Celebrating famous female cannabis connoisseurs throughout herstory to the present day.
All contents copyrighted. "Bright Leaf" artwork by Jean Hanamoto, camomoto at Spoonflower.com
Sunday, December 1, 2024
Tokin' Women and Others We Lost in 2024
This year we lost activists John Sinclair, Mari Kane, Nancy Udell and Peggy Hitchcock; Actresses Teri Garr, Maggie Smith, Gena Rowlands, Shelley Duvall and Glynis Johns; Musicians Melanie and Kris Kristofferson, plus Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh and Super Deadhead Bill Walton, and (too) many more. Sadly, this page will be updated throughout 2024, with an emphasis on women and those connected with cannabis and its legalization and other progressive causes, through their lives and/or work.
Alice May Brock (February 28, 1941 - November 21, 2024)
The woman who inspired and co-wrote Arlo Guthrie's song "Alice's Restaurant," set at Thanksgiving, died a week before the holiday at the age of 83. Brock met Guthrie while she was a librarian at the Stockbridge School in Massachusetts where he was a student, and her eatery in western Massachusetts is forever immortalized in the song, which became an anti-war anthem in 1967 while US boys were still being drafted into the Vietnam war. Brock wrote several books, including “The Alice’s Restaurant Cookbook” (1969) and “My Life as a Restaurant” (1976); she appears in a cameo performance in the movie "Alice's Restaurant." A GoFundMe site to help with health and financial issues late in her life raised $170,000 in a few days. A used Hardcover copy her cookbook in "acceptable" condition is on sale at Amazon for $4,629.66. It includes advice on subjects as varied as Your Attitude, Equipment, Improvising And Making Do, and The Supply Cupboard. In 1991, Guthrie bought the re-purposed church in Great Barrington where Alice lived and hosted the Thanksgiving dinner he sang about to house his archives and a community action center. The center hosted its 19th Annual free Thanksgiving dinner this year; plans for an exhibit of Alice's artwork there began just before she died.
Quincy Jones (March 14, 1933 - November 3, 2024)
The amazingly multitalented Jones's now-famous composition Soul Bossa Nova, which gave Austin Powers his mojo, was the inspiration for the ballet "Dear Quincy" in which the dancers smoke and share a pipe.
Garr's autobiography Speedbumps: Flooring it Through Hollywood
(2005) reveals that she had encounters with pot when she was a young go-go dancer on TV shows like "Shindig!" and in movies like Pajama Party with Annette Funicello,
and while hanging out with fellow acting-school student and VIP Jack Nicholson, with whom she appeared in his psychedelic movie Head (along with the Monkees and Funicello). Garr also writes about sending a boyfriend to buy a joint for them to share on a vacation in Maui (somewhat anonymously). Like Funicello, she suffered from MS, but its unknown if either actress used cannabis for it. Garr was perfectly cast as Phoebe's stoner mom on TV's Friends, and remains beloved for her comedic and adorable performances in Young Frankenstein, Oh, God!, Tootsie, Mr. Mom, among many others. Read more.
Grateful Dead bassist Lesh's "intellectual, articulate and reflective" book, Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead
(2005, Little, Brown) includes his description of the band's "forays
into mind-altering substances." He wrote, "For me and my friends, these drugs (pot, acid, the other
entheogens) were seen as tools -- tools to enhance
awareness, to expand our horizons, to access other levels of mind, to
manifest the numinous and sacred, tools that had been used for thousands
of years by shamans, by oracles, in the ancient mystery schools, by all
whose mission was to penetrate beyond the veil of illusion . . . These
experiences were not embarked upon as escape from 'reality' -- they were
explorations into the superreal."In 2020, Rolling Stone ranked Lesh as the 11th Greatest Bassist of All Time.Read more.
Barbara Dane(May 12, 1927 – October 20, 2024)
"Bessie Smith in stereo," wrote jazz critic Leonard Feather of Dane in the late 1950s. Time wrote of Dane: "The voice is pure, rich ... rare as a 20-carat diamond" and quoted Louis Armstrong's exclamation upon hearing her at the Pasadena jazz festival: "Did you get that chick? She's a gasser!" On the occasion of her 85th birthday, The Boston Globe music critic James Reed called her "one of the true unsung heroes of American music." Dane was one of the many artists whom the FBI surveilled because of their activism, and her FBI file later became source material for her 2022 autobiography, This Bell Still Rings: My Life of Defiance and Song, where she revealed that she suspected her first husband of feeding the FBI information about her. Dane continued to be active well into her 90s. In addition to publishing her book, she continued to perform and appeared in a 2023 documentary about her life, The Nine Lives of Barbara Dane.
Mitzi Gaynor (September 4, 1931 - October 17, 2024)
Gaynor helped teach us tolerance by falling in love with a Frenchman with Polynesian children in the 1958 movie "South Pacific," set during World War II. Initially her character Nellie Forbush, a Navy nurse from Arkansas, rejects him on racial grounds, leading to the song, "You've Got to Be Taught" with its brilliant Oscar Hammerstein lyrics. A wonderful dancer, here Gaynor dances with Gene Kelly in "Les Girls" (1957).
