It is 1990, and Wysteria, Florida, America's oldest and least credible spiritualist community, is celebrating its 100th birthday. Coordinating an anniversary festival is local resident and US Arts & Crafts magazine publisher Sheila Renault. Assisting Sheila is her cousin Van, US A&C's incompetent receptionist and Wysteria's reigning Virgin Queen; Erich Weimar, ex-con, divorced father and town hunk; his nephew Seth, a troubled 30-year-old in the body of an even more troubled adolescent; Justin Cook, whose parents bought the Wysteria Hotel so he could have some other place to lie around; Marilyn Smart, the community's most talented and most modest psychic; and Lenore LaShomb, its least talented and least modest. Together Sheila and her committee organize an event that makes Wysteria a household name--for very different reasons than they expect--and makes the upper-class residents of neighboring Talbot consider nuking it from orbit.