The Forbidden Passages: Tales from the Editorial Spike

Journalists call it the “spike”—the decision to not publish a story for reasons of its truthfulness, incompleteness or other political sensitivity. I used the spike on thousands of words I could have included in my dating book. Even after years of polishing and considering materials, I had to decide what to include and what to delete up until the end. The book could have topped 250 pages had I opted to throw in every pearl of wisdom I’ve ever scribbled on dating topics, or topics completely unrelated to dating.

In some cases, I spiked episodes that I ultimately did not feel comfortable seeing the light of day (at least under my own name). They were just too personal, revealing more than necessary about the inner workings of intense relationships. I decided to leave in related but shorter or milder material that made a point without drawing blood. And in some cases, I think I’ll save the material for either a novel or another try at the New York Times’ “Modern Love” column. Something may be too personal for a book, but just right for Modern Love (as I’ve said at times in my life, I’m corruptible).

Still, no harm will come from a peek at what’s not there. So, here, free of most context, are snippets of what I call the Forbidden Passages—Tales from the Spike. Feel free to create your own imagined stories about them.
-----------------------
She had said I was a pain in the ass for never calling, just doing IM. "That's not true!" I protested. "As soon as Helga gave me her phone number I called her." Ingrid was stunned by this—she never knew I had actually talked to Helga. I had behaved the same with Ingrid—when a woman gives me her phone number, I call.
-----------------------
A 37 year-old Catholic lawyer of Lebanese background in Latin America, Judy immediately attracted passionate attention from men who loved her glamorous profile and pouting, voluptuous photograph, remarkably similar to Latin TV star Ninel Conde.

In fact, the woman in the picture was Ninel Conde. The profile was a fake, a lark invented by a friend to assemble all the stereotypical themes of a glamour-girl profile. Then the lie became a kind of truth. My friend turned to me, as co-writer, to help figure out what to do with the emotional mess that her sexy monster created.
-----------------------
For months I chased Sandi even as her yes/no/maybe-so ambivalence made the pursuit as futile and maddening as Captain Ahab’s quest for Moby Dick. I knew this opportunity would end badly, but my back muscles strained and my hands and heart bled as I plunged my emotional oars into the churning, blood-chilling waters of romance with Sandi. . . . Then, Sandi flipped her cruel, mighty tail one final time and smashed my pathetic little whaleboat of love, ending contact between us.
-----------------------
Vera says: Come to see me
Van says: That's a long haul, a big step. Will you be in the US at any time?
Vera says: No, I prefer you come  ladies first choice
Van says: I see. Too bad about all that water in the middle.
Vera says: Bye
-----------------------
My favorite venues have been the Essensuality “erotic expression” salons and the monthly Wide Open Wednesday at the Museum of Sex, where performers gather in the Oral Fix Café for a rollicking, unpredictable time. I’ve had to go deep within to find my own performing style and material. From the start, I knew I had to connect to audiences with my words, not my looks; unlike some performers, I’ll never wow anybody by stripping down to my skivvies. What, I thought, could I possibly say compared to talented performers like Bikini Bondage Babe, Little Miss Orgy Organizer, Gay Phone Sex Dude and Brooklyn Transgender Birthday Gang Bang Guy?
-----------------------
We were in our 40s and used my classic Corvette Stingray to get away from our kids. Better late than never!

Did I say “Corvette Stingray”? I meant my “Hyundai Elantra.” But it thinks it’s a Stingray.

Publication Day

"A Kosher Dating Odyssey" becomes properly available today. I've had friends already email me that Amazon has sent out the paperback version. I'm waiting to hear about the Kindle version. I've had some gratifying congratulatory calls, including from my friend referred to as Chloe the Oracle of Romance in the book. She's soon to get her copy. The references to her could be a great ice-breaker in her online dating activities.

I have no idea what coming days will bring, although at least one article is set to run about the book and I continue to alert editors about it. Who'll find it interesting as fodder for a review or just as a good read is anybody'd guess. The essays I'm doing in support of the book could turn in to excellent material for a revised edition down the road; one essay is evening inspiring me to write a short story for a contest being sponsored by the Texas Observer newspaper.

