Rest in Power Dolly Parton, Who Joined the Pot Party in "9-5"

Parton in "9-5"

Dolly Parton, who died at age 80 yesterday, managed to project an authentic, down-home womanly image wearing outrageous wigs and fake fingernails, while making jokes like, "It takes a lot of money to look this cheap." 

The fourth of 12 children raised in a one-room cabin in Tennessee, her father Robert Lee was an illiterate tenant farmer and her mother Avie Lee (Owens) sang old Anglo-Celtic ballads and hymns while doing housework. Dolly said she admired a woman in town considered trashy due to the way she dressed, and began emulating her as she began her singing and songwriting career. 

In one of her first hits, "Dumb Blonde" (1967), she sang, "Just because I'm blonde don't think I'm dumb / 'Cause this dumb blonde ain't nobody's fool." She was smart enough to form her own publishing company at age 20, retaining the rights to her own songs. When Elvis Presley's manager demanded The King take half of the publishing profits for recording her song "I Will Always Love You" in 1974, Parton refused (then cried all night). Instead, Whitney Houston made it a monster hit in 1992 and Dolly made $10 million in royalties, investing part of the money in an office complex in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Nashville. 

Tokin' Woman Jane Fonda, who produced the 1980 feminist film "9-5," starring Lily Tomlin and herself, reportedly was looking for a third co-star to broaden the film's appeal when she heard a tape of Dolly singing and decided to make her a movie star. Parton's film debut is a tour-de-force performance in which she sweetly but strongly threatens to turn her lecherous boss Mr. Hart "from a rooster to a hen" with one shot from the gun she carried in her purse. 

In the film, Tomlin's character Violet suggests that her co-workers Judy (Fonda) and Doralee (Parton) smoke a joint together. "Is that one of them marijuana cigarettes?" Doralee asks, offering her home as the setting for their "old-fashioned ladies pot party." Doralee says, "that stuff really don't do much for me" and Judy says she tried it once and "could never figure out what the big deal was." Cut to: the three ladies laughing uproariously (and soon, munching out). 

Sture and Charlotte Johannesson: "Hash Girl" and Galleri Cannabis

Dow Shalt Not Kill! U.S.A - Union of
Stoned Anarchists (Sture Johannesson). 

At the Oakland Museum of CA (OCMA)'s Gallery of California History, I spied an amazing poster featuring an image of LBJ surrounded by corporate logos and phrases and, subtly in the margins, cannabis plants. 

Some research revealed the title of the 1967 poster is "Dow Shalt Not Kill! U.S.A" and it's attributed to the Union of Stoned Anarchists and the Swedish artist Sture Johannesson.   

According to the Oak Tree Review, Johannesson’s psychedelic posters "scandalised the progressive Swedish society of the sixties. His defence of psychotropic substances, used as a critique of State control, provoked censorship in both public and private institutions. For more than twenty years, his poster production served to denounce that the way in which society builds and transmits its patterns of authority is ultimately more hallucinatory than the effects of any drug."

When interviewed by Swedish magazine FIB Aktuellt in 1967, Johannesson "enthusiastically spoke about his use of psychedelics and cannabis. For instance, as he discusses an elaborate marker drawing with the reporters, Johannesson admits he created it under the influence of hashish, LSD and mescaline. 'That’s why it’s so great,' he says of the drawing."

Appropriately enough, the interview took place at “Galleri Cannabis,” an art gallery and studio space in Malmö, Sweden, which Johannesson founded in 1965 with his wife Charlotte Johannesson, also an artist. The gallery "functioned as a meeting point and production house for the self-styled underground." 

What Made the Etruscan Women Smile?

Sarcophagus lid in The Etruscans: From the Heart of Ancient Italy exhibit in SF

The Etruscans, who thrived in Italy between the 9th and 2nd centuries BC before they were slowly conquered by the Romans, invented so-called "Roman" numerals and the famous "Roman" sewers, and pioneered winemaking in Italy, among their many accomplishments and innovations. Wealthy traders, they were among the three main powers in the ancient Mediterranean, along with the Greeks and the Phoenicians. 

Nearly all of their written records were destroyed, but a current exhibit at the Legion of Honor museum in San Francisco tells their story in the form of over 200 amazing Etruscan artifacts from museums around the world, including finely crafted pottery, metal work, and statuary. Household objects like mirrors and vases depict parties or (s)heroic scenes, and both Etruscan women and men are depicted on funeral urns and sarcophagi. 

The Etruscans were people who loved to party, it seems. Banquets were very important to them and banquet scenes are found on painted the walls of their tombs, since they felt death was more a transition than a finality. There's such a thing as the "Etruscan smile," and many of the pieces in the exhibit recorded these, particularly on the women, whose eyes look rather dreamy as they give a kind of knowing Mona Lisa smile.