Terri, a pajama-clad, disaffected high school student learns how to engage the world with the help of Mr. Fitzgerald, his assistant principal.

Hoping to improve his life, the temperamental Rodolfo Cano enlists in the Army. But when another Rodolfo Cano receives his sign-up orders, the two Rodolfos' lives collide -- with the first Rodolfo's girlfriend adding to the confusion.

“My plan was to die before the money ran out,” says 60-year-old penniless Manhattan socialite Frances Price, but things didn’t go as planned. Her husband Franklin has been dead for 12 years and with his vast inheritance gone, she cashes in the last of her possessions and resolves to live out her twilight days anonymously in a borrowed apartment in Paris, accompanied by her directionless son Malcolm and a cat named Small Frank—who may or may not embody the spirit of Frances’s dead husband.