Such reward for my efforts! Such praise! And since I needed to be in the kitchen much of the time, no one expected me to be a brilliant conversationalist. My role was essential, limited, and clear: as co-host, my conversation didn’t need to scintillate — warm greetings, supportive murmurings were enough. Besides, during dinner, much of the conversation centered on the food. Our friends were always vocal (perhaps one of our unspoken requirements for a guest?), so conversation never lagged, and after dinner, Larry and I controlled the music, the mood for the rest of the evening. We set the stage, chose the actors, orchestrating the whole event from conception to clean-up — co-directing our own production.

For over three decades, Larry and I entertained friends with far more devotion than we paid to our debts. We’d spend our last dollars of the month on a bottle of Grand Marnier if a recipe asked for a tablespoon. We might need to sell books to make it through the summer, but our liquor cabinet was full.

We set the stage, chose the actors, orchestrating the whole event from conception to clean-up — co-directing our own production.

Even if an evening didn’t showcase our culinary ambitions, we reveled in having people over, especially on Friday nights. High school teachers needed to let off steam as much as their students, we said, and for years we nominated ourselves as the party-throwers for our colleagues. I still have an image from one of these nights, of thirty people sitting on the floor around our fire place, at least six of them strumming guitars, as we all sang “This Land is Your Land,” with a fully grown, hundred-pound Bismarck sitting tall in the midst of the group, the triangles of his silver-black ears perked above the rounded heads of sweeping hair.

But later in the sixties, by the end of a week of bomb threats and knifings in the Berkeley schools, we supposedly grown-up teachers were ready to explode. At these get-togethers, there was no peaceful sitting on the floor swaying to acoustic guitars. With the lights turned off, candles dripping wax on tables, we could barely see each other’s faces. And with the air saturated with Janis, Jimi, Ray, and Aretha blasting on Larry’s Bose speakers — helped along by gallon jugs of Larry’s favorite, Cribari red, and the dope somebody always brought — nobody cared about nuanced conversation.

The sweet carrot, the reward for finishing another week trying to control raucous high-schoolers, these blow-outs. And we were not the only ones extending invitations for these Friday nights, which became electric attractions for more reasons than the plentiful dope from Nam. This was also the era of open marriages: the aroma of the slogan “try it, you’ll like it” wafted through the air like weed, like musk.

For some time I had been persistently wooed after school by one of the coaches. And while I had been feeling increasingly neglected by Larry, as he spent more and more afternoons and evenings with his students, I’d remained steadfast, determined to remain monogamous. At one of these TGIF gatherings, however, I finally succumbed. Late one Friday night in the Home Ec teacher’s apartment I found myself in a dark alcove with my head leaning on the shoulder of our school’s six-foot-four-inch tennis coach, rocking back and forth to Roberta Flack’s “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.” Slow and close, two magnetically attracted bodies cautiously, spontaneously, finding ways to move together. Now this was dancing I could do. After feeling my left breast massaged in a way I never had before, and having a faint but powerful glimmer of what the firm cylinder pressing into my belly promised, I agreed to go to his apartment a few nights later. We were lovers for two and a half years.