Of Madonna and Rosanna, and Marijuana

Ten years ago today, Madonna grabbed headlines away from her fellow Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame inductees by using her acceptance speech to reveal she took ecstasy and smoked grass on her way to the top. The admissions came on March 10, 2008 at New York's Waldorf-Astoria hotel.

After accepting her award from Justin Timberlake, Madonna announced, "The night I met Michael Rosenblatt, who signed me to Sire Records, I jammed my demo tape into his hand, we both did a tab of ecstasy and then we danced the night away." She then recalled the night she met long-term publicist Liz Rosenberg, saying: "We smoked a joint together." Ah, drugs, you're so wonderful for bonding.

After pulling a joint out of her boot (pictured above) in the 1985 movie Desperately Seeking Susan (now on Amazon Prime), Madonna's character turns on a philandering, money-grubbing suburban spa salesman (played by Mark Blum). After smoking, he muses, "What's it all about? There's more to life than making money....You know how all time comes from a single point in the universe?" Ah, pot, you're so wonderful for philosophizing.

On a March 31, 1994 edition of The Late Show with David Letterman, Madonna asked Dave whether he had ever smoked "Endo" (meaning, presumably, marijuana grown in Mendocino county, California). In 2009 she said to Dave about her high-jinks that night (when she also used the f-word 13 times), "I think it may have had something to do with the joint I smoked before I came on." And she intelligently and compassionately handled her son's arrest for marijuana in 2016, saying, "I love my son very much. I will do whatever I can to give him the support that he needs."

Rumor has it that Rosanna Arquette, who played the suburban housewife Roberta in Desperately Seeking Susan (of whom it is said, "She's so straight she's never even smoked a joint"), hoped to play the wild child Susan instead. Arquette got her turn to be wild in the 2011 film Peace Love and Misunderstanding (now on Netflix), where she tokes it up and howls at the moon, wearing a big old pot-leaf necklace (pictured).

The next movie that should be made available on some platform is the excellent 2005 rockumentary Arquette directed and co-produced, All We Are Saying. With an all-star cast that includes Joni Mitchell, Chrissie Hynde, Macy Gray, Patti Smith and a lot of great men too like Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson, it could only have been made by the woman who inspired the rock anthem "Rosanna."