Felix is a film scholar who runs a Monday-night movie club in what was once a vaudeville theater. While setting up a film in the projectionist’s booth, he’s confronted by the ghost of Lois Weber, a trailblazing motion picture director from Hollywood’s silent film era. Lois invites Felix to revisit—and in some casesrelive—scenes from his past as they are projected onto the cinema’s big screen.The medium of film becomes the lens for Felix to reflect on the women who profoundly affected his life. There’s his daughter, Aliza, a Gen Y writer for New York magazine; his sister, Frances, with whom he once shared a complicated bond of kindness and cruelty; and Verna, a fiery would-be contender for the 1951 Miss Rheingold competition, a beauty contest sponsored by a Brooklyn-based beer manufacturer.Against the backdrop of a kaleidoscopic convergence of politics and pop culture, family secrets, and Hollywood iconography, Felix gains an enlightened understanding of the pressures and trials of the women closest to him, and of the feminine ideals and feminist realities that all women, of every era, must face.