What comes next creatively? I have some ideas. I always have ideas. Execution remains the issue. To goose up the competitive spirit, I attended a panel presentation by three romance novel writers at the Ridgefield Public Library today. Hearing other writers always inspires me, and now that I have one real, honest-to-goodness book to my credit, I can keep thinking about what comes next. Surely this can't be the peak of my writing career—have keyboard, will travel to distant lands and write about topics that have been bubbling in me for decades.

All I have to do is turn off the Internet and get back to banging out what's already in me, just waiting to burst out—a little later than I expected in life, but the only present I have is right now.

Rolling With The Online Dating Punches

This essay appeared in what was then called JMag, the magazine of the dating site JDate, in conjunction with the publication of my book A Kosher Dating Odyssey. 

The profile intrigues me. The woman has everything I seek – the education, the cultural interests, the open smile with a hint of sauciness (lingering, intimate weekends), a passion for Judaism. I sense a connection. I write, she responds, we meet at a café midway between our suburban homes. Sitting outside on a spring evening, time simply stops as we both wonder if this could mean something. We kiss goodbye and then write to each other later that evening. We’ll meet again. Soon.

OK, that’s the fantasy. Here’s the reality. Same starting point, different direction:

The profile intrigues me. The woman has enough personality so I write to her. She writes back and we agree to meet. Sitting inside a Starbucks on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on a fall afternoon, I sense little connection. She’s tired from hard Halloween partying the night before and doesn’t want to get a drink. I settle for tea. After 15 minutes she says, “I don’t think this is a love match so I’m leaving.” And leave she does, as I sit there gaping. We’ll never meet again.

Such awkward moments are part of dating. You’re out there emotionally, revealing hopes and fears and your brightest smile. Do it long enough and you get a thick skin that still bleeds easily. Sure, you want to leap into the great romance of your life, but that electricity doesn’t always strike. More often, you’re drenched in a chill drizzle of encounters that range between wryly amusing (in retrospect) to heartbreaking. I detail some of them in my book A Kosher Dating Odyssey: One Former Texas Baptist’s Quest for a Naughty & Nice Jewish Girl.

Weird moments typically happen on a first or second date when you’re sorting out early impressions. Consider my time with a woman I’ll call Spygirl. On the surface, we looked way promising. Like me, she was from Texas and we both worked in corporate communications – in fact, our employers were direct rivals. And that started the problem. We had one date that worked out well enough, then scheduled another, just for a coffee again. This time, Spygirl started asking, rather aggressively, for confidential documents from my company. Her tone struck me as bizarre. Was I her romance interest, or a patsy in a corporate espionage ring? I declined, of course, and Spygirl’s peculiar behavior pushed me to run for the exits.

Speaking of Texas, I once had an IM from an attractive woman involved in the arts in that state. She was a bit younger than me, and her smart ‘n’ sassy profile made my heart go pitty-pat. Alas… it turned out this woman was my second cousin and we’ve known each other since childhood. Our mothers were first cousins so, no dice there. File under “awkward, but funny.”

Then there was Sparkles, a fellow suburbanite. One Sunday evening at her house we were trying, reluctantly, to move the date to its conclusion. With the weekend kid hand-off looming, we struggled to get me out the door. Keep in mind that Sparkles was a curvy armload of a gal and I liked the feel of our farewell hugs. The seconds were ticking away, but we just couldn’t disengage as we stood next to my car.

And then the headlights hit us as her ex pulled into the driveway with the kids. I don’t know how much he saw of us – we quickly broke the clinch – but he certainly noticed my battered 1986 Saab in the narrow driveway. Without a pause he backed up so I could make my getaway. By the way, Sparkles’ ex and I had some professional connections (let’s leave this vague) so opportunities for office awkwardness could have reached astronomical levels. Maybe I should have introduced him to Spygirl so she could pester him for documents.

