Alligators in the Trees

Frank’s Coffee Shop on Manhattan’s Lower East Side becomes a safe haven for Tobias Jordan, a paparazzi-phobic 90s rock star, drawn to the obscurity of the dingy hole-in-the-wall, and Philip Glessner, a disgraced architect, who ducks inside to elude a posse of blood-thirsty reporters. What keeps both coming back is their waitress, Priscilla Vanderpool, who becomes an improbable paragon of virtue to the shell-shocked Philip, and an unwitting muse to gifted and jaded Tobias. But neither man sees her as she really is: a philosophical hard-luck case with a quick wit and a twenty-year habit of penning insightful and haunting lyrics that no one has ever heard. Alligators in the Trees—a line from one of Priscilla's songs—symbolizes the bugaboos that lurk in the minds of all three characters: in Tobias, the fear he's lost his talent, and that his string of model-mistresses will be the downfall of his soul; in Philip's guilt-ridden conscience as he struggles with the collapse of his most touted building and the prospect of losing custody of his daughter if he doesn't meet his estranged wife's demands; in Priscilla, the fear of actually making a decision about her life instead of always taking the path of least resistance. Fate intervenes and forces all three to act on their true desires.