The Park Bench

It is Christmas in Japan and Karen, an American exchange student, is miserably homesick, in spite of the kindness of the Japanese couple she lives with.

A young woman, struggling to become a novelist, has her life go into a tailspin. Her first novel is rejected, her non-committal boy friend decides to take a powder, her best friend moves to Mexico for an acting job, and her mother announces that her long presumed dead father is actually a hippie photographer who has come to town to meet her. Sinking into a depression at being a total failure at 28, she starts fantasizing about suicide. In her depths of despair she meets various eccentric characters including a chain-smoking Santa Claus and an obnoxious literary agent. But her belief in herself is only restored when she meets a patient in a hospital where she does volunteer work.

This short film follows two out, gay, Christian leathermen - Master Skip and Pup Tim - as they prepare to compete in The Second International Puppy Contest (IPC), a leather title contest for human canines and their handlers. The documentary is the first to introduce puppy play - a fetish in which a human expresses the attributes of a canine, most often in relation to another human taking the position of pup handler, owner, trainer, etc.