Get ready for a road trip filled with all the frustrations, fun and laughter that goes with being family!

Straight-laced Joy Miles (Shawnee Smith) thinks she’s taking a simple road trip to move her free-spirited mother-in-law, Loraine, from Louisville to Savannah. Complete opposites, the two women manage to tolerate each other—barely. Joy is consumed with work, an impending deadline and a high-stakes project. Reluctantly, Loraine, now widowed, is taking the next step in life, moving to a retirement community, no longer a preacher’s wife, but a woman on her own. Her insights about life and family tend to get under Joy’s skin, especially since Loraine’s words make Joy take a hard look at her own whirlwind life, her priorities, and what is really important to her.

That’s the actress Shawnee Smith, learning how to peel crawfish on Sunday after the liturgy at our church in south Louisiana. Shannon Tilley, a pillar of the church and an excellent boiler of crawfish, is her instructor. Shawnee, who was in the sitcom Becker, the Saw horror films, and who currently stars with Charlie Sheen in Anger Management, became an Orthodox Christian just over a year ago. When I met her in Malibu this spring, she told me what a profound difference Orthodoxy made in her life, and how she wanted to show the world what it meant to live and to love as an Orthodox Christian. She and producer Rotimi Rainwater are working on a documentary film tentatively titled Orthodoxy, A Love Story. They and a small film crew plan to travel around the US, and perhaps to Russia, profiling various Orthodox Christians and congregations, capturing the diversity of the faith, and talking with converts about why and how they were drawn to it.