A tale
about
parking in
paradise.

Who do you trust your “baby” with?

In the Seat of a Stranger’s Car is a vibrant comedy that looks under the hood at the entourage of working-class misfits you leave your car with every day. Set in the bubbling ethnic melting pot of Hawai’i, by day, the pseudo-intellectual protagonist is a struggling writer who teaches at a renowned prep school. By night, he is a full-time valet, surrounded by a lewd yet lovable cast of coworkers who challenge his misplaced sense of entitlement. The gang’s service industry stasis is quickly shattered when they discover a young boy in the trunk of a deserted vehicle in the hotel parking lot. Afraid of surrendering the abandoned child to foster care, the valets decide to raise the child as their own—a task that proves both absurd and transformative. Juggling jobs and a budding romance with a late-night flower girl, the narrator finds himself on a journey around the island to uncover the boy’s mysterious past but unearths something much more meaningful in the process: himself.

Excerpt

Valet parking is a lot like stripping: you’d like to get out of it, but the money’s just too goddamn good. You never knew valets made bank? Well, now you do. We clean up. Maybe not all the time, but some years, some locations, some gigs are indeed better than others. Yet still, just like stripping, there’s a stigma. An odd, and might I add unwarranted, reputation. I mean, you can see it in their eyes. Literally watch a customer go through three of the five stages of grief handing their ride over to a valet. As if every attendant is related to, or influenced by, those two greaseballs in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. By the way, thanks for that, John Hughes. That sweeping generalization and basically only living portrayal of valets in popular culture has really done a number for our image. Those two goons are pretty much our blackface…

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• Kauai
• Oʻahu
• Maui
• Hawaiʻi
• Berkeley
• Los Angeles