Beauty-Wellness innovator finds resilience in laughing wildly, loving wholly, living fully. Dorit Baxter has cultivated a capacity for self-renewal since the young skincare specialist new to New York left her handsome unfaithful first husband, then was scorned by Manhattan's elitist beauty establishments. On her own, Dorit eventually opened in Midtown an original day spa offering a lively clientele novel treatments and an exotic product line from a legendary place. Dorit experienced economic crises, unraveling of her playful and passionate pairing with a debonair risk-taker, life-threatening illness, fire destroying her spa. After recovering health and business, Dorit fell hard for a younger man, the rugged and restless maverick who showed her America's heartland and its routes from reinvention to redemption. From youth's raw resolve to maturity's ripened wisdom, Dorit forges nurturing friendships through self-obsessed Seventies, avaricious Eighties, networked Nineties, nervous Noughties.