Paging through the original red leather diary for the first time gave me goosebumps. Little flakes of red leather from its worn cover sprinkled onto my white bedspread. Every page and entry was magical. I couldn't help but think, how did it find its way to me, and why?

Florence's life was one of theater and art, many lovers, writers and poets, including the Italian count Florence fell for while in Rome when she sailed to Europe in 1936. Names floated on the pages through time: Eva Le Gallienne... George... Nat... Manny... Pearl... Evelyn...

That first night with the diary when I was 22, in 2003, I slipped under the covers and continued to read. I followed Florence's adventures into the night. My lavender-painted room, which I was renting in the Upper West Side apartment of an eccentric older woman, filled with an orange glow from the streetlamp outside my window. Time seemed to do a backbend, like in yoga.

I felt as if we were one, this girl from the'30s and I. Florence wrote on July 3, 1932: Five hours of tennis and glorious happiness--All I want -- is someone to love -- I feel incomplete.

I got out of bed to examine the other items I had found in the steamer trunks in the dumpster alongside the diary, the rose beaded flapper dress, which hung from its wooden trunk hanger like a pale pink ghost. I wrapped myself in the musty glamour of the tangerine bouclé coat with the label sewn into its silk lining, the color of the pearly inside of a shell: "Bergdorf Goodman on the Plaza." I secured its elegant Bakelite button.

I slipped into the flapper dress and quietly danced around my room until beads from its frail fringe started hailing down onto wooden floorboards. I eyed the black satin bathing costume for an hourglass figure. Its straps crisscrossed my back like X-marks-the-spot.

As I stared into my full-length closet mirror, the old kind in two separating layers dotted with black spots like a jumpy old film reel, I couldn't help but wonder: Who was this young woman? Who was Florence Wolfson? Who was I? 

As I walked around New York, Florence's diary became my guide. Trying on a dress at Bergdorf's, I caught myself searching my reflection, waiting for Florence to join me. Considering a lipstick at Barney's, I noticed the Nars lipstick, "Flora" between "Orgasm" and "Pillow Talk."

Author in flapper dress with The Red Leather Diary

I stopped at La Perla to pass the time before meeting a friend, an actress, and thought of Florence amid lace as light as sea foam, embroideries made by fairy hands. I flipped through color swatches and lost myself in its underworld. The Roaring Twenties. Jazz. The Charleston. Coco Chanel. Garter belts. The'30s evoked Marlene Dietrich. The seducing Blue Angel in corset, stockings and top hat. Just what the dismal times needed.

Florence's words floated down through the city's canyons, and into my mind. Only a few favorite places survived from her New York. One was the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where I often sought rest in the Chinese Garden Court. From the rooftop sculpture garden, I stared at the dreamlike citadel of Manhattan's rooftops. New York is the place of stories, allegory, and metaphor. Like Alice in Wonderland and Dorothy on the road to Oz, Florence was determined to make her way. I discovered the diary, a real-life time machine, which transported me back into Florence's world. Florence once wrote, on the beach, away from her city, Oh, for dear old New York! 

I needed Florence.

Fearlessly and authentically, Florence Wolfson filled the diary's pages, recording her life's adventures over five years, from 1929 to 1934 from 14 to until she turned 19. I learned from a newspaper scrap, which fell out of the diary's pages that Florence had lived on the Upper East Side.

Three years later, I found Florence, miraculously, after receiving a chance call from a private eye. Charles Eric Gordon was like a pulp 1930s character who entered my life wearing a trench coat, pulling a magnifying glass out of his inside lapel. His license plate read "Sleuth3."

Florence, I learned when I finally met her at 90 and reunited her with her red leather diary, was one of a generation of Depression-stamped young men and women who longed to cultivate a creative life. As a 19-year-old Columbia graduate student, Florence hosted a literary salon in her parents' apartment. Among her friends were the young poets, Delmore Schwartz and John Berryman.

The diarist posing in her mother's designs.Scalloped-edged black and white photographs recreated the half-forgotten world of the sophisticated young Manhattanite who loved "making a sensation" outfitted in clothes designed by her mother, a couture dressmaker with a shop on Madison Avenue, who had come to America alone as a teenager and worked her way up to being a respected business owner, a rare accomplishment in those days.

After Florence married, she drifted from her art and admitted she had, later in life, "a country club mentality." As she fingered the pages of the red leather-bound book crumbling in her hands, she reflected on the young woman brought to life so vividly in its pages. 

