What happens when a psychotherapist moves next door to a speakeasy-brothel in 1927 San Francisco? A full-contact sensual event!
Briefest of Synopses
Madeline Langley, owner and gifted crafter of fine hats for mainly men, desperately wants a child. She gets her wish when an angel on the fire escape outside her window grants her one on the condition she will not be able to have another. She accepts and her son Luther is born.
When he unexpectedly dies at age four, she is driven by grief to France, where she spends years and when she returns, she is transformed into Lady Madeline and when trying to buy her business back from Evan Roche, the unofficial mayor of San Francisco, is forced into a partnership both professional and personal.
Together they build up CockRoche’s into her new Versailles, a unique speakeasy where men are drawn to the spiked air of what Madeline brings along with her three girls, Ramie, Chamille and Zoe. As time goes on, she begins to want another child and searches in her own way for the angel in the fire escape to buy back her fertility but begins to descend into drinking and an obsession with her past life as Josephine, love and wife of Napolean.
When psychotherapist Dr. Carl Supine, haunted by his experiences in the first world war, and his assistant Peter Simpson move into an office where his window faces hers, they cross paths through the melancholy voice of her singing that wafts through his window and up his spine.
What follows is an uncorked spiritual and sexual mayhem that can be described as a full contact sensual event, a slapstick tragedy, an ultimatum on who the true healer is, the prostitute or the psychotherapist.