Jan, an effete Danish male nurse, is charged to look after a terminally-ill woman and her 12-year-old grandson over the course of a summer at the Jersey Shore. The distant and reserved Jan soon develops a friendship with the boy, whose love of show tunes and old Hollywood movies may presage his emerging sexuality. Feeling protective, Jan tries to put a damper on the lad's enthusiasms, aware that a very different life awaits him in Florida at summer's end, and that he had best start acting less like an embryonic queen and more like a "serious person."