PROLOGUE.

After her boyfriend Michael was killed in the September 11 attacks, Kristen Wilde began coping with the loss in a strange way: by doing stand-up. She talks to host Ira Glass about a comedy routine that, in retrospect, maybe wasn't so funny.

Act One. Lights, Camera, Traction!

At the age of 63, Suzanne Knode wrote her first screenplay ever. She lives in the Burbank Senior Artists Colony (BSAC) in Los Angeles, an independent living facility for people over 55 that offers writing and acting and painting classes. Suzanne wrote the screenplay, a ten-minute short called Bandida, in a screenwriting class. Everyone at the facility liked it so much that they decided to make it into a movie. They hired a director and held open auditions, and as the project took shape, expectations started rising.

Act Two. Miami Vices.

There's a show called Mortified in which ordinary people get onstage in front of a live audience and read embarrassing artifacts from their pasts: old letters, poems, mash notes, and—of course—diaries. We filmed Sascha Rothschild reading excerpts from her teenage journal, in which she documents, in bubblegum script with heart-dotted "i"s, her surprisingly quick slide into middle-school debauchery.