A California couple confronts the tumult of the last half of the 20th Century including the turmoil that was the Civil Rights Movement in Oakland. This is the story of a marriage between Jeb, a dreamer, and Marian, an ingenue who believed all of Hollywood's myths. They struggle to stay together even as they hotly disagree about their future. Their first lesson-the painful and comic reality of trying to start married life in New York City with no money and no skills. Was that bond between them a mistake or the slow development of that strange phenomenon called love? "The gold was there all the time," Jeb said when he talked about California's Gold Rush. "It was waiting for the right moment and the right man to bring it into the world." Marian thought she had found the right man and she wasn't going to be dissuaded."