When six-year-old Elray reaches up to touch the moon in the Tunnel of Love, she narrowly escapes a freak electric current that claims the lives of both her parents. Suddenly orphaned, she is left stunned and mute, until two loving but undomesticated uncles step in.

Cross-dressing Uncle Ajax insists on being addressed as 'Aunt'; Uncle Harwood is a macho photographer, full of swagger and fond of drink. When the deceptively sweet Irish lawyer Rena moves in to mount a lucrative lawsuit against the fairground, the eccentric household becomes the very model of family life reinvented.