UPDATE: Barbra Streisand's new memoir also mentions marijuana. Read more.
Melissa Etheridge, who is currently performing a one-woman show on Broadway, is out with a book, her second memoir titled "Talking to My Angels." She reads the audiobook, which features groovy guitar breaks and a performance of her book-title song.
Etheridge, our 2015 Tokin' Woman of the Year, starts the book in Chapter 1 with a description of eating a "heroic" dose of cannabis via a batch of chocolate chip cookies baked by a girlfriend. She called it, "an experience that jump-started me into a wholly new way of living a daily practice that has helped me heal."
"We were kicking back, listening to music, and enjoying the cookies. Then I began to feel a shift—not an earthquake. More like a slow inner spin. I began to laugh as the room slowly melted away and I felt keenly present....I'd enjoyed cannabis before, but this night was different. Something big was happening....
"I felt both in and outside of my body. I didn't want to move, but I had the sensation of moving and felt an electric energy course through me, pulsing my blood, and quickening my breath...Then I began to see my thoughts. Images of my life collided before me out of sequence but with vivid clarity: my daughter, Bailey, being born. Performing at my first women's music festival....Time collapsed and these memories were no longer distant but nearer to me, and in the flow of them, I felt like all of me was coming back to myself....I also heard voices talking to each other about me, and I was overhearing their conversation." The voices asked if they should tell her the meaning of life and, she writes, "I then received a kind of download of information and the arrival of a new understanding."
In Chapter 2, she grapples with making sense of her profound experience, writing, "After I delved into religion, physics, and philosophy, I investigated ancient Indigenous cultures and how the shamans and medicine men and women of these cultures had been sacred plant medicines for thousands of years. Peyote, psilocybin (magic mushrooms), cannabis—plant medicines found in many ancient cultures as methods for healing and convening with the spirit world." The Kansas-born musician recalls having taken mescaline at the age of 19 and thinking to herself, "Missy, you are definitely not in Kansas anymore."
Etheridge mentions the influence that Barbara Ehreinreich's book, "Witches, Midwives and Nurses" had on her early on. Angels also touches on Etheridge's use of cannabis to help combat the effects of chemotherapy when she had cancer, something she bravely talked about on Dateline NBC back in 2005. She donated proceeds from a 2011 film she made about breast cancer to the medical marijuana movement, and she won a 2013 Tokey Award for penning the oped, "Pot Got Me Through" for CNN.
Etheridge dedicates the book to her son Beckett, who died of an opiate/fentanyl overdose in 2020, and she writes of how her new-found awareness and subsequent spiritual exploration has helped her deal with the guilt and pain his death brought. With the aim to uplift us all, as her music always has, "Talking to My Angels" is a powerful, honest book from a voice that won't quit (thank Goddess).
Marijuana is mentioned early on. In describing the young singer spending time during the summer between 8th and 9th grades at her grandmother's house in Bay City, Michigan, Gabriel writes, "Her grandmother's idea of child-rearing was liberal in the extreme. Madonna said she could go out with boys, drink beer, 'have twelve desserts...and stay out past ten.' Nanoo, as they called her, let her sons, Madonna's uncles, smoke pot in the basement and practice their rock band in her garage. 'I thought they were the coolest people in the world,' Madonna said."
Madonna and her Egg movie director, Wyn Cooper, "liked to cruise the streets of Rochester in his 1973 Mercury Capri listening to music "while enjoying a little marijuana," as he described it. With her friend Whitley Setrakian, her roommate in 1977 when she studied dance at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor (home of the long-running "Hash Bash"), Madonna and she "smoked pot together in a dance-building storage area they christened Zeet Lounge." Whit taught her to masturbate, something she mocked doing onstage in her breakthrough performance of "Like a Virgin" at the VMA awards.
Sire Records A&R man Michael Rosenblatt, who described his job as "being paid to smoke pot and listen to music," (p. 102), discovered Madonna in a New York dance club. When she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, she said the night she met Rosenblatt, "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." Gabriel calls Rosenberg one of Madonna's "most important connection, who would be at her side for decades."
Of the video for her breakthrough hit "Lucky Star," record executive Jeff Ayerhoff said, "I made 'Lucky Star' for $14,000 with a friend who was a pot grower from Bolinas, California," referring to Arthur Pierson, who directed it. Madonna turns on a suburban spa salesman with a joint in the 1985 movie "Desperately Seeking Susan," which launched her dance hit, “Into the Groove.”
When her 20-year-old brother Christopher visited her at New York apartment, she softened the blow of telling him he couldn't stay with her by giving him a tab of Ecstasy. A 2012 album was named "MDNA," a "playful" take on Madonna's name and MDMA or Ecstasy as suggested my M.I.A., who guest-rapped on the album. I'm guessing that's been her drug of choice.
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