Lilly Ledbetter (April 14, 1938 – October 12, 2024)
Born Lilly Lynn McDaniel in Possum Trot, Alabama, Ledbetter was the plaintiff in the United States Supreme Court Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. in which she alleged pay discrimination due to her gender. She won the suit in 2003 and was awarded more than $3 million, but the amount was reduced to $300,000 because of a statutory cap and $60,000 in back pay. Goodyear appealed the decision to the Supreme Court, arguing that Ledbetter could only win damages or back pay for the 180 days prior to the filing of her claim. Two years after the Supreme Court decided that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 does not allow employers to be sued for pay discrimination more than 180 days after an employee's first paycheck, the United States Congress passed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to remedy the issue. Then-President Barack Obama (pictured above, with Ledbetter) signed the measure into law on Jan. 29, 2009, the first bill he signed as president. Subsequently, Ledbetter became a women's equality activist, public speaker, and author. In 2011, she was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame. Source.
Ethel Kennedy (April 11, 1928-October 10, 2024)
Kennedy was at the side of her husband, Robert F. Kennedy, when he was assassinated in Los Angeles in 1968, on the night he won California's Democratic presidential primary. She was pregnant with their 11th child. "Petite and peppy," as the Washington Post described her, Ethel founded the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights (now called Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights) soon after her husband's murder, and advocated for a variety of causes. She was active in the Coalition of Gun Control, the Special Olympics, and the Earth Conservation Corps. She participated in a 2016 demonstration supporting higher pay for farmworkers in Florida, and joined a 2018 hunger strike against the Trump administration's immigration policies. Source.
Ruth Johnson Colvin (December 16, 1916 – August 18, 2024)
Colvin was the founder of the non-profit organization Literacy Volunteers of America, now called ProLiteracy Worldwide in Syracuse, New York, in 1962. The organization currently has hundreds of programs and 100,000 tutors in 42 states and 60 other countries, offering lessons in scores of languages at homes, workplaces, prisons, libraries and other sites. For 60 years, Ms. Colvin remained a teacher and administrator, traveled widely and wrote 12 books on her work. Colvin also developed two tutor training manuals: Tutor and I Speak English, which are considered to be authoritative sources for training volunteer tutors to teach adults basic literacy or English as a second language, among other books, including a 2020 memoir. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush in December 2006.
Kristofferson, the Rhodes scholar, helicopter pilot, and OG hippie outlaw country musician, was also a hemp advocate, appearing with John Trudell at a 2014 benefit for Hemp Aid. Johnny Cash famously sang Kristofferson's song "Sunday Morning Coming Down" with the lyric, "I wish to God that I was stoned" on TV in defiance of censors. Kris joined Merle Haggard to sing his own lyrics to "Okie from Muskogee" at the 2011 Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco:
We don't shoot that deadly marijuana
We get drunk like God wants us to do
Maggie Smith (December 28, 1934 - September 27, 2024)
Among her many, memorable roles, Smith played Aunt Augusta in "Travels With My Aunt," which begins with her young paramour hiding his pot stash in an urn of ashes.
Phil Donahue (December 21, 1935 – August 18, 2024)
A pioneer in involving the audience in talk shows, Donahue hosted this raucous conversation about marijuana legalization in Alaska in 1990. When Marlo Thomas guested on his show in 1977, she gushed, "Whoever you're dating is very lucky."“You are wonderful,” she replied. “I said it when we were off the air and I want to say, you are loving and generous and you like women and it’s a pleasure. Whoever is the woman in your life is very lucky.” Pretty soon, they were married and remained so for 44 years until his death. In 2020 they co-wrote the book What Makes a Marriage Last: 40 Celebrated Couples Share with Us the Secrets to a Happy Life. Now we're stuck with the horrible Dr. Phil, who got his start on the Donahue-inspired Oprah Winfrey show. The lesser Phil hosts sensationalized programs about marijuana and other drugs, full of falsehoods. And many of the issues around marijuana from Donahue's 1990 show remain current today.
Gena Rowlands (June 19, 1930 – August 14, 2024)
Rowlands played a bad-ass woman who defends a young boy from the mob in Gloria (1980) and inspired her husband John Cassavetes to write A Woman Under the Influence (1974) when she expressed a desire to appear in a play about the difficulties faced by
contemporary women. When he tried to raise funding for
the film project about an alcoholic housewife, he was told, "No one wants to see a crazy, middle-aged
dame." Rowlands was nominated for an Oscar and won a Golden Globe for her performance. She won an Emmy for her portrayal of Betty Ford, and in 2015 she received an Honorary Academy Award in recognition of her unique screen performances.