Fortunately, awkward encounters usually last just a few minutes. You meet an ex-flame entwined around her new guy, the doe-eyed IM charmer becomes a strident anti-American loon on the phone, the woman you meet bears absolutely no resemblance to her profile photos (been there, done all of that.) When these moments happened, I gleaned whatever lessons I could, dusted myself off and moved to the next contestant. Sometimes I seriously ached, but that’s the way the game goes.

However, awkwardness could stretch far beyond a phone call or coffee date. Instead, you have stumbled into a dating version of The Twilight Zone, full of shadows, menace, long pauses and no chance for escape. I’m talking about the most hopeful yet perilous phase of online dating: “The Visit.”

Traveling a few hours to another city for lunch is one thing; flying to another country for a week is quite another. I know from experience; meeting a woman in a country where you can’t even speak the language requires a leap of faith and a zen-like tolerance for potential disconnections. I made that leap into disconnection during a trip to meet a woman I’ll call Guapa. We burned hot in the beginning of our relationship, then cycled through periods of stone-cold silence and warmth. While she wanted me to visit, she also vowed to find me a local “girlfriend.” The longer I knew her, the less I knew her, if that makes sense, but I was intensely curious about Guapa. After a local opportunity tanked, I agreed to a week-long visit to a place I’ll call Pueblo Peligroso—Dangerous Town.

Surprises began at the airport, where Guapa met me with her ex-husband. She lacked a car at the time, so the ex agreed to be our chauffeur. At her place, Guapa laid down some ground rules, such as, I couldn’t take photos of her nor get any photos of us together. She was often distracted; I wondered why she even bothered to have me visit. File this under “awkward and ominous.”

She really did pawn me off on a local friend of hers. And guess what – we connected as the local girlfriend graciously showed me the charming side of Pueblo Peligroso. Among other things, we enjoyed a long lunch at an outdoor café across the street from the main cathedral, which we then toured. In all, a lovely, hand-holding day, with photos. While Guapa was a considerate hostess, we never found a comfortable rhythm and the trip ended our rocky three-year relationship. “Awkward” doesn’t begin to describe the visit. The local girlfriend and I remain in touch, although I have not returned to Pueblo Peligroso.

I like to think every awkward episode was a learning experience. After Guapa, I never took another long trip to meet a woman, for example. I became much more local in what I would consider. In a few years, I met a nearby woman I began dating steadily. I learned what works for me. Reaching that point required leaps into the unknown and plenty of strained moments. Be the encounter a Starbucks one-off or a risky week in another country, I had to find out for myself.

Some Modest How-To Ideas on Dating

I cover a lot of ground in my book "A Kosher Dating Odyssey," but one topic I mostly avoid is how-to. By the time you're in your 40s and 50s, you don't need my advice on how to present yourself or appeal to men or women. Then again, why not some ideas from a guy who spent years out there knocking around and getting knocked around? I'm compiling a list of pithy, good-hearted guidance, initially for women. As ideas come to me, I'll add some for men out there who are working the websites and wondering how to make them work better. So:

