The Babysitters

These girls mean business.

Shirley Lyner keeps her life in a nice, orderly manner. She likes her right angles. She likes knowing where things are. She likes the expected, not the surprises. As Shirley is fond of saying, “everything and everyone has a place”.

Michael Beltran has a different outlook on life. The father of two, Michael married Gail, the ‘party-girl’ who turned out to be the responsible one in the family. He works a job he doesn’t like, misses the occasional AA meeting, and longs for a little of the excitement he used to know.

When Michael drives Shirley home from babysitting the first night, they both find something they need in each other. Michael wants someone, anyone, to think of him as fascinating and funny and vital. Shirley wants someone to think of her as grown up. But, as Shirley says, as soon as one thing is out of place, it throws everything out of whack, and when a stolen kiss is returned both Shirley and Michael set in motion a series of events fatally destined to crash.

For Michael, guilt over the kiss leads him to overpay Shirley for her babysitting services. For Shirley, what she doesn’t admit she can’t regret, so she puts the money away with the rest of her college fund. When a friend of Michael’s wants the same experience and Shirley’s best friend is willing to “baby-sit” Shirley sees it as a simple matter of supply and demand…and a way to make twenty percent off the top.

But sex is never as easy as stamping “services paid”, and love to a teenage girl doesn’t mean the same as lust to a middle aged man. So while “business” is soon booming, so too are greed, envy and jealousy threatening to spiral Shirley’s carefully constructed world wildly out of control.