In 1968, Garson had a child, Juliet, and in 1969 she went to work at The Shelter Half, an anti-war GI coffee house near Fort Lewis Army base in Tacoma, Washington.
The first edition, which was self-published on the same offset press as the Free Speech Movement Newsletter, had sold over 200,000 copies by 1967 when the play opened in New York in a production starring Stacy Keach, William Devane, Cleavon Little, and Rue McClanahan.
"[1] Dwight Macdonald, in The New York Review of Books, called it "the funniest, toughest-minded most ingenious political satire I've read in years…"[2] Robert Brustein wrote that "Although this play is bound to start a storm of protest (not all of it unjustified) and may even be suppressed by some government agency, it will probably go down as one of the brutally provocative works in the American theater as well as one of the most grimly amusing," and praised Garson as "an extraordinarily gifted parodist.
Garson's musical children's play The Dinosaur Door, set on a class trip to the Natural History Museum, was performed at the Theater for the New City in 1976.
When protesters were arrested for opposing price increases and water shut offs, Garson organized a "shareholders" demonstration on their behalf in front of the South African consulate in New York City.
Indeed, Money Makes the World Go Around was largely ignored by the anti-globalization movement within which Garson was active, while a The Wall Street Journal review said "Ms. Garson recounts her travels with a disarmingly balanced combination of amazement and social concern"[5] and Business Week said "...her voice is so persistently good-natured and her intelligence so obvious that by the end of this curious capitalist's Baedeker you can't help but trust her gentle judgments.
[7] George Packer, writing in The New Yorker, says of Garson, "she's written several books of social reportage about work and money, and this steady engagement over many decades has honed an appealing voice: wry, modest, realistic...like a sympathetic but slightly critical friend, ready with a hug and unable not to give advice."
Garson is the author of over 150 articles in publications including Harper's, The New York Times, McCalls, Newsweek, Geo, The Village Voice, Ms, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Baltimore Sun, Los Angeles Times, The Denver Post, The Australian, Newsday, Modern Maturity, Mother Jones, The Arizona Republic, The Guardian, The Nation, Il Posto, Znet and The Nation's tomdispatch.com.
Garson was awarded an Obie for The Dinosaur Door and a Special Commission from the New York State Council on the Arts, for the Creation of Plays for Younger audiences.
In the 1992 U.S. Presidential election,[8] Garson was the running mate for J. Quinn Brisben on the Socialist Party USA ticket, replacing Bill Edwards, who died during the race.