• I like self-confidence in a woman, especially on appearance issues. Of course, our bodies change as we age, and a woman's sense of satisfaction and self-acceptance is very appealing. Put your best foot forward and save the neuroses for your girlfriends.
• When going out to dinner with a man, take plenty of time to find a restaurant you both like. Once there, select what you want to eat with a minimum of agonized consideration; long discussions about the pros and cons of different dining options exhaust and confuse men. We like to decide on what to eat and be done with it. Save the food fetishes and phobias for girls' night out.
• If you had an enjoyable time with a man and think the feeling is mutual, surprise him with a hand-written thank-you note. Everybody likes to get real letters yet  nobody sends them. Break that pattern and surprise a man with your communications flair and elegant handwriting—you will make a BIG impression.
• When using an online dating site, remember that men are intensely visual creatures. Use as many profile photos as possible, selecting those that focus on YOU in a favorable, put-together light. Let men's imagination wander and envision themselves with you via evening wear, business wear, fresh at-home ensembles. Avoid blurry cell-phone and webcam photos, photos with sunglasses (what are you hiding?), travel pictures that make you look tiny (men don't care that you visited the Eiffel Tower), or group photos with your arms draped around Uncle Fritz and Aunt Gerdl. Show that you care enough to get appealing photos.
• Don't let strong political views overly color dating profiles, since that can turn off men who don't share those values. You may think "Republicans make me vomit!" and "Rush Limbaugh is a war criminal!" but saying so brands you as a political crank rather than a caring progressive. I found profiles with such intolerant views and they were a major turn-off. Men and women are more than their political views so it's better to agree to disagree rather than dismiss an otherwise compatible man just because he does not think exactly the way you do. (In my experience, liberal women are far more adamant and unyielding in their politics than conservative women.)
• While on a date, you may see other friends. It's perfectly acceptable to stop and chat with them and introduce your date of the evening. Beware, however, if the conversation with the friend turns into a one-on-one discussion that leaves your date feeling ignored and isolated. This could especially sour an early date in a new relationship when people feel vulnerable and want to stay connected with the romantic potentiality. Save the deep discussion for later (post-date, when you'll want to dish about the date, anyway) and keep the focus on having an enjoyable time with the man/woman of the evening.
• GUYS: This is for you. Based on conversations with women, such as my dear friend, mentioned in the book as Chloe the Oracle of Romance, show some common sense. Chivalry is still popular: Hold open doors, stand up when a lady enters the room, push a woman's chair in at a restaurant, observe good grooming at all times, be attentive to a woman's interests and questions. Don't drone on about your obsessions, be they sports, World of Warcraft, the "Saw" movies, your prostate, or anything else that could be a conversation-stopper. Keep the focus on getting to know your date and let her know about you—but not everything about you. Sure, you're interesting—but she is, too.

 

Speaking in Several Tongues

Readers of the upcoming book, "A Kosher Dating Odyssey," may want to keep some dictionaries handy since I throw in words from several other languages. Sometimes a phrase from Hebrew or Spanish just sounds right. I write about this linguistic side of online dating—how a little learning can go a long way—in a post at the Times of Israel, where I'm also contributing these days. "Judaism is for (Language) Lovers" is my maiden voyage there:

Once I graduated from college and moved to New York, I started dating Jewish women and found many excelled at languages. They inspired a lifetime of studies that often overlapped with whatever was spoken by my love interest of the moment. If she spoke Hebrew or Russian or Portuguese or Dutch, then I wanted to speak it, too. For the past 30 years I’ve diligently cycled through languages, including several rounds of Hebrew. While I can’t speak anything but English, an ability to call a woman “motek” (“sweetie” in Hebrew) or close an email with “beijos e abraços” (“kisses and hugs” in Portuguese) sure can smooth the flow of a promising new romance.

 

The Case of the Two Nancys -- A Shopping-Day Investigation

While I've never been much of a shopper, I will snap up old books, publications, posters and music when I see something I want. Yesterday was one of those days when I made some great purchases in two locations, linked, improbably, by the late actress Nancy Marchand. Or actress Nancy Marquand. Same actress or not? What started as a a fun post on an amazing coincidence became a puzzling tale of research and ambiguity.

I know Marchand from the series The Sopranos, of which I became a huge fan once it appeared on DVD. I compulsively watched the show and took notes that I turned it into an essay, "What I Learned About Love from Tony Soprano." A small part of the essay appears in "A Kosher Dating Odyssey." Marchand played Tony's conniving mother Livia, to great acclaim. Memories of the show returned when I dropped by the local Goodwill store yesterday afternoon and found "The Sopranos: A Family History," published in 2000 after show's second season. The book notes that Marchand died in 2000, during the filming of the second season. She died the day before her 72nd birthday.

Later in the day, I dropped by the Westport Public Library for its spring sale. There, I saw boxes of old—and I mean, back to the 1940s old —Playbill theater programs. There must have been 200, and the sale had been on since 9 a.m. The more I pawed through the boxes, the more I thought, "I gotta scoop these up. When will I get this chance again?" Another theater buff asked about when the Playbills appeared and I showed her where most of them carried a date for the week they appeared, on an inside title page. She thanked me as we returned to our crazed quests to find programs of plays that resonated with us.