Hettie Jones (July 16, 1934 – August 13, 2024)
Born Hettie Cohen to a middle-class Jewish family in Queens, she married African-American poet LeRoi Jones and wrote 23 books that include a memoir of the Beat Generation, three volumes of poetry, and publications for children and young adults, including The Trees Stand Shining and Big Star Fallin' Mama: Five Women in Black Music. She successfully led the effort to prevent the Cooper Square Hotel from tearing down her apartment building in Greenwich Village, where a plaque now commemorates her and other residents. She worked as an editor at Partisan Review and her book How I Became Hettie Jones provides detailed accounts of the day-to-day process of running a literary magazine. Jones taught at the New School and the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center, chaired on PEN America's prison writing committee, and ran a writing workshop at the New York State Correctional Facility for Women at Bedford Hills. She also co-authored the memoir No Woman, No Cry with Tokin' Woman Rita Marley.
Agnes Sasagawa (1931 - August 15, 2024)
A Japanese nun who reported visions of the Virgin Mary as Our Lady of Akita, Sasagawa died at age 93 on the Feast of the Assumption of Mary. Sister Agnes's deafness was reportedly healed by Mary, and a wooden statue representing the apparitions is venerated by the Japanese faithful and other Catholics. In December 1973, a Japanese television station videotaped tears coming from the statue's eyes, something that reportedly happened over a hundred times. The image also became affiliated with The Lady of All Nations movement, with which her message shares some similarities.
Susan Wojcicki (July 5, 1968 - August 9, 2024)
The former CEO of YouTube, Wojcicki was named "the most important person in advertising," as well as one of Time's 100 most influential people in 2015. She was described in a later issue of Time as "the most powerful woman on the Internet." In December 2014, she had joined the board of Salesforce; she also served on the boards of the UCLA Anderson School of Management, Environmental Defense Fund, and Room to Read, an organization that focuses on literacy and gender equality in education. Wojcicki was an advocate for the expansion of paid family leave, countering gender discrimination at technology companies, getting young girls interested in computer science, and prioritizing computer programming and coding in schools. She also owned a real estate holding company that worked on the sustainable growth of Los Altos, California. In November 2024, to coincide with Lung Cancer Awareness Month, a message she wrote before she died from lung cancer was posted on YouTube. It notes that lung cancer among people who never smoked had risen and that two-thirds of people diagnosed with the disease are women.
Sheila Jackson Lee (January 12, 1950 – July 19, 2024)
Jackson Lee was the U.S. representative for Texas's 18th congressional district for nearly 30 years, from 1995 until her death. She had a stellar voting record on marijuana reform bills, and in 2023 she was among Congressmembers who reintroduced the Marijuana Opportunity Reinvestment and Expungement (MORE) Act (H.R. 5601), one of the most comprehensive marijuana reform bills ever introduced in the U.S. Congress. Speaking as the Chair of the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, Jackson Lee said, "As I have said before, we need to pass the MORE Act as an important component of a broader effort to reform our drug laws, which disproportionately harm racial minorities and fuel over-policing and mass incarceration. That is why I will continue to advance other legislation to achieve comprehensive reform of our criminal justice system."
Cheng Pei-pei
The Chinese actress known for her roles in "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "Come Drink with Me" was a martial arts icon who was considered the first Chinese female action hero. Cheng starred in 20 wuxia action films from Shaw Brothers Studios, including "The Last Woman of Shang" and "The Jade Raksha." “Her performances are [characterised] by grace, agility and dignity, which undoubtedly came from her background in ballet, music, and Chinese dance,” a Hong Kong critic wrote in 1980. “She is considered to be one of the best actresses to have emerged from the martial arts cinema.”
Bernice Johnson Reagon (October 4, 1942 - July 16, 2024)
Civil rights activist and singer Reagon was a founder of The Freedom Singers, an a cappella group that was part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. Through music, the Freedom Singers chronicled SNCC's activities, including a movement leader's funeral ("They Laid Medgar Evers In His Grave"). Later Reagon received a Ford Foundation Fellowship and founded the women's a cappella group Sweet Honey in the Rock. In 1974, she received a music history appointment at the Smithsonian; a year later, she added the title of Dr. after receiving a Ph.D. from Howard University; in 1989, she won a "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation. In 1994, she created a 26-part NPR documentary "Wade in the Water" that won a Peabody award. And in 1995, she was awarded the Presidential Medal and the Charles Frankel Prize. Source.
Naomi Pomeroy November 30, 1974 – July 13, 2024
The chef and restaurateur Pomeroy was known for for helping to put the Portland, Oregon dining scene on the map and for competing on the third season of Top Chef Masters. In 2009, she was listed by Food & Wine as one of the ten best new chefs in the U.S. and Oprah's O Magazine named her as one of the top ten "women on the rise" for 2010. The 49-year-old James Beard Award winner drowned in the Willamette River when she accidentally fell off an inner tube she was riding in a swift current.
