Three Seconds in the Key
by Deb Margolin

A woman and her son cope with the mother's serious illness by watching basketball, borrowing the physicality of these strong, healthy men in the absence of mother's health and son's maturity.

During the course of their obsession with the team, one of the players comes out of the ecology of the television and into the woman's living room, cajoling her back into her body, from which she has been living in exile.

Filial love, mortality, the beauty of the body, and the collapsible boundary between Blacks and Jews are all raised by the woman's struggle to come to terms with her son's favorite basketball player having stepped into her life, and with her own ambivalence about the beauty of life in the face of her mortality.