COMING SOON… RUNNING LATE FOR THE LOVE STORY

Viola’s polar plunge on a chilly Windset beach

When Anthony texts his weekly reminder that today is garbage day, and Viola texts back, everyday is garbage day when I’m with you, darling, she knows she can’t survive this suffocating marriage of over thirty years much longer. But her (slightly more than) midlife crisis is put on hold when her mother dies and she temporarily abandons her husband—Anthony’s words—leaving her disintegrating life in California to settle the family estate in small-beachtown Massachusetts in January. Unfortunately, Mom—fearing damnation, naturally—has left an oh, by the way confession, revealing that she was in fact the first to know Anthony. One thing led to another and next thing I know, we’re in his apartment doing the deed, Mom says posthumously, while continuing to insist that by keeping it secret, I only ever acted in your best interest. After her brain explodes, Viola embarks on a vendetta to punish Anthony by following her every worst instinct, beginning tonight. She meets up with her gonzo friend Jackie from high school days, the one for whom they must’ve coined the phrase sex, drugs, and rock ’n roll. They drink themselves silly at a dive bar before Viola gets the brilliant idea to undertake her first polar plunge at the nearby beach. But when she’s halfway into the water with half her clothes strewn across the sand, an annoying good samaritan grabs her from behind under the mistaken impression that she wants to off herself. You ruined it, she cries, but one look at her rescuer, reminiscent of a droll-eyed, graywhiskered Sean Connery, ignites the dormant sexual desire within. After an interruption from Jackie, she turns back to get his number for a possible future one-exquisite-night-of-carnalpleasure escapade, but the annoying man has disappeared. There’s no rest from here on out, as Viola wages war with her mother’s ghost, struggles to work up the courage to tell Anthony where he can put his garbage, and pursues the mystery man who may or may not be related to the signs she ignored when destiny once clubbed her over the head. Meanwhile a winter-nor’easter-for-the-ages bears down on Mom’s seaside home, floundering on stilts over the crashing waves.