Shannen Doherty
April 12, 1971 - July 13, 2024
Doherty was already an accomplished actress in the early '90s when the beautiful brunette shot to fame playing a high school student in Beverly Hills, 90210. In 1998, she starred in the TV series Charmed, in which she played the oldest of three sisters who are witches. She also directed three episodes for the series. In March 2015, Doherty was diagnosed with Stage III breast cancer, which had spread to her lymph nodes. According to Doherty, her employer at the time had failed to make her insurance payments on time, causing her coverage to lapse from 2014 to 2015, and resulting in the cancer not being diagnosed until it had already spread significantly. She died from cancer at age 53.
Dr. Ruth Westheimer
June 4, 1928 - July 12, 2024
Better known as Dr. Ruth, Westheimer was a German and American sex therapist and talk show host. Born in Germany to a Jewish family, her parents sent her at age 10 to a school in Switzerland as the Nazi's came to power. Both were killed in concentration camps. After World War II, she emigrated to British-controlled Mandatory Palestine. At 4 feet 7 inches tall and 17 years of age, she joined the Haganah, and was trained as a sniper. On her 20th birthday, she was wounded in action by an exploding shell during mortar fire on Jerusalem during the 1947–1949 Israeli War of Independence, and almost lost both feet. Two years later, Westheimer moved to Paris, France, where she studied psychology at the Sorbonne.
Immigrating to the United States in 1956, she worked as a maid to put herself through graduate school, earned a Master of Arts in sociology from The New School in 1959, and earned a doctorate at age 42 from Teachers College, Columbia University, in 1970. Over the next decade, she taught at a number of universities and had a private sex therapy practice. Westheimer's media career began in 1980 with the radio call-in show Sexually Speaking, which continued until 1990. In 1983 it was the top-rated radio show in the country's largest radio market. She then launched a television show, The Dr. Ruth Show, which by 1985 attracted two million viewers a week. She became known for giving serious advice while being candid, but also warm, cheerful, funny, and respectful, and for her tag phrase: "Get some." (Source.)
Shelley Duvall
July 7, 1949 - July 11, 2024
The Texas-born Duvall was discovered by Robert Altman, who cast her in his black comedy Brewster McCloud and again in McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Thieves Like Us, Nashville, and 3 Women, and as Olive Oyl in the live-action Popeye with Robin Williams. Duvall was spot on as a flighty rock critic in Annie Hall and as the terrified prey of Jack Nicholson in The Shining. She then ventured into producing and creating television programs aimed at children and youth, beginning with Faerie Tale Theatre (1982–1987) which featured "A" list actors like Williams, Carrie Fisher, Teri Garr, and more.
Carol Bongiovi (1940 - July 9, 2024)
A former Playboy bunny, U.S. Marine, entrepreneur, and mother of rocker Jon Bon Jovi, Carol Sharkey was born and raised in Erie, Pennsylvania and met her future husband, John Bongiovi, Sr. after enlisting in the Marine Corps in 1959. Bongiovi bought her son his first acoustic guitar at age 7 and later founded and operated the Bon Jovi fan club out of her flower shop, earning the nickname "Mom Jovi."
Judy Belushi Pisano (January 1, 1951 – July 5, 2024)
John Belushi's high school sweetheart Judy Jacklin moved to New York City with him as his career took off, and married him in 1976. She was a radio producer for The National Lampoon Radio Hour and was nominated for a Primetime Emmy Award in the category Outstanding Nonfiction Series for her work on the television program Biography. In the aftermath of her husband's death, Judy challenged the popular image that formed of him as "a hard-partying drug addict," in favor of a more nuanced portrait that put his addiction in the context of "sudden fame, abysmal self-doubt and a [drug-heavy] celebrity culture" in her book Samari Widow and subsequent projects. She was a founder of the Second Chance Foundation, which helps people struggling with addiction. She died from endometrial cancer at her home on Martha's Vineyard at the age of 73. Source. Photo by Lynn Goldsmith.
Martin Mull (August 18, 1943 – June 27, 2024)
Mull's off-the-wall humor first shone in his mock talk show Fernwood 2 Night. Many know him from his comedic roles on Arrested Development, Roseanne, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch (pictured, with the two witches his character dated on the show). In 2016, he was nominated for an Emmy for his guest role on Veep. He also appeared on Grace and Frankie and The Ranch, on which his recurring character, the family lawyer, expresses a fondness for magic mushrooms.
Kinky Friedman (November 1, 1944 - June 27, 2024)
The incomparable comic and musician Friedman 2006 ran for Governor of Texas in 2006 on a platform calling for drug legalization, an end to bans on smoking and a promise to lower the speed limit from 55 to 54.95 miles per hour. He mocked feminism in "Get Your Biscuits In The Oven & Your Buns In The Bed," here in a video with Ruth Buzzi. He also published a novel titled, "Kill Two Birds & Get Stoned."
