SYLVIA'S SECOND ACT

Bye-bye, Florida retirement community—hello, Manhattan!

“Because I am an avid fan of Sex and the City (I’ve seen it from start to finish six times), I know that Belinda is in reverse cowgirl position.” When Sylvia walks in on her husband, Louis, with the “roving whore of Boca Beach Gables” and learns in the aftermath that he has lost all their money through a bad investment, she feels mainly relief. She finally has a good reason to leave him, which she’s wanted to do for a long time. She heads over to her friend Evie’s, who suggests they start drinking immediately and the next day puts Sylvia in an Uber to the airport. Her initial plan—to stay with her daughter, Isabel, and help with the twins—is foiled by Isabel, who has no faith in her mother’s ability to make it on her own and is determined to get her parents back together. Rather than cave in to pressure, Sylvia decides to do the one thing she “really, truly” wants: move to Manhattan and restart her wedding-planning business. Though she would also like to “remember what it’s like to enjoy sex,” there’s no marriage plot here: Sylvia’s game plan is far more Sex and the City than Golden Bachelor. She persuades Evie to fly up to join her, and the roomies plunge into city living together in an Airbnb in Harlem, with Sylvia pawning her jewelry for seed money and going for a job interview with a rival wedding planner who did her dirty long ago. Yablon’s debut is mostly gentle screwball comedy, with a bit of gravitas added by Evie’s plotline—she lost her son to a drug overdose, and his widow has cut her off from her grandchild. So along with a messy affair, a penitent husband, and an angry daughter, Sylvia’s got that to worry about, too. But for a 63-year-old lady, she’s not much of a worrier. What Yablon (who’s much younger than her protagonists) gets right is that Sylvia cares less about finding true love than about work and friendship.

A little sex, a lotta laughs in the city.