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I needed something to brighten my mental landscape when "Final Gifts" — our first feature film . . . four years of loving labor — was rejected by the Sundance Film Festival and the International Film Festival at Vail, Colorado.

Then, Lo and Behold! We arrived home one night a week later and found an e-mail from the Garden State Film Festival: “Congratulations, your film Final Gifts has been accepted for screening as part of our festival.”

Joyously dancing together in the kitchen at midnight, two crazy lovers in their seventies, we are overtaken by the childlike delight of an acceptance, our first. Lee usually serene, a quietly cheerful soul, singing and flinging in spite of the torn meniscus in her right knee, Neil jumping and whirling like a dervish.

Neil: “Now I won’t give a damn if we get a thousand rejections!” Lee: “Someone has seen the value of what we’ve done. We’ll have a ball at the festival.”

“Dear so-and-so,” we e-mail back to the festival secretary, “We are so grateful for the work you do to create an event that helps the heroic women in a no-budget movie like ours reach people’s hearts.”

That night we go to bed with smiles of delight and dreams of glory. One day later we receive an e-mail from what’s-her-name, the Garden State Festival founder/director: “Dear Lee and Neil, I am mortified. The intern who sent out acceptances reversed two of the numbers in your Tracking Number. Your acceptance was a mistake.”

Mortified? OUCH! OY! HURTING! Embarrassed to feel so wounded by this turn of events-- at our age, it seems terribly adolescent.

Although I’ve had a play produced Off-Broadway, other plays Off-Off Broadway, books published, a movie made from a novel of mine, all with Lee’s assistance, nevertheless rejections can stir up painful thoughts, downhearted feelings. Not so for my darling, she seems rejection-proof.

Neil: “How do you stay so calm?! Lee: “I don’t really know.” Neil: “How am I going to live through fifty or a hundred rejections over the next two years?”

Lee: “What would Bob say?” Lee’s brother Bob-- the happiness role model for both of us, a prince of a man-- taught by his living example how to celebrate failure as well as success, and to make each day a work of art.

Neil: “He’d say have a great dinner out and celebrate every #$%! rejection, because without rejections you’re not alive.”

So off we go to Charlie Brown’s, occupy a small booth and drink a toast to our brother Bob, who also taught us: “Total acceptance of reality makes life a beautiful fairy tale.” But it’s hard to celebrate when the door was opened a crack, a little success came streaming in, and then the door slammed shut on our fingertips, leaving me deadly dull. Some beautiful fairy tale!

Clinking our wine glasses, I try morosely: “Here’s to the joy of rejection!”

Lee adds: “Here’s to the joy of the people whose films were accepted.”

“I don’t think I’m that spiritually advanced yet.”

Lee: “Think about the filmmakers who had received a rejection notice, and now because we lost they won and just today found out their film has been accepted-- Wow! Remember us dancing in the kitchen? Those people are jumping for joy.”

Lee turns my depression upside down, doing what the Buddha advised 2600 years ago: See the joy of others as one’s own, and rejoice in their rejoicing.

Is there any more healing gift a lover can offer to her suffering partner than a way to change the darkness of painful, destructive thoughts into images of the happiness of others, and to rejoice in that happiness? We raise our glasses: “L’Chaim! To Life!”

Neil R. Selden, a licensed psychotherapist, lives, works, and creates in Highland Park. You can e-mail him at: wayhaven@aol.com.