I left the library with 28 Playbills at 50 cents each, total cost, the equivalent of about three gallons of gas. Such a deal! I selected them in several categories. Some were classics, like South Pacific or West Side Story, and others might appeal to friends, like Lost in the Stars and Roland Petit's Les Ballets De Paris. Others had great kitsch appeal in their covers, like Gorilla Queen (off-Broadway) and others featured young versions of famous faces on Broadway, such as Alan Alda in The Owl and the Pussycat and Carol Burnett in Fade Out-Fade In.

And then I scanned one of the oldest Playbills, I Remember Mama from the week of March 4, 1946, by Rogers and Hammerstein. Starring in the role of Christine was Nancy Marquand. The program said,

Nancy Marquand (Christine) hails from Philadelphia's Main Line. While in high school she began preparing for the stage by studying with her great aunt, Julia West, who at one time had been a member of Lillian Russell's company. Her professional debut was with the Greenhills Theatre at Ocean City, where she remained as the company's ingenue for two years. Her first Broadway engagement was with "Kiss and Tell." Earlier this season she was seen in Owen Davis' "No Way Out."

Reading this, I assumed Marquand was Marchand with an earlier spelling, but the more I read about Marchand's career, the more I wondered. Bios all say she didn't reach Broadway until The Taming of the Shrew in 1951; I Remember Mama was five years earlier. When I looked for Nancy Marquand, the path quickly goes cold, as she's listed for only the plays given above and then—nothing. The Marquand bio from 1946 describes an actress with more experience than Marchand could have had as a 17 year old then. Marquand came from Philadelphia, while Marchand studied at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Tech (later renamed Carnegie Mellon University). The photos don't quite look the same, as Marquand looks delicate; Marchand in her late 60s was tall and stern—but the photos were taken a half-century apart. Here's the 1946 photo: 

So my shopping passions collided with my Sam Spade instincts to lead me into the case of the Two Nancys, Marquand and Marchand.. I'd like to think they're the same Nancy, but my instinct says they're not. I now know everything about Nancy Marchand. But who was Nancy Marquand, and how did she vanish after such a promising start on the Great White Way? Does anybody remember (her role in) Mama?

Continuing a 32-Year Conversation With Myself

I've always been a fan of what I call "found object journaling." While most of my journals use freshly purchased wirebound notebooks, I sometimes find and use notebooks discarded by others for my thoughts. Like a crab finding an abandoned shell, I move right in and make somebody else's notebook my literary home for a few months. These notebooks are often from school classes, tossed away as soon as a class ends. They're rare, but they exist.

My latest find is a real gem. I know, because it's my very last class notebook from Princeton University, "Spring '80" written on its yellow cover. After I graduated I held on to it as a record of my closing months at Old Nassau. I knew I had it, but never paid much attention to it until I finished up a volume and decided to use the 40 or so open pages in the massive 130-page, narrow-ruled notebook now. So the classes of the 22 year old me are mixing with the daily thoughts of the 54 year old me. I think of it as a single conversation with a 32-year gap in it.

My classes were the History and Philosophy of Science, English 313 on Literary Criticism (I would have been better off taken a plain old English course rather than one on the criticism of literature), and Religion 348 on Modern Judaism with Ellen Umansky, an excellent teacher who is now a professor of religious studies and the Director of the Carl and Dorothy Bennett Center for Judaic Studies at Fairfield University in Connecticut.

My notes from Umansky's class are riveting because the lectures and precepts marked my first rigorous, academic study of Judaism. Until that point, I had been completely self-taught as I meandered my way into some understanding of Judaism. Now, I had some badly needed guidance.
Writing in an impossibly compact handwriting I can't duplicate now, I jotted notes on the rise of the Jewish Enlightenment. Haskalah, maskilim, the Besht (Isaac Baal Shem Tov), mitnagdim, the Mussar movement, Moses Mendelssohn—they were all covered in just one lecture.

