The PlayFinder™

THE STORY: Vista Del Sol is paradise. Sandy beaches. Avocado-lined streets. But for seventeen-year-old cheerleader Laura, everything changes when her mother is killed in a car crash, and she is thrust into the role of caregiver for her precocious younger sister, Hannah, and her brittle father, Phil. Escape comes in the form of a ferocious fellow cheerleader. Leslie has a brochure about the Spirit Institute of the South, a two-week intensive where they can learn real cheer, the kind with Bible belt intensity. All they need is two weeks and a thousand bucks. Leslie gets her money easily, manipulating her overwrought single mother, Judy. But Laura has it harder. Her father is a consultant on a new and controversial freeway project, and he needs her home, taking care of Hannah. Desperate, Laura finally steals the money, and she and Leslie sneak off. Armed with only a Mobil card, the girls must face the open road together while a frantic Phil and Judy must cope with missing daughters. Once a part of the freeway protests, Judy now takes Phil’s side, and in each other, they see the mutual pain of a California dream lost. Hannah longs for her sister, and some order, to return. When Laura and Leslie finally arrive at their destination, a terrible realization awaits. The brochure that Leslie read was from twenty years ago, a relic she believed in out of desperation. In the void of the abandoned schoolyard, Laura finally confronts her mother’s loss. She’s ready to go home. Back at home, Phil, Judy and Leslie stand together at the freeway opening, cheering as they cut the ribbon. Laura refuses, taking Hannah to the beach to write things in the sand. It’s a dangerous, shifting place they live in, but facing the ocean they see hope and renewal there too.