The diary proved how buttoned up our version of the past tends to be. Long before blue jeans entered the scene, the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Woodstock--love was in the air. A sexual revolution was taking place in Florence's 1930s world. If Florence had been born fifty years later, she would have fit right in.

As open as Florence was in her diary, she was with me. That's Florence, a timeless teenager. As she headed north from her home in Pompano Beach to embark on the book tour, her email to me read:

We're leaving soon--am trying to be calm--but who expected all this at my age? Lv

Lily Koppel, author of The Red Leather Diary: Reclaiming a Life Through the Pages of a Lost Journal, is guest blogging on Jewcy, and she'll be here all week. Stay tuned.

The Red Leather Diary paperback hits bookstores on January 20. Please join me for the paperback release party at the 92YTribeca (not your grandma's Y), 200 Hudson Street, at 7:30pm on Thursday, January 22. Tickets include a Sloe Gin Fizz, a throwback to the flapper era. Reserve your tickets here. Come in costume. The private eye who helped me track down Florence will be there in his trench coat and houndstooth hat.

This is the story of a powerful love, the kind that comes along once in a lifetime. It's the story of a man who meets his destiny in the eyes of an Alaskan princess, under the infinite Alaskan sky, who lays down his soul for that princess - again and again, in every imaginable position - and pledges always to be at her side. This is the story of a love too special, too fragile for the world - it flourishes in the privacy of a hotel room, or a tent, or a basement storeroom, or a restaurant, or the bathroom of a church, or a snowmobile dealership, or a highway rest stop, but when the world catches up to it, like the last gust of winter catches the first tender spring flower, this love can not survive the awful chill. 

When the elevator door opened, it took my eyes a few seconds to adjust. The light in the penthouse was dim, the windows filled with the liquid majesty of Alaska by starlight. Across the wide space, a shadowy figure sat on a leather couch, legs crossed, holding a snifter of cognac. From hidden speakers, Bette Midler sang "The Rose," the strings rising to the swell of my heart.

"Sarah," said a gravelly voice. She took my hand and led me out of the elevator.

"Dick," she said.

From the shadows, he came toward us: the Angler, the Cheyenne Strangler, the man Sarah would replace. He was taller than I expected; what looked like stoutness on television was, in person, a muscled beauty that was almost Greek. He wore a hand-stitched, white three-piece suit, his ascot boasting the colors of a tropical bird. When he spoke, it wasn't with the gruff fury of the infighter, the backstabbing oilman, the bare-knuckled partisan - but with the mellifluous allure of someone who knows your secrets, someone who makes it his business to know your secrets, someone who's going to get what he wants and make you think it was what you wanted all along.

This is the story of how I blew Dick Cheney.

Jewcy, it would take too long to faithfully chronicle everything that happened that night, the ecstasy and agony, the pleasure and pain and more pain - lots more pain - that ensued. We sat for a time sipping cognac and watching the landscape, Her Babeness and the VP laughing about their old friend Ted Stevens, whose corruption trial had begun that morning.

"And so he says, ‘Quid pro quo? That's not even my house!'" Dick said, waving one hand around, he and Sarah doubling over with hilarity. I sipped my drink and smiled politely - but inside, I was boiling.

Sarah leaned over to touch Dick. One strap of her dress had slipped off her shoulder. "What do you think? Should we make Ted Secretary of the Interior? Energy? Maybe director of the EPA?"

"Oh no, no, no," he said, suddenly serious. "He's damaged goods. He'll probably be convicted. You can't put a felon in a position like that. It'd look bad, and be a distraction from passing tax cuts."

I was getting a little woozy, wondering if maybe there wasn't something strange in my cognac. "Well, where, then?" said Her Babeness. "I have to do something for him."

"Where we put all criminals. Attorney General, of course," said the VP. Then he unzipped his white pants and pulled out his cock.

"Suck it, novelist," he said.

What politicians do: when no one's watchingWhat followed was a bacchanal of epic proportions, a wild debauch that went on till dawn. Not an inch of flesh escaped being tongued, nibbled, bitten, burned; not an orifice went unfilled; not a membrane escaped the seep and spurt. The VP was, I have to say, impressive - athletic and flexible, light on his feet and yet powerful. He was, I could see it now, the perfect interlocutor for my beautiful Sarah, herself so accommodating and soft one moment, fierce and commanding the next. Their give and take was like a ballet, or a fierce, grunting rugby match, and I was the slick, disoriented ball caught in their scrum. I'll never forget the feeling of Dick's fingers trailing across my abdomen, of Sarah's tongue on the backs of my knees. I'll never forget the sight of the VP with his face between Her Babeness's legs, or of Sarah licking the Angler's asshole, silhouetted by the indigo and argent landscape out the windows. How many times did I think, "I can't believe this is happening," swept along in a daze of desire and Rohypnol? I might not believe it today, if I didn't have the keloid scars to show for it.