Donald Sutherland (July 17, 1935 - June 20, 2024)
Among the many memorable characters Sutherland portrayed was the college professor who turns his students onto pot in "Animal House."
Bill Walton (November 5, 1952 – May 27, 2024)
The NBA MVP and beloved basketball broadcaster was also famously a Grateful Dead fan. It was easy to see Walton dancing head and shoulders above the crowd at numerous Dead shows. Dead & Company honored Walton in an Instagram post on their feed, saying, “Bill was an irreplaceable force and spirit in our family. Father Time, Rhythm Devil, biggest deadhead ever. Over 1000 shows and couldn’t get enough. He loved this band and we loved him. Rest in peace and may the four winds blow you safely home."
Morgan Spurlock (November 7, 1970 – May 23, 2024)
Spurlock started a national conversation about America's reliance on junk food with his 2004 documentary Super Size Me, wherein he ate three McDonald's meals every day for 30 days and monitored his declining health. It inspired comedian Doug Benson to produce Super High Me (2007), wherein Benson consumes cannabis for 30 days in a row, after which his physician concluded that the effects on Benson's health were generally inconsequential.
Dabney Coleman (January 3, 1932 - May 16, 2024)
Coleman was pitch perfect as the scumbag boss that Lily Tomlin, Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton have revenge fantasies about after the gals smoke pot together in "9 to 5."
Trina Robbins (August 17, 1938 - April 10, 2024)
A pioneer in the male-dominated world of comic books, Robbins and Barbara "Willy" Mendes co-produced the first American comic book created entirely by women, "It Ain't Me, Babe," published in 1970, which led to a long-running series of "Wimmen's Comix.” Robbins' artistic journey first took her to fashion design, with a New York boutique called Broccoli. She created clothes for '60s rock musicians, including Cass Elliott and David Crosby, and was immortalized in the Joni Mitchell song, "Ladies of the Canyon," which begins, "Trina wears her wampum beads / She fills her drawing book with line." Mendes noted, "Trina Robbins significantly forwarded the cause of women artists with her historical writings, her comics editing and artwork, and her strong, uncompromising presence."
Peggy Hitchcock (June 29, 1933 - April 9, 2024)
Margaret "Peggy" Mellon Hitchcock, heiress to the Gulf Oil fortune, heard that Professors Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert were looking for research subjects to experiment with LSD while at Harvard, and she volunteered to try the then-legal experimental drug. "It really confirmed a lot of things that I had hoped were true, that I had sort of glimpsed at various times in my life, that there was a larger reality than what my everyday, humdrum experiences were," she said of her experience. Along with her brothers Billy and Tommy, Peggy made their Millbrook estate in upper New York available to Leary and Alpert (aka Ram Dass) after they were ousted from Harvard. It became known as America's most notable psychedelic commune, and was raided by G. Gordon Liddy in 1966.
In 1989, Hitchcock met the Dalai Lama and she became a Buddhist and a supporter of Tibet House in Manhattan, opening an Arizona outpost, Arizona Friends of Tibet, where the Dalai Lama came to teach. At her death, Hitchcock was chair of the board of directors of AUDIT USA — Americans United for Democracy, Integrity and Transparency — a nonprofit devoted to election transparency, one of many causes she supported. “She was a totally marvelous person, a people artist,” Buddhist scholar Dr. Robert Thurman told the New York Times. “These social people, people of privilege like Peggy, can really bring people together — the good ones, that is. It’s a real creativity, and she was one of the best. We are sure she is in a heavenly place,” he added, “and expect to hear from her soon.”
Poet, musician and activist Sinclair became a poster child for marijuana law reform when he was given a 10-year sentence for two joints, prompting Yippie! Jerry Rubin to organize an all-star Freedom Rally held on December 10, 1971 at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. On the bill were Michigan natives Stevie Wonder, Bob Seeger, and Commander Cody (who did a soulful "Down to Seeds and Stems Again Blues"). Also appearing, in his first American performance since the break up of the Beatles, was John Lennon with Yoko Ono, who performed his composition "The Ballad of John Sinclair." Two days later, an appellate court freed Sinclair on bail.He was in the news in 2019 as one of the first to purchase newly legal marijuana in his home state of Michigan, and died days before the annual, longstanding Ann Arbor Hash Bash.
Richard Serra (November 2, 1938 – March 26, 2024)
The son of a shipyard pipe-fitter, he grew up watching vast steel tankers come and go. As a young man he worked in local steel mills to pay for college in California, and went on to study fine art at Yale. He moved to New York in the mid-1960s, where he began making art from industrial materials, especially metal. "I started as a kid in the steel mills," the artist told NPR in 1986. "And in some sense I've never left." Source. Shown: Serra's 40-foot tower, made of four panels of 2.5-inch-thick COR-TEN steel at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, with its height and profile echoing that of the nearby Cathedral of Learning at the University of Pittsburgh.
