Dancing Under a Buzzing Streetlamp

It's Los Angeles, in the early 1970's, a time when a young Italian man was the legacy of his family. A time when a young man was destined to step into his father's, his grandfather's shoes. A time when a young man was not encouraged to chase his dreams of being the next Hollywood or Broadway singing and dancing sensation and of being in love with someone of the same sex.

Mike Demetriano, that 16-year-old third-generation young Italian man, has a lot on his plate.

His quirky, Latin-quoting best friend Kait knocks him upside his head (literally and often) and tells Mike to follow his dreams. Mike’s boyfriend Josh carries as many secrets as Mike is, and not just about also being gay. A dance instructor, outside whose studio Mike each night dances incredible, impromptu choreographies while bathed in the light of a buzzing streetlamp, tells Mike he's the most naturally-gifted dancer she's ever met and offers to teach him for free.

Mike just wants everyone off his case. He just wants to be the good little Demetriano and do what his beaten-down father and his tyrannical grandfather expect him to do. Mike knows it's the right thing to do, because he learned early on, when he was five years old and lost and abandoned in a dark alleyway in a foreign city: if you don't play things safe, you don't keep your head down and your nose clean, this life eats you alive and spits you out. And you end up the worst thing imaginable: alone.

At Kait's Sweet Sixteen party she demands Mike give her the gift she really wants: that he dance her off her feet, right there in front of everybody. Mike fights her, but his best friend knows she's the one person Mike can’t deny. Mike gives Kait her gift, and it just feels...so...perfect.

No! The family business, Demeter Design — the one that lets them live the incredible life they do as Hollywood Oscar-winning elite — needs a third-generation Demetriano at the helm, and that's got to be him. Helming Demeter is Mike’s security, it’s Mike’s playing it safe.

But then there’s that night when the nightmare Josh lives blows wide open, and Josh’s grandfather reveals all the horrific things he’s been doing to his grandson for so long. Incredibly horrific things. So how, therefore, can Josh still smile and laugh? Given his boyfriend’s optimistic reaction, Mike now knows he at last has some important, life-changing questions to answer: What choice does Mike make, this Italian young man, the pride of his family and their hope for the future? Play it safe for the rest of his life? Or risk everything and dance a choreography, right there in front of all of them, that opens the gates of Heaven themselves?