Christmas Classics and Cannabis

VIP Bob Hope was perhaps the most beloved American entertainer with the most longevity, best known for entertaining US troops abroad and for his Christmas TV shows.

Tonight, TCM aired Hope's 1951 movie "The Lemon Drop Kid" in which he and Marilyn Maxwell sing "Silver Bells," a song written for the film. Based on a Damon Runyan story, the movie has Hope rounding up New York's petty crooks to dress as Santas and collect money for a phony charity.

While singing the song about 56 minutes into the movie, Hope is clowning around just after it's established a policeman can't shut him down because he's licensed. He stops to sniff a big meerschaum pipe smoked by a street corner Santa, after which he acts goofy, whistling and flapping his wings. (The tune is actually introduced by William Frawley as "Gloomy," who sings, "chunk it in/chunk it in/or Santy will give you a Mickey.")


Hope joked about pot on radio broadcasts in the 1940s and while entertaining troops in Vietnam in the 1970s. "I hear you guys are interested in gardening here," he quipped. "Our security officer said a lot of you guys are growing your own grass." Poignantly, he added that "instead of taking it away from the soldiers, we ought to give it to the negotiators in Paris." The jokes were censored from Hope's 1970 Christmas special (so much for Peace on Earth).

Hope, who admitted to trying pot in a Rolling Stone interview in 1980, gave a nod to his "Road" movie co-star Bing Crosby at the end of The Lemon Drop Kid. Crosby, whose recording of "White Christmas" is the best-selling single ever, was also a VIP.

Another beloved Christmas film, "The Man Who Came to Dinner" (1942), edits out a scene from the 1939 play by Moss Hart and George S. Kaufman where absinthe is mentioned. In the film, Sheldon Whiteside, played by Monty Woolley, is the unwanted guest of staid Ohio industrialist Ernest Stanley over the Christmas holidays.

The original play has this scene:

JOHN (manservant): And Sarah has something for you, Mr. Whiteside. Made it special. 

WHITESIDE: She has? Where is she? My Souffle Queen! 

SARAH (cook): (Proudly entering with a tray on which reposes her latest delicacy) Here I am, Mr. Whiteside. 

WHITESIDE: She walks in beauty like the night, and in those deft hands there is the art of Michelangelo. Let me taste the new creation. (...swallows at a gulp one of Sarah's not so little cakes. An ecstatic expression comes over his face) Poetry! Sheer poetry! 

SARAH: (beaming) I put a touch of absinthe in the dough. Do you like it? 

WHITESIDE: (rapturously) Ambrosia!

Interestingly, the word "counterfeiting" in the play's line, "If that's for the Stanleys, tell them they've been arrested for counterfeiting," was changed to "dealing dope" in the film. Mr. Stanley brags of building ball bearings for the war effort, which is what the real Ohio industrialist Henry Timken did. Timken's son Harold H. ("Henry") also grew hemp in Imperial Valley, California in 1917.

Woolley also appeared in the Christmas movie "The Bishop's Wife" (1947), in which he plays a professor  who describes to the Bishop (David Niven) the never-emptying bottle of sherry that the angel (Cary Grant) bestows upon him thusly: "It warms. It stimulates, It inspires. But no matter how much you drink, it never inebritates....it's something you can't explain with all your Ecclesiastical knowledge." 

In his latest brilliant column on marijuana, VIP Andrew Sullivan skewers David Frum and NIDA for their backwards words and policies. He writes,

"The whole point of marijuana use is to disrupt settled ways of thinking and feeling, to offer a respite, like alcohol, from the deadliness of doing. But for reasons we don't quite yet understand, marijuana, like other essentially harmless drugs in moderation, can prompt imaginative breakthroughs, creative serendipity, deeper personal understanding, and greater social empathy and connection. People need these things and have always sought refuge in them, especially at this time of year in the Northern Hemisphere."

True, even at the movies.

Veggie VIPs Rock US Postage Stamps; Madonna First Female VIP to Rock Superbowl

Several VIPs (that's Very Important Potheads) will grace US Postage Stamps as part of a new series honoring "vegetarian icons" picked by PETA. McCartney (again) joins Woody Harrelson (natch), Chrissie Hynde, Natalie Portman and Pythagoras on the stamps, which are due to go on sale later this month.

