An imaginative boy from New York with an ethnically diverse background (Mexican-American mother, Polish-American father) Howie Kaplinsky, dreams of being a cowboy, vividly fantasizing that NYC locations and situations are scenes and situations in the Wild West. With his "Cowboy Vision," Howie transforms dogs into coyotes, telephone poles into sequoias, a woman in a fur coat into a grizzly bear, the concrete canyons of New York into the Grand Canyon, and Thanksgiving parade floats into an enormous, bizarre stampede.