Your description of the hippie couple as "beautiful people" brought back a delightful memory from Tom Wolfe's hippie-era book (I'm doing this name from memory and may not have it exactly right) "The Tangerine-Colored Kool-Aid Candy-Flake Acid Test." In discussing the many, many teenagers who ran away from home during the late '60s/early '70s to join Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and similar hip enclaves, he described the first letters they would write to their parents as "Beautiful People Letters," because they always started out "I am fine and am living with a bunch of beautiful people...." Something like that. I greatly admire some of Wolfe's works, by the way, because I think he, like JDS, gets the cultural details of his era exactly, exactly right. Not the highest achievement of literature to do that, but praiseworthy nevertheless. pauline