be my girl?’ Babe responds, “Do I have to”? Of course, she’s willing to, to which an overjoyed Sid responds, “What a picnic. What a girl. What a day.
Babe Williams (Doris Day) and Sid Sorokin (John Raitt) fall in love.
Food? Not when there is so much singing and dancing.
See Richard Bissell. 7 1/2 Cents. Boston: Little Brown, 1953; George Abbott, The Pajama Game (1954). Book by George Abbott and based on Richard Bissell’s novel 7 ½ Cents. Music and Lyrics by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross; George Abbott and Stanley Donen. The Pajama Game (1957). The screenplay by George Abbott and Richard Bissell is based on Bissell’s 7 ½ Cents. Music and Lyrics by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross.