Pat, nearly eighty – once a hairdresser by day and performer in a gay bar by night – lives in a grey, functional Ohio care home. He sneaks smokes in an outlying corridor, and serviettes from the dining hall, which he obsessively refolds into squares. He wears a polyester tracksuit and much of the time sleeps in an armchair in his grey, functional room, dreaming of his former life.
Then, one day, a visitor turns up – the solicitor of a former client who has died. He offers Pat $25,000 to style her hair for her display in an open coffin at the funeral parlour in town. She was a Republican socialite who, with other clients, had abandoned his salon when Pat’s partner died of AIDS-related illness.
