Plot: It's sometime during the 1950s. Married Humpty and Ginny - it the second marriage for both - live and work on Coney Island, it a time when it has verged onto the seedy. Richie, Ginny's son from her first marriage, is acting out by setting fires, arguably as a result of his parents' split which Ginny admits was her fault in cheating, and despite Richie not remembering his father. While Humpty is emotionally needy of Ginny, Ginny, once a promising young actress, is unhappy in the marriage in realizing she never loved her Humpty about which he is totally oblivious, she who has been having a summer-long affair with Mickey, a college student and budding dramatist who pays the bills by lifeguarding. Ginny sees younger Mickey, with who she is in love, as her path to happiness as her next husband. While Mickey sometimes thinks he loves Ginny in return, his feelings are nowhere the obsessive nature of Ginny's feeling for him. Their lives become more complicated with the return of Carolina, Humpty's twenty-six year old daughter from his first marriage. Humpty broke complete ties with her when she, against his and her mother's wishes, married gangster Frankie Amato five years ago, instead of marrying some "good" boy, many which Humpty had lined up for her. With nowhere else to turn, Carolina needs to hide out as she, in her divorce from Frankie, has squealed against him to the authorities about where the proverbial bodies are buried. As such, Frankie and his thugs are out to eliminate her, with Humpty being the last place they would look in Frankie knowing the situation between Carolina and her father. Regardless, Humpty takes her in in being the protective father, who provides as much as he can for a better future for her in paying for her night schooling. That complication increases when Carolina and Mickey meet, there an immediate attraction between the two, with Carolina knowing nothing about his affair with Ginny. The question then becomes how far unstable Ginny will go to hang onto Mickey, who she sees as her future happiness.
Alternative Plot: Four peoples' lives intertwine amid the hustle and bustle of the Coney Island amusement park in the 1950s: Ginny, an emotionally volatile former actress now working as a waitress in a clam house; Humpty, Ginny's rough-hewn carousel operator husband; Mickey, a handsome young lifeguard who dreams of becoming a playwright; and Carolina, Humpty's long-estranged daughter, who is now hiding out from gangsters at her father's apartment.
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