As the notebook rolls on, I can sense the solid organization and the enormous territory covered. A March 3 discussion covered "forerunners of Zionism," going all the way back to the destruction of the first Temple in 586 BCE and marching ahead to the 18th and 19th centuries. Leo Pinsker, Herzl, Peretz Smolenskin, Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, Ahad Ha-Am:  the names keep rolling on and coming in between other lectures and classes featuring Coleridge, Hazlitt, Chaucer, Dryden, Johnson, Baudelaire and scientific equations that are completely incomprehensible to me—did I actually understand them at one point?

The notebook marks my keen awareness of the closing of a tumultuous four years of college. I note the months and then days before my senior thesis was due on May 11, 1980. The inside cover has the phone numbers of publications to which I would apply for jobs—the New York Times, the Journal of Commerce, Fortune and Forbes. The inside cover also had the contact for an internship in the office of New York Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, where I indeed had an interview in Washington with his senior legislative assistant Chester Finn, Jr., now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution focusing on K-12 education issues. He was baffled about why a guy from Texas wanted to work in the office of a New York senator.

Even my doodles are full of meaning, from a drawing I called the "Laughing Centaur" to Grateful Dead song titles "St. Stephen" and "Dark Star" to wistful scribbles of the names Christie, Esther and Barbara (my mind was wandering to romantic daydreams that 30 years later I would turn into a book). There's even a thumbnail-sized sketch of Texas with dots indicating my home town of Mission, no doubt meant to show a classmate where I was from and where I really hoped I would not be immediately returning.

In May, I started the laborious handwritten process of composing "Modern Judaism paper (last one!)" that started with the line, "A hesitant mysticism pervades the Zionist thinking of Mordecai Kaplan and Ahad Ha-Am." That essay concluded my undergraduate education on a high note.

The future relentlessly barreled down on me in the spring of 1980. As challenging as Princeton had been, that future would be even more chaotic when I plunged into the real world of New York life and high-stakes business journalism just days after graduating. The very last page of the notebook has notes on "apartment survival techniques" and hints like "check Salvation Army, places for clothing, furniture" and the almost-poetic "if trouble get lawyer."

And now, 32 years later, I'm still doodling names in margins of notebooks, although I tend to do so in Hebrew and Russian. I still read about Judaism and build on what I learned in Religion 348, and I even attend the outstanding speaker series that Ellen Umansky organizes at Fairfield University. I still like the Grateful Dead and I'm not above picking up a good bargain at Salvation Army and Goodwill stores.

And I'm still writing in notebooks, although these days I prefer the wide-rule format -- they work much better for 50-something handwriting.

Photography on the Border

A theme that cycles through my book, especially the earlier chapters, is life on the border between Texas and Mexico. I very rarely went to Mexico, and for the tamest of reasons. But others went for untame reasons and I heard their conversations growing up. Drugs, cheap liquor and Boystown—the name of the red-light brothel zones.

The rawest reason jumped out at me during a recent visit to, of all places, the International Center of Photography in New York, one of my favorite museums. The exhibit that caught my eye, and took me right back to the banks of the Rio Grande, was a look at the contact sheets of the Magnum photo agency. Contact sheets are direct prints from negatives on to  photo paper, how photographers used to assess their work, finding the best and weeding out the rest.

One of the Magnum contact sheets came from photographs for a book called "Boystown: La Zona de Tolerancia," published in 2000 by Aperture in association with the Wittliff Gallery of Southwestern and Mexican Photography at what was then Southwest Texas State University, now Texas State University-San Marcos.

I have that book.

I have it, moreover, through a surprising process—an accident, a matter of a noontime trip to the Virgin Megastore in Times Square in 2004, before it closed. I worked in the Midtown and always enjoyed lunch breaks at the store, a sprawling multilevel cathedral of music, books and movies. The place had a bin for books that were damaged or unpopular. I glanced at the bin. The big-format book with the black spine and silver lettering that announced "Boystown" practically leaped into my hand. The spine was cracking, the edges were worn, but I didn't care; I would have paid triple the price of $4.99 for this amazing window into the life pulsing on the other side of the river, a world I heard about, but never even got close to experiencing -- not that I ever had a desire to visit the red-light districts of Mexico.

