An Actor Prepares

Bad guys plot to trick a newly arrived Eastern girl out of a ranch which belongs to her infant ward. Roy, of course, saves the ranch for the girl. Songs include "I'm Headin's for the Home Corral," "He's a No Good Son of a Gun," "Sandman Lullaby," "Song of the San Joaquin," and "I'm a Cowboy Rockefeller."

Jack Frost's playboy lifestyle in New York City is rocked by the news that his childhood love is engaged. Amidst his friendships with Scotch Evans, a ribald nightlife correspondent; Ozzy, a troubled but loving heroin addict; and Kate Hardwick, a bewitching, quick-witted reporter, Jack sinks deeper into depression. Haunted by lost-love and his mother's suicide, Jack plunges into whiskey and self-destruction . . . until his eleven-year-old neighbor, Sophie, an unlikely mother figure, leads Jack back into himself, and out of the nostalgia and excess that consumed him.

In 1983, Oliver Nicholas, at thirteen, is well-poised to enter the precocious teenage world of first-sex, vodka and possible-love in New York City when he is traumatized by the stroke of his housekeeper (and only true maternal figure), a sixty-five-year-old Chilean woman named Aida. What was supposed to be an exhilarating and somewhat fearful rite of passage - diving into the exciting, fast-paced world of first experiences - quickly becomes skewed by an incomprehensible depression, and a house of interior horrors. Surrounded by women - his untraditional, Spanish, photographer mother (more interested in the role of confidante than mother) his sister, a comedic, door-slamming tormentor, marked by her parent's divorce; and Aida, his silver-haired emotional focal point on the verge of death in Lenox Hill Hospital - Oliver struggles to maintain his role as "man of the house" and his sanity.