It's just been announced that Hynde will open a vegan restaurant in Los Angeles along with Ellen DeGeneris, another of the 20 vegetarians to get a stamp. (Ellen's never admitted to smoking it, but joked about it when she hosted the Oscars in 2007.) Hynde's "Legalise Me" is the theme song in the new VIP video.

It's a good bet some of the other top vegetarians also toked. Pamela Anderson wrote a letter to Obama in 2008 in favor of legalization. Joan Jett covered the trippy 60s song "Crimson and Clover" and thought pot-puffing actress Kristen Stewart did a great job portraying her in a 2010 biopic. Leo Tolstoy explored the use of hashish and other intoxicants in his 1890 temperance essay "Why People Become Intoxicated," but his conclusions seem based on his experiences with wine and tobacco.

Lots of other cannabis connoisseurs have been honored with postage stamps, including Bessie Smith, Bob Hope, and Mark Twain, whose stamp came out this year. Also given a stamp in 2011 was pioneering African-American writer and filmmaker Oscar Micheaux, in whose 1931 film "The Exile" VIP Louise Cook appeared.

And it's been announced that Madonna will appear at this year's Superbowl halftime show on Feb. 5.

As well as turning a suburban spa salesman onto pot in her 1985 movie "Desperately Seeking Susan," the world's most successful female musician admitted to smoking pot and taking Ecstasy in March 2008 upon her induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

The Material Girl (worth an estimated $325 million) is far from the only pot lover who's appeared at America's biggest sports fest. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers rocked the stadium in 2008. At Superbowl 2005, Paul Mc Cartney played "Get Back" with the lyric, "Jo Jo left his home in Tucson Arizona, for some California grass." In 2004, Willie Nelson played along with country singer Toby Keith, he of the famed tune, "I'll Never Smoke Weed With Willie Again."

At least one member of last year's halftime act, The Black Eyed Peas, is a known pot smoker: rapper Taboo (né Jaime Luis Gomez) was arrested near LA in March 2007 after marijuana was found in his car. The Peas just appeared at the nation's tree-lighting ceremony along with Kermit the "It's Not Easy Being Green" Frog and President Obama.

This Week’s Sermon from The Evangelista Sista

The evidence is in. In persecuting cannabis connoisseurs we’re effectively silencing the intelligencia, the artist, the poet, the peacenik – and it’s high time (ahem) it stopped. The other side has raised the white flag for a truce and it’s time to come to the table and negotiate a Peace for Pot package. We need our own two-state solution, with tolerance in between. As Allen Ginsberg said to Jack Kerouac in 1965, “It’s time for poets to influence American civilizaton.”

Our country’s version of the Tianamen massacre—the War on Drugs-- has arrested 20 million pot smokers, unlawfully detained or searched countless others, harassed, ridiculed, frightened, turned neighbors into informants and informees, and robbed our school budgets for prisons.  In fact, by some estimates if the WOD escalates at current rates, half of the country will be behind bars with the other half its keepers, here in the Land of the Free. Let’s not forget that softer rhetoric hasn’t always meant kinder policies.

How wimpy is our increasingly strident and un-listened-to conservative faction if it’s fearful of a little Latina on the Supreme Court? As if by saying she is proud of the way her brain works and would pit it against the whole of Mt. Rushmore and beyond, she would heartlessly rule against anyone. That’s our opposition’s job.

How popular are drug warriors these days? The UK’s home secretary Jacqui Smith, who successfully pushed for a rollback of Tony Blair’s more liberal pot policies (just after admitting she’d smoked it in college), has resigned in disgrace over a sweeping set of misuse of public funds scandals.

One of the recommendations of the Beckley Foundation report, presented at UN meetings in Vienna in June, is to look at cannabis and creativity.

Just look around.

Bob Hope told jokes about marijuana like, "Instead of taking it away from the soldiers, we ought to give it to the negotiators in Paris," and he just got his own postage stamp. His partner on the Road to Morocco, Bing Crosby, was an admitted smoker who advised his son to put down the booze and pick up the pipe. Sammy Davis Jr., who once played the caterpillar in Alice in Wonderland, was reportedly a viper. Rodney Dangerfield wrote about it extensively in his memoir No Respect, and said he saw Jackie Gleason procuring some from his hotel room in the 1940s. To say these icons aren’t representative of Americans is to belittle us, and them. And there’s been quite enough belitting going on.

Let’s start with the uplifting, already.

Keep Up the Good Words, 

Evangelista Sista

www.tokinwoman.blogspot.com