Mercedes is a taxi dancer--in a town where taxi dancers have gone the way of the penny arcade--who aspires to become a famous actress. She is in love with Harry, an aging TV actor so has-been that his big comeback gig has him dressed in a gorilla suit. Mercedes' colleague on the dance floor, Jackie, is a slim, tall, copper-headed transvestite who looks really--really--beautiful in blue sequins. But it is Mercedes' sweetly innocent relationship with Ernesto, a hopelessly romantic admirer, that is at the film's emotional core.