Paula Weinstein (November 19, 1945 - March 25, 2024)
"In the boy’s club of Hollywood, Ms. Weinstein was the rare female top executive: Over her long career, she was president of United Artists, a vice president of Warner Bros. and an executive vice president at 20th Century Fox," began her NYT obituary. Her mother, Hannah Weinstein, was a journalist and speechwriter who in 1950 fled "the grim and punitive politics of the country’s McCarthy era" and produced movies and television series using blacklisted actors and writers in Britain. Jane Fonda went to Hannah to help fund an office in D.C. where concerns facing soldiers could be brought to Congress in 1970. Hannah donated $2000 and years later asked Fonda to help find a job in Hollywood for her daughter Paula, who had just graduated from Columbia University. Paula became Fonda’s agent, helping her land the role of Lillian Hellman in “Julia” (1977). “It helped that Lillian was Paula’s godmother,” Fonda said.
Paula's next job was at Fox, where she oversaw the production of “9 to 5” (1980), the hit comedy starring Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton as office workers who revolt against their sexist employer (played perfectly by Dabney Coleman) after partaking in "an old fashioned ladies pot party." She reunited with Fonda and Tomlin as an executive producer of the long-running, pot-friendly Netflix series “Grace and Frankie.” Weinstein was also a founder, with Fonda, Barbra Streisand and others, of the Hollywood Women’s Political Committee, a "fund-raising powerhouse for liberal candidates and causes from 1984 to the late 1990s."
With her husband, Mark Rosenberg, whom she met when they were both members of Students for a Democratic Society, Weinstein made a number of films, including “The Fabulous Baker Boys” (1989) and “Citizen Cohn” (1992), an HBO movie about Roy Cohn, the lawyer and fixer for Senator Joseph McCarthy (and influencer of Donald Trump). Weinstein won an Emmy award (pictured) as executive producer for the HBO movie “Recount” in 2008, which was based on the 2000 presidential election. “A man can be mediocre in almost everything, but a women’s got to be perfect,” she told Life magazine. Fonda is godmother to her daughter Hannah.
Eric Carmen (August 11, 1949 – March 11, 2024)
Carmen began his musical education with violin lessons from his aunt Muriel, who played with the Cleveland Orchestra. After hits with The Raspberries like "Go All the Way" (in which it is the woman who makes the suggestion), he had a pair of solo hits—"All By Myself" and "Never Gonna Fall in Love Again"— playing the piano on two borrowed Rachmaninov melodies.
Lewis, who called himself "The Prince of Pain," made a career being hilariously upfront about his neuroses and his struggles with addictions to alcohol, cocaine, and crystal meth. In his 2000 book, The Other Great Depression, he joked that in college, "I didn't smoke a lot of pot because I was too paranoid to begin with and strong grass made me think I was stalking myself." Of his early days in stand-up comedy when he sipped wine and "occasionally smoked a joint" he wrote, "it was a real pleasure to get a nice buzz... and to be in a head space where I felt so loose and self-confident that I actually might have been legitimately relaxed and happy." His former girlfriend Debra Winger and co-star Jamie Lee Curtis wrote tributes to Lewis on on Instagram, with Curtis adding, "He also is the reason I am sober." (Photo: Bonnie Schiffman, who brilliantly turned him into Edvard Munch's painting "The Scream.")
Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt
February 8, 1932 – February 26, 2024
Employed as an office manager, Wolf-Rehfeldt was a self-taught artist working under a regime of strict surveillance in the former German Democratic Republic. She turned herself into a typist—a stereotypical female job—and is known particularly for a period of geometric and poetic typewriter graphics art that she called "typewritings" produced between the 1970s and 1990, mostly as part of Mail Art collaborations, which allowed artists living under totalitarian regimes to communicate and form networks, even as they engaged with conditions of official surveillance. Her work addressed cybernetics, environmental issues and human rights. Photo: Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, Information, 1970s.
Aaron Bushnell
(1998 - February 25, 2024)
Images of the horrific event weren't able to be shown on TV, but social media broadcasted 25-year-old Bushnell's video wherein he self-immolated in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC to protest the war in Gaza. An active-duty member of the US Air Force, Bushnell grew up in a religious community on Cape Cod called the Community of Jesus, whose former members have come forward alleging abuse and a rigid social structure. He repeatedly yelled, "Free Palestine!" during his protest. Days later, President Biden announced (while eating an ice cream cone with Seth Meyers) that he expected an agreement on a ceasefire within a week. (It didn't happen until the end of November.)