Eight years after getting the book, I saw one of the contact sheets at the ICP. The explanatory text filled in some of the gaps in the book, which kept its geographic details very vague. None of the essays give details about where on the border the photos of prostitutes with drunken gringo frat boys, aging ranch bosses and Mexican workers were taken. The black-and-white photos existed in a feverish neverland that existed somewhere but no place in particular. However, the text for the sheet identified the local as (if I recall correctly), Ciudad Camargo, across from Rio Grande City. The place immediately grounded itself just 30 miles from where I grew up, in Mission.

These days, I doubt too many lonely Anglo ranchers and drunken frat boys are yahooing it across the border for debauched fun as they did in the 1970s when these photos were taken by Mexican street photographers hustling for a buck. The places still exist, but I'm guess the clientele has radically changed. Still, the book captures a place in time, when I was taking notes and starting to write about what was going on around me, on the other side of the river.

"High Art," Odd Jewish (Sort of) Movie

Departing from my usual fare, I had Netflix send me High Art, a 1998 movie set in the drug-addled art-magazine world in New York. The cast had promise, with Ally Sheedy, Patricia Clarkson (struggling and failing to maintain a German accent) and Radha Mitchell. The photo-magazine setting also caught my interest, but the druggy characters and dark settings dampened my mood. Ally Sheedy as Lucy looked dreadfully gaunt as an alienated star photographer in emotional exile—I hope that was just acting, not real life.

What added an odd angle to High Art was Sheedy's interaction with her mother, an upper-class German-Jew who rails against Sheedy's German girlfriend and drives a Mercedes. The strained mother-daughter relationship and the explicit Jewish angle (including a scene with Shabbat candles in the background) were so at odds with the blank backgrounds of the other characters that I had to wonder what was going on.

Did Holocaust traumas drive Lucy's drugging and withdrawal? What's the backstory on the German girlfriend and the mother's hectoring? Lucy carries the weight of history as well as addiction in her, and that added a fresh element to a romantic threesome movie set in the late Clinton era of New York. High Art is worth watching, but it's no feel-good date movie.

Thinking About Body Images and "Someday Melissa"

I typically scan the New York Times obituary page for lives well lived, but the December 21 edition with the tiny-type paid notices was wrenching with its sketches of too-soon loss. One very long notice was for Suzanne Hart, the advertising executive killed in an elevator accident a week earlier. By contrast, the memorial notice for Melissa Rose Avrin ran only 7 lines, plus a photo. It read,

Dec. 21, 1989-May 6, 2009. Your movie is a reality. It's changing lives around the world in the battle against Eating Disorders. Missing and loving you forever, Mom. www.somedaymelissa.com.

I followed the link and found that "Someday Melissa" is the name of a documentary made by Melissa's mother, Judy Avrin, as a response to Melissa's death at 19 from a heart attack related to her bulimia. It has already accepted at a film festival and screened at medical schools, universities and Jewish community centers. Someday Melissa includes journal entries from Melissa and interviews with family members, friends and medical and mental health professionals.It deserves wide viewing and discussion.

Melissa Avrin's wrenching and fatal bulimia resonates with me as the extreme expression of body-image issues. In my dating days in the 1980s, I met women with bulimia and the memories of their deep distress over appearance and other psychological issues still haunt me. I tried to be as supportive as possible, but I realized the matter was far beyond my influence, other than saying I accepted them for who and what they were. Whatever self-perceptions led them to behave this way had no basis in reality -- they were attractive and fit. But we're not talking about reality with any of this. I couldn't save anybody, and it took years before I realized that.

I touch on body image issues, both men's and women's, in my book, "A Kosher Dating Odyssey." I don't know if Jewish women are more prone to eating disorders than any other ethnic group, but they are perhaps more articulate in acknowledging and addressing them. I look at the film's website and I think of other women and their pain. The film already has had an impact, judging from the hundreds of comments posted on the site's guestbook about viewers' responses to it. I can only hope that Judy Avrin's response to her great loss leads to comfort and support for people who punish themselves when looking in the mirror and not seeing the God-given wonder they truly are.