"I’m Wearing My Own Clothes!" is a memory play bookended by scenes featuring two 10-year-old school girls who are writing about Dr. Mary Edwards Walker (1832-1919) for a school project. Raised by liberal parents who put their daughters in pants to do chores, Walker never took hers off despite frequent arrests for "impersonating a man." She was an ardent supporter of abolition, dress reform, and suffrage. Walker offered her services to the Union Army in 1861. Prejudice against her gender and clothes kept her from a commission though she volunteered in hospitals and on battlefields for three years. While serving the 52nd Ohio Infantry, she was arrested as a spy and imprisoned for four months in Castle Thunder, a notorious Confederate prison in Richmond, Virginia. Near the end of the war, Walker was finally mustered into the Union Army in Louisville, Kentucky, where she oversaw the Woman’s Military Prison Hospital. Recommendations by two generals resulted in Walker receiving the Medal of Honor in 1865, which she wore every day until her death, and she remains (in 2017) the only woman to be awarded the Medal of Honor.

The lives of two young couples are unalterably changed when General Ulysses S. Grant issues an order on December 17, 1862, banishing all Jews from a military district that includes Paducah, Kentucky, where 30 Jewish families reside. A Paducah merchant, Cesar Kaskel, organizes an exodus by boat to Cincinnati, where Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise and other Jews help. Kaskel then takes a train to Washington where he meets with President Lincoln who had been unaware of Grant’s order. (Though based on historical incidents, the play is intended as a dramatic work rather than a documentary.)