Noah took me under his wing. Meeting his friends was like swinging open the gate to a side of the Bay Area I thought had been pushed out. Here were chefs and social workers, academics and musicians, dancers and poets. Few were employed full-time. They practiced radical honesty and believed in nonreligious spiritual orientation. They spoke in the language of encounter groups. They sat in each other’s laps and snuggled in public. They owned costume boxes. It was not unusual, at parties, to walk into a bedroom and find someone administering Reiki.
