I need a summary about "Where the kissing never stops" by Joan didion please.

"Where the Kissing Never Stops" is an essay from Joan Didion's landmark 1968 essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem. The essay originally appeared under a different title, "Just Folks at a School for Non-Violence," in The New York Times Magazine in 1966.

This essay is about the folk singer Joan Baez and her Institute for the Study of Nonviolence in the Carmel Valley. Didion is fiercely critical of her subject, characterizing her, and her attempts at activism,...

"Where the Kissing Never Stops" is an essay from Joan Didion's landmark 1968 essay collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem. The essay originally appeared under a different title, "Just Folks at a School for Non-Violence," in The New York Times Magazine in 1966.

This essay is about the folk singer Joan Baez and her Institute for the Study of Nonviolence in the Carmel Valley. Didion is fiercely critical of her subject, characterizing her, and her attempts at activism, as superficial. In Didion's view, Baez is overly earnest, too emotionally open, and generally ineffective. To quote the author:

Joan Baez was a personality before she was entirely a person, and, like anyone to whom that happens, she is in a sense the hapless victim of what others have seen in her, written about her, wanted her to be and not be.

Why is the author so hard on Baez, we might ask? Didion sees Baez as representative of a larger problem she sees in her home state of California. Indeed, this essay collection is mostly about this very topic: Didion's experiences in California in the 1960s and her critique of the culture there. (In another essay in the collection, Didion writes about a preschool-aged child in San Francisco whose parents give her LSD.)

In Didion's view, California is a place where the sun-dappled outward image hides a darker side. And Baez's institute is a perfect example. As Didion writes:

 [It's] a place where the sun shines and the ambiguities can be set aside a little while longer, a place where everyone can be warm and loving and share confidences.

Californians (like Baez, in this case) appear to be happy and free, but in many cases, they're lost, disconnected from reality. "Where the Kissing Never Stops" focuses on Joan Baez and her institute, but it's best understood within the larger critique that Didion is making in the collection.