When I first saw my beautiful Sarah penetrated by Dick Cheney, something inside me broke and I cried out. The pain of that moment, and of the Angler squeezing my testicles, was exquisite. For the first few hours we'd all been equal partners in this erotic adventure, but now the truth was being made known: In this penthouse, there was one master and one only. There was predator and there was prey, governor and governed. There was Dick Cheney, and there was the rest of us.

Sarah went wild. With me, she'd always been responsive, her pleasure audible - but now she was like a beast uncaged, her eyes blank with frenzy. I'd thought I could win her heart by giving in to her demands, being the one who never said "no." But only now, Jewcy, did I see what she really wanted. Only now did I understand that the dominator always secretly wants to be dominated, strength always yearns for someone stronger. And the Angler played us like a maestro: his foot on my throat, his fingers in Sarah's ass, her lips around his Vice Presidential member, all while he dialed room service with his free hand. It was beautiful. As my trachea began to collapse, I had the strange and somehow liberating thought that I deserved this, we all did. Hadn't we been asking for it all along?

Later, I twitched and groaned in the tub, warm water bubbling gently from jacuzzi jets, soothing my bruised and broken bones, my lacerated skin, my fractured heart.

"It's okay, baby," Sarah muttered. "Mommy's still here." She lay sprawled on the cool tiles as though she'd been dumped out of a wheelbarrow. I slipped in and out of consciousness, until a voice at my side brought me back.

"'I have done it again. One year in every ten I manage it -'" it said.

With my last strength I pushed myself up. Dick Cheney was sitting on the bidet, watching me with fond, tired eyes. "'A sort of walking miracle,'" he said, reciting a poem I hold dear. "'My skin bright as a Nazi lampshade.'"

"That's Plath," I groaned.

He brightened. "'Lady Lazarus.' My favorite."

"I didn't know you read poetry," I said wearily.

"I'm a huge Plath fan. What do you think I did the whole time I was dodging the Vietnam draft? I was reading poetry. Even wrote some." He sighed. "It wasn't any good. But when I read your novel, Lady Lazarus, I just had to meet you."

"You liked it?"

He stared at his hands and nodded. "It was something. All that stuff about ‘90s punk rock, about celebrity culture and the cheapening of art, the sexualization of young women in the public eye and the glamorization of suicide. Real interesting," he said. "And then to throw in Zen Buddhism and Lacanian psychoanalysis - that was the coup, I think, exploring the connections between Eastern spirituality and poststructuralist theory, connecting them to Western narcissism..."

He let out a long, low whistle. On the floor, Sarah groaned. "And to have it be so funny," he said. "I nearly busted a gut. Satirical, and yet in the end very moving. You know, if I could do it all over again..." But he didn't finish the thought. A moment later, he met my eyes. "Well, bravo," he said.

"Thanks," I said. "Dick."

"'For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge,'" he quoted, now touching his pacemaker. "'For the hearing of my heart -'"

I finished the stanza for him: "'It really goes.'" Our eyes met. He put his hand atop mine. One moment of connection, before merciful sleep carried me off.

**

The "ding" of the elevator woke me. I didn't know how much time had passed, only that the bathroom was cold and empty. When I heard the elevator door slide shut, I gingerly pushed myself out of the tub, staggered into the penthouse suite and stood shivering in the glare of raw morning. I didn't quite know what had hit me.

In the last eight hours I'd been sodomized, brutalized, slapped, kicked, and violated; my last memory was of the VP standing over me, unleashing a powerful stream of urine. But now that he'd gone, and taken my beloved Sarah, I missed him. I missed them both. I'd believed them when they said they'd never leave me, that they would always look out for me, that even their most puzzling actions were done with my best interests at heart. They'd promised to keep me safe. But now I was alone.

