Jean Pritchard is a supermarket cashier, a news junkie and the mother of three: two teenagers who still live at home and another who speaks in italics and seems to have moved out. Then her kids start getting in fights for defending their Vietnamese neighbours, and her son takes up with "That Charlene," and her long-lost mother comes blasting out of the past (where Jean wishes she'd stayed) and prepares to move in, declaring that "anyone as can't hold up their end in a poker game is a person who's been subjected to child abuse." Jean concludes that if bullshit was music, "they'd be a whole brass band - and I'm the one playing the trombone."