In spite of years of education, phenomenal hard work, and huge risks taken to change my life, I am not only in the 99%, but I’m also in its most dreadful lower echelons. This has less to do with my incompetence, and far more to do with geopolitical and economic forces that slap me down every time I rise up.

I opened a restaurant in San Francisco a few years before 9/11 on an inconceivably small budget and revitalized a neighborhood. I qualified for an SBA loan after a while that I was supposed to collect in mid-September of 2001. Instead, I went under. I went back to grad school after that and became a therapist. I got out of school just as the economy tanked in 2008. I was able to get a clinic job that paid under minimum wage; then the money for the city evaporated and all the clinics got closed. Suddenly a lot of fledgling therapists were out of work entirely. Diligence and hard work doesn’t necessarily get you anywhere in America.

When the Occupy camps began sprouting up in cities everywhere, there was only one choice: do something in support. Those people were speaking for me and for a lot of other people who weren’t going to set up camp with them. The least I could do was try to  make their vigil a bit easier.

If there’s anything a former restaurateur knows how to do, it’s cook for the masses. However, there was no money to buy groceries, even for me. So I posted a notice on Facebook, the great broadcaster, and asked if anyone wanted to chip in some grocery money and bring those people some food. In my Italian heart, I knew that if there was any way I could express my thanks for their actions, that would be it.

In San Francisco, there is a well set up kitchen space for the camp, but no facilities for cooking. City residents are supportive, and donate a lot of food to the camp, but much of it—huge bags of rice, dried beans, crates of green vegetables, cans of soup—are useless without a place to cook them. I have a big kitchen, and all the mammoth cooking gear left over from my restaurant years-- and the Facebook posting turned up a great crew of collaborators.

We’ve started going to the camp and picking up ingredients, racing back to my house and cooking them, and then trying to get the prepared food back before it gets cold. I happen to know that this is strictly illegal, feeding people without a licensed kitchen, and I know this because it got me arrested once already, for doing a lot less than we’re doing now.

I got arrested at a demonstration for the 99^th trial of Keith McHenry, the San Francisco activist who founded Food Not Bombs. He was feeding homeless people and runaways, but cooking in a home kitchen; the city kept arresting him, and he kept on doing it.

My friend Peter Doty did an annual event called “Let Them Eat Cake,” where he got his friends to dress as 18^th century aristocrats and hand out cake in front of City Hall. We never got arrested doing that. However, we showed up at the McHenry protest in our aristocrat drag, and I was holding a minute poodle tray with the crumbs from my morning croissant (made in a licensed kitchen) when they snapped the cuffs on me. I spent the day in jail in a hoop skirt for that; but at least in those days, we actually knew someone who could bail us out. Now the odds of anyone having money to post bail are fairly slim.

So I know that feeding the Occupiers is a radical act that could get me in trouble again, but it’s another of those risks I’m taking for the right cause. The arrival of a pot of hot soup, trays of enchiladas, beans and rice, steamed vegetables, or even trays of sandwiches, are cause for celebration down there. And they deserve it. They’re out in the cold and rain, visible and vulnerable, to let the establishment see them and to make us feel like we’re not alone in our torment.

The irony is that what I do is considered illegal because the food I bring could make someone sick if not maintained at proper temperatures or correctly stored. In the meanwhile, police forces will confiscate people’s belongings and leave them without tents, sleeping bags or clothing in the cold. It seems like that is the greater danger.

As for the hallowed sanitation of commercial kitchens, I have worked in too many to think that they do it better. Almost none of them wash the vegetables you eat. And if you have irritated a line cook with your complaints, you may get your dinner back seasoned with a gob of spit.

People have said that the San Francisco camp is just like a party, with people of all sorts mingling. Some think that they shouldn’t be enjoying it because it’s serious business. But they are together with a shared objective: to speak to the issues in this rich country that leave a fifth of the population in poverty, while a small percentage live in opulence. There are the old radicals, in Che style berets, les eminence gris, who were, in the ‘60s, the long-haired kids protesting Viet Nam, and now showing the new kids how to do it, while strumming Dylan on guitars. There are old and nouveau hippies, veterans, young idealists, skinheads, unionists, lefties of every stripe. There are the homeless as well, who at last have a purpose—and how many of them fought previous wars, and came back unable to participate in the American Fantasy, or lost their jobs, their homes, the willingness to try, and had nothing left for them except the street?

Everyone is glad to be there. After years of Bush-era hopelessness, the community is gathering, gaining power in numbers and the solidarity of such diverse interests and concerns. It is yet another phenomenon, like Burning Man, that attracts people across the generations and usually disparate social connections. Of course they are celebratory: they have hope, they found community, and occasionally some warm food.