Nancy Udell (1973 - February 24, 2024)
Longtime Empire State NORML co-director and treasurer "loved to march in the annual NYC
Cannabis Parade and spent many lobby days in Albany prior to
legalization," wrote Steve Bloom of Celebstoner. Born in Atlantic Beach, Udell was a graduate of NYU and
the University of Denver and worked for many years as a paralegal. She was often quoted in stories about marijuana legalization in New York, always arguing for equity, reason and fairness. Photo: Luna Rouge
Alexei Navalny
(June 4, 1976 – February 16, 2024)
Navalny’s death at age 47 has deprived the Russian opposition of its most well-known and inspiring politician less than a month before an election that will give President Vladimir Putin another six years in power. Navalny had been jailed since January 2021, when he returned to Moscow after recuperating in Germany from nerve agent poisoning he blamed on the Kremlin. He was later convicted three times, saying each case was politically motivated, and received a sentence of 19 years for extremism. He died at a remote Arctic penal colony, reportedly two days after he was put in a "punishment cell" there. Over 400 people were detained in Russia while paying tribute to Navalny. The film Navalny won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2023. Souce.
Bob Moore
(February 15, 1929 – February 10, 2024)
Moore and his wife Charlee "developed a passion for whole grains that coincided with parenthood," and opened a flour mill in Redding, CA. "The first whole grain loaf of bread that came out of my wife Charlee’s oven on our five-acre farm back in the ‘60s was the most delicious loaf of bread I can ever remember smelling and eating," Bob later recalled. After moving to Milwaukie, Oregon to attend seminary school and read the Bible in its original language, the couple founded Bob’s Red Mill in 1978, and grew it into a leading global food brand offering 200+ products in more than 70 countries. On his 81st birthday, Moore established an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), transferring ownership of the company to its 700 employees, saying, "The Bible says to do unto others are you would have them do unto you." The Moores were named honorary Beavers for their significant donations to Oregon State University, where they helped fund the Moore Family Center for Whole Grain Foods, Nutrition, and Preventive Health. Charlee died in 2018, when Bob retired; he remained a Board Member of the Red Mill until his death at just before his 95th birthday.
Isabel Mijares (1942 – February 10, 2024)
After finishing her Bachelor's degree in Chemistry at the Complutense University of Madrid, Mijares applied to continue studying at the Perfume Institute in Paris and at the Oenology Institute at the University from Bordeaux. She was accepted in both, but finally, in 1967 opted for Bordeaux, where she graduated in Oenology [the study of wines] with a Higher Diploma in Wine Tasting. In 1970, she completed her doctorate in Oenology and became the first female winemaker in Spain, the first to run a winery, and the
first president of an appellation of origin (Valdepeñas) in all of
Europe, back in 1982. She traveled extensively in the wine regions of Mexico, Argentina, and Chile;chaired juries, fairs, forums and specialized salons; and was known for her erudition, irony, and humor. Source.
Toby Keith
(July 8, 1961 – February 5, 2024)
You can pour me some old whiskey river, my friend
But I'll never smoke weed with Willie again.
Keith died of stomach cancer at the age of 62. (Nelson turned 90 last year.) Sad that Keith didn't choose the healthier inebriant.
Don Murray
(July 31, 1929 – February 2, 2024)
After earning an Oscar nomination for his film debut opposite Marilyn Monroe in "Bus Stop" (1956), Murray went on to a career playing roles with social significance, such as a young husband hiding a morphine addiction from his wife (Eva Marie Saint) in “A Hatful of Rain” (1957, pictured). He played a priest who counsels former convicts in "The Hoodlum Priest" (1961), for which he bought out his film studio contract to produce it independently. In "Advise & Consent" (1962) he played a US Senator being blackmailed over a gay encounter in his past and his TV series "The Outcasts" (1968-69) addressed racial tensions as the first show with black and white co-stars. As the entertainment industry became less daring and significant, Murray traded on his looks in shows like the nighttime TV soap "Knott's Landing," in which his character was controversially killed off after Murray left the show. Speaking at the LA opening of the play "Marilyn, Forever Blonde" in 1962, he expressed dismay that Monroe hadn't been nominated for her "astonishing" performance in "Bus Stop," kind of like how Ken was nominated this year but not Barbie.
Chita Rivera
(January 23, 1933 – January 30, 2024)
Ten-time Tony award nominee and the winner of two Tony awards plus the Tony Award for Lifetime Achievement, the fabulous actress/singer/dancer Chita Rivera was the first Latino American to receive a Kennedy Center Honor in 2002, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009. On Broadway, she originated the role of Anita in West Side Story (1957), Rosie in Bye Bye Birdie (1960), Velma in Chicago (1975), and the title role in Kiss of the Spider Woman (1993, at the age of 60). Rivera acted in the film Sweet Charity (1969) and appeared in Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978). Her autobiography, Chita: A Memoir, published in 2023, tells a story about being taken to Charlie Parker's hotel room in 1956, where she was offered a joint (until a friend intervened). In a "Forbidden Broadway" skit portraying Rivera and Rita Moreno, who played Anita in the West Side Story movie, Rita sings: "When people smoke too much pot, Chita / They're think you're me and I'm not Rita." As Anita, in the song "America," Rivera sang: "I like the island Manhattan / Smoke on your pipe and put that in!" and in "All that Jazz" from Chicago: "Lucky Lindy never flew so high."