In the elevator, I tried to stay calm. She would wait for me, I told myself. But who did I really want to see when I got to the lobby? I was confused, defeated. With each descending floor I felt it more acutely: the hangover, the terrible aftermath. We'd had a wild ride, but the party was over, the costs ever more apparent, ever more appalling. Dick and Sarah had taken my money, my dignity, the clothes off my back. I had no more respect for myself, nor could anyone respect me after the way I'd behaved. All that was left was resentment and self-loathing, the inescapable knowledge that the worst betrayal of all was my own.

Is there life after Sarah Palin? If so, who will I be? What will become of me?

Jewcy, I'm still trying to find out.

When the elevator opened, I dashed through the lobby and out the front doors, just in time to see Dick helping Sarah into the back of a stretch limo. He whispered something in her ear and she threw her head back and laughed, the laugh of a woman who's found what she's looking for, the laugh of a woman in love.

"Sarah," I said, but it came out too softly. I started for the car, but strong hands grabbed me and threw me down onto the pavement. Next thing I knew, I was pinned under Sarah's two Aryan bodyguards.

"Aw, leave him be," one said. I had no strength left in me, and he knew it. On his face, I may even have seen pity.

I sat up, rubbing my bare arms. From inside the limo I could hear salsa music and the pop of a cork. As the car pulled away, the driver's window lowered and the chauffeur leaned out to salute me. With a shudder, I recognized John McCain.

It was late morning. Hotel guests moved in and out. They barely noticed me, sitting naked and ruined on the driveway. I watched those taillights and thought about what I'd lost. For one more second I could hear the party still going on, before the limo turned onto the great Alaskan highway, gunned its engine, and left me out in the cold.

Andrew Foster Altschul, author of Lady Lazarus, spent the past week guest blogging on Jewcy.  This is his parting post.  Can't get enough?  Buy his radicool book.

 

Every year around this time I go into a minor stage of depression. I think it’s the high holiday liturgy that gets to me—I just feel like I’ve been such a bad person all year, and I get disgusted with myself. Usually I’m able to dig myself out of my morbid anger, but when I was a teenager I was a lot less capable of seeing over the huge grotesque obstacle in my way (my own poor behavior) and for a few years I was clinically depressed.  During the years when I was depressed, I remember that when we got to the vidui part of the service where we knock on our chests and list the things we’ve done wrong all I could think was how I had actually done all of those things. I hadn’t, of course, but somehow hating myself was very important to me.
Depression Sucks: seriously
It’s been a long time since then, but when I think about how much depression effected me it’s really terrifying. I’m thankfully unable to access that kind of self-loathing anymore (though if you want to read more about it, check out this post from one of my favorite blogs. The post is called, “I’m the Guy Who Sucks Plus I Got Depression” which is a reference to an Acheworld comic) but instead I worry about other people who struggle with depression, and as Y-Love reminded me over at Jewschool, being religious or part of a religious community doesn’t save you from the jaws of depression.

I did some digging online, and unfortunately there aren’t a ton of great Jewish resources out there. YU has some lectures posted online about depression, and I listened to one, but it opened with a note on how more religious people don’t get depressed as much because they have such strong faith in God. Maybe on a statistical level that’s true, but I know plenty of depressed frum people. Also the rabbi referred to depressed teenagers as, “everything bagels” (seriously). Ohr Samayach has a kind of dvar Torah posted online about depression, but it’s also pretty simplistic.

MyJewishLearning, RitualWell, and Beliefnet are all silent on this one, probably assuming you’ll just go to a secular source for help. There are some great blogs about Jewish life and depression, though, so I direct you to Haazina Tfilati, which is a Jewish woman's struggles and successes dealing with life, God, and depression. I think her saddest and most important post is this one. There’s also Everlasting Passing Days, which is insightful as well.

So please, during this time of renewal and reflection, look out for other people in your community who might be feeling less than cleansed, and who might be reaching out for help. You can find a detailed list of depression’s symptoms here.

Continue reading...

This morning I had a video iChat with my mom. First she gave me a diet idea. Then she asked me when I was sending out my book. Touchy subjects, to say the least. I snarled at her like an adolescent and she retreated. Poor Mom.

Then she asked, “Hey, how’s The Secret going? Are you still doing it?”

And I said, “Well, there’s nothing to do, really—there’s just something to be, and I haven’t been feeling much like Secret Rebecca lately so, no I guess haven’t been. Doing The Secret. I mean, I made that vision board…” I glanced at the yearbook-page style collage I had hung on the back of my front door, a piece of cardboard covered in seascapes and babies and bookshelves and Oscars and trillion-dollar houses in Malibu.

