Ellie is as multi-faceted as the beautiful glass she makes. As the stylish and glamorous Heloise, she commands huge admiration and astonishing fees for her exquisite art and is the envy of her new and alarmingly ambitious apprentice but her distant, impeccable psychiatrist husband sees her as the wayward, indulged artiste. To their daughter Stephanie, who has fled to South America, Ellie is the ultimate manipulative mother, yet to her countless gay male friends - many of whom are in the throes of the epidemic AIDS - she is the wise maternal figure who knows how to organise a \'good\' death. Perhaps it\'s only her best friends Hugo, a gay man and Judith, the woman with whom she LUNCHES who know and love the woman of high ideals and muddled emotions that is Ellie MacCauley. But even they wouldn\'t understand the ongoing dialogue she is conducting in her head with the irascible angel who heralds the shattering of Ellie\'s universe...