Melanie (February 3, 1947 – January 23, 2024)
Bothered by being pegged by her high school classmates as a "beatnik" in school, Melanie Safka ran away to California but returned to New Jersey where she began performing at The Inkwell, a coffee house in Long Branch, NJ and later, at the folk clubs of Greenwich Village. In 1969, Melanie had a hit in the Netherlands with "Beautiful People" and was one of only three solo women who performed at the Woodstock festival. Her first US hit, "Lay Down (Candles in the Rain)" was inspired by the Woodstock audience lighting candles during her set. When first released, her sweet song "Brand New Key" was banned by some radio stations as containing a sexual innuendo. In 2015, she dueted with Tokin' Woman Miley Cyrus on "Look What They've Done to My Song, Ma," still sounding great (in English and French). When she died, Melanie was working on a new record of cover songs, titled "Second Hand Smoke," for the Cleopatra label. She opened at Woodstock, and at Carnegie Hall, singing "Close to it All" with her signature, unique phrasing:
If I had my dream it would not fall down
If I could live high on the ground, the sound
Of high is a good one to many around
When they want to be close to it all
Mary Weiss (December 28, 1948 – January 19, 2024)
Lead singer Weiss and her booming voice made loving bad boys cool with the Shangri-Las hit "Leader of the Pack," recorded when she was 15 in 1963, the year after Shelly Fabares had a hit with the sappy and virginal "Johnny Angel." After shocking James Brown when he found out they weren't black, and churning out hits like "Remember (Walking in the Sand)" and "Give Him a Great Big Kiss," the group, made up of Mary's sister Betty and their twin friends Mary Ann and Margie Ganser, broke up over legal issues that left Weiss unable to record for 10 years. She moved to San Francisco and then to New York, where she cut a critically acclaimed solo record, "Dangerous Game," in 2007. "We are deeply saddened to hear the news of Mary Weiss’ passing," the official Ronnie Spector tweeted. "She and Ronnie were kindred spirits; two fearless bad girls of the 60s. Join us as we spin the Shangri-Las in her honor." (We lost Ronnie on 1/12/2022.)
Mari Kane (July 24, 1959 – January 11, 2024)
A photographer and writer, Kane read Jack Herer’s “The Emperor Wears No Clothes” and soon published the first trade journal and directory for the hemp industry, HempWorld magazine, from 1994-1998. She went on to blog about wine, food, travel, her life, and her cancer. Her portfolio includes studio-style portraits of Deadhead families and cover portraits for Wine Spectator magazine. In 2014 she published, "Create a WordPress Website in Ten Easy Steps." She took time to congratulate Tokin' Woman on our 10th anniversary and 420th post in 2021. "Mari was such a wonderful person and a very important part of the hemp industry," said Eric Steenstra of VoteHemp.
April Ferry (October 31, 1932 – January 11, 2024)
After a career as a dancer where she became enamored of the costume process, Ferry began her costume-designing career working on TV shows like The Sonny & Cher Show and Laugh In and movies like The Rose (1979), The Big Chill (1983), and Brokedown Palace (1999). Ferry's first TV series. Rome. was "one of the shows which redefined television" and won her an Emmy. (It also showed Roman women smoking hemp, and whatever Cleopatra was inhaling.) Ferry took over for Michelle Clapton for the 6th season of Game of Thrones, and in 2014 she received the CDG’s Career Achievement Award. When asked what she sacrificed for her art, she replied, “A regular life. I spent a lot of my time on location. But it has meant I’ve traveled all over the world—I wouldn’t exactly call it a sacrifice.”
Germana Caroli (August 18, 1931 – January 7, 2024)
Caroli, an Italian singer, was popular in the 1950s.
Joan Acocella (April 13, 1945 – January 7, 2024)
Best known as the dance critic from The New Yorker (from 1998-2019), Acocella began her writing career authoring a psychology textbook, and in 1999 wrote
Creating Hysteria: Women and Multiple Personality Disorder, in which she examines the "Sybil-ing" of American: over diagnosing women with MPS. In 2008 she published, Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints: Essays covering Joan of Arc and Mary Magdeline (the saints), and artists like Dorothy Parker, Martha Graham, Twyla Tharp and Susan Sontag.
A new collection of Acocella’s writings on literature, The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays, is to be published this year.
Glynis Johns (October 5, 1923 – January 4, 2024)
Best known for playing the suffragette Mrs. Banks in "Mary Poppins," Johns had a long and impressive acting career. "Send in the Clowns" was written for her and she won a Tony for that role in "A Little Night Music." She was charming and spirited in "The Card" with Alec Guinness, and opposite Danny Kaye in "The Court Jester," and was nominated for an Oscar for "The Sundowners," as well as playing an irresistible mermaid in "Miranda." She celebrated her 100th birthday last year.
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