“Yes, but that was like a week ago!”

“And I stuck that ‘125’ Post-It on the scale, but the cleaning lady moved it. Maybe it’s a sign?”

My mom laughed. “The honeymoon is over, huh?”

Maybe it is. I’ve stopped experiencing that silly buzz I used to get from pretending my life was perfect. Now it just feels like a lie. I feel like a big lying liar.

My shrink isn’t surprised. “The Secret sounds, to me, like a simplified form of cognitive-behavioral therapy,” she said to me in her office on Friday, “And if CBT worked, I’d be out of a job.”

What is cognitive-behavioral therapy?

According to the British Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Psychotherapies:

Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) is an approach to help people experiencing a wide range of mental health difficulties. The basis of CBT is that what people think affects how they feel emotionally and also alters what they do.

During times of mental distress the way the person sees and judges themselves and the things that happens to them alters. Things tend to become more extreme and unhelpful. This can worsen how the person feels and causes them to act in ways that keep their distress going.

CBT practitioners, who come from many training backgrounds, aim to work jointly with the person to help them begin to identify and then change their extreme thinking and unhelpful behaviour. By doing this, the result is a significant improvement in how the person feels and lives their day to day life.

So our own negative thinking—not events or circumstances or biology—creates depression and other psychological maladies. Change your thoughts and feelings, change your life. Sounds a lot like The Secret, huh?

The problem with this method, according to my therapist (a fan of psychoanalysis), is that it addresses symptoms but not their causes. “Things may be different for a while, but actively creating thoughts all the time is exhausting. And there’s no guarantee these positive thoughts will ever feel authentic.”

But my shrink, as a critic of CBT, is in the minority. Cognitive-behavioral therapy is the second-favorite form of talk therapy in the U.S. according to a segment on NPR, and its controversial founder, Albert Ellis, is cited by the American Psychological Association as the second-most-influential therapist of the century. Insurance companies love CBT because it is a short-term solution to concrete problems, rather than an opportunity to endlessly free-associate formative childhood experiences with a therapist at a rate of $200 per hour.

I can see the appeal of CBT—simply extinguish the negative behavior instead of obsessing about it. But say I am depressed—if a therapist succeeds in convincing me that my depression is irrational, does that mean I won’t be depressed anymore? Conversely, does rationally acknowledging that there are no barriers to my success except the ones I create myself mean that I will be able to achieve success?

It just seems too simple. Like the Secret. While CBT differs from The Secret’s think-positive-be-positive model in that it involves extensive homework (patients often carry a stack of flashcards to remind them how to think), it still blames us for things we can’t always control.

Which empowers some people, but leaves others feeling even more powerless than they did in the first place.

Zach The Man BraffLooks like Zach Braff, in the pop news of late for his battle with depression, has no rational reason to look all mopey. The actor has just agreed to a deal for $350,000 per episode to do another season of the show, putting him in the top bracket of highest paid TV actors.

Braff was previously waxing all cynical about the future of "Scrubs" without him and expressing his interest in starting another show.

Speaking of pilots, anyone think that an "Office"-esque satire done about a police station would make for a great filler when "Scrubs" finally retires?

Wake me up when "Murder She Wrote" comes back so I can have Ms. Fletcher investigate as to where the fledgling NBC exec's balls (who agreed to pay the ridiculous amount to Braff for a dying series) are.

I'm trying so hard to smile. It hurts.It's not a great secret that comedians often suffer from bouts of depression or other forms of mental illness and since there are plenty of Jewish comedians out there, the correlation between the two isn't such an enigma.

So this week, prior to Zach Braff attending the Golden Globes (and perhaps to excuse his poor sport behavior when he was slighted for a "Best Actor in a Comedy/Musical" award), Jewtastic reported that Braff battles with depression.This information was based on an interview he did with Us magazine recently in which he said, " I don’t care about image and all that nonsense. I’m in sweat pants every day. I don’t play the game at all.” Braff left out the part where he mentions he doesn't leave his house. Sweat pants? LA? Who are you trying to kid, here?

Anywho Jewtastic also reported that Ben Stiller might be bipolar, but Stiller has shrugged off the rumors.

I'd have to side with Stiller's defense. No one wants to be lumped in the woe-is-me-I'm a self-pitying-sonovabitch-who-gets-millions-tossed-at-me-to-be-funny, yet I still can't bring myself to take off my sweats category. That can only be bad publicity.