Celebrating famous female cannabis connoisseurs throughout herstory to the present day.
All contents copyrighted. "Bright Leaf" artwork by Jean Hanamoto, camomoto at Spoonflower.com
Sadly, this page has been updated throughout 2024, with an emphasis on women and those connected with cannabis and its legalization, through their lives and/or work.
Carter "was way ahead of his time when he called on Congress to decriminalize marijuana in the mid-70s,” NORML founder and legal director Keith Stroup said. Read more.
Michael Brewer (April 14, 1944 - December 17, 2024)
Brewer and his partner Tom Shipley were best known for their song, "One Toke Over the Line," which they added to their set when they ran out of songs while opening for Melanie at Carnegie Hall. It was a Top 10 hit in 1971 until then-VP Spiro Agnew condemned it along with the Beatles' "With a Little Help From My Friends" and the Byrds' "Eight Miles High" as "latent drug culture propaganda," and the FCC pressured radio stations to ban it. But first, it was performed on the Lawrence Welk show, with Welk calling it "a modern spiritual." Country music's Maybelle Carter was similarly confused, wanting to sing the song she thought was a spiritual, according to her granddaughter Carlene Carter in the Ken Burns Country Music documentary series.
Jean Jennings(February 3, 1954 – December 16, 2024)
At 14, Jennings was an exchange student in Ecuador where she learned to drive in a Toyota Land Cruiser in the Andes mountains. At eighteen, she bought a used Plymouth Satellite, painted it yellow, installed a roof light and a meter, and joined the Yellow Cab Company in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she was elected president of the Yellow Cab board. After writing for Car and Driver (1980–1985), she co-founded Automobile, where she continued to write her widely known column, Vile Gossip. Jennings became an undercover spokesmodel at the 1988 North American International Auto Show, and on Good Morning America startled Diane Sawyer, live on air, after calling the new Chevrolet SSR, "bitchin," explaining that it was a hot-rodding term. She taught an Oprah Winfrey Show audience how to change a tire and jump start a car, and edited the book Road Trips, Head Trips, and Other Car-Crazed Writings.
Anita Holmes Johnson (May 8, 1929 - December 15, 2024)
In 1951, while studying journalism at the University of Oregon, Johnson broke a national story about a cross burning on the lawn of a sorority house because a sister there was dating a black man,. After earning her degree, she got a job at the Washington Post where she was assigned to the woman's desk, ironically so, since she had eliminated the women's page at her college paper. She went on to co-found the Eugene Weekly newspaper in 1991, and remained active at the paper until her death. The EW has published the work of 150-plus journalism students from OU and Lane Community College - more than any other professional news outlet in Oregon. The paper investigated rape allegations against two Eugen police officer who later went to prison, and recently the reported on OU officials' efforts to cover up a string of fraternity party druggings.
Jeanne Bamberger (February 11, 1924 – December 12, 2024)
Bamberger was a child prodigy pianist who performed with the Minneapolis Symphony before she had reached
adolescence. She became a Professor of Music and Urban Education at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, and Adjunct Professor of Music at the
University of California, Berkeley.
She also taught at the University of Southern California, and the University of Chicago. In Chicago, she became interested in the education of young children, and particularly in the Montessori method. Her research interests included music cognitive development, music
theory and performance, teacher development, and the design of text and
software materials that fostered these areas of development. She won both a Fulbright Scholarship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, wrote several books and articles, and co-created MusicLogo, enabling students to write computer code to create tunes that could be immediately played out loud.
Mary McGee (December 12, 1936 – November 27, 2024)
The first woman to compete in motorcycle road racing and motocross events in the United States, McGee was the first person to ride the Baja 500. She competed in motorcycle road racing and motocross from 1960 to 1976,
then began competition again in 2000 in vintage motocross events. Her
last race was in 2012. In 2013, McGee was named an FIM Legend for her pioneering motorcycle racing career. She was inducted into the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 2018.
McGee died from complications of a stroke at the age of 87 just one day before the release of the documentary Motorcycle Mary, which aired on ESPN's YouTube channel.
Barbara Taylor Bradford
(May 10, 1933 - November 24, 2024)
Bestselling author Bradford sold her first magazine story when she
was 10 years old. She went on to become a journalist, columnist and
fashion editor. She was 46 when she saw her first novel published:
1979's "A Woman of Substance," the story of Emma Harte, a poor but
plucky and beautiful Yorkshire servant who founds a business empire. The
book was an international smash, selling more than 30 million copies,
and set the template for strong and independent Bradford heroines who
would feature in 39 subsequent novels – all bestsellers, many turned
into films or mini-series. In 2007, Bradford was presented with
the Order of the British Empire for her contributions to English
literature. Source.
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.
Known for voicing Grandmother Coco in the 2017 Pixar/Disney film Coco, Murguía was an acclaimed Mexican actress. In 2010 she appeared in Las Buenas Hierbas (The Good Herbs), where she plays an herb dealer with Alzheimer's.
Tommy Smothers (12/26)
The Smothers Brothers' groundbreaking television hour ushered in the topical comedy of Laugh In and Saturday Night Live, and so much more. David Bionculli's book Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour reveals that some of the comedy on the show was fueled by weed. Tommy said in the 2002 documentary Smothered that he and headwriter/"Classical Gas" composer Mason Williams would "sometimes torch a joint" while working on scripts. Singer Jennifer Warnes recalled one road trip on which she and Tom dropped acid, and Williams remembered mistakenly eating a batch of cast member Leigh French's "specially enhanced" brownies. During the trial that resulted in a settlement for breach of contract after the show was cancelled by CBS, French's skit where she played country singer "Kentucky Rose" who said, "I used to play bluegrass, but a couple of weeks ago I started smoking it" was entered into the court record. Tommy testified at the 1968 trial of impresario and restauranteur Frank Werber who was accused of possession and cultivation of marijuana, saying he'd known Werber for years and "before he started smoking pot, he was a real a-hole." Smothers played the second guitar on John Lennon's song "Give Peace a Chance," performed at Lennon's honeymoon/war protest and mentioning Tommy in the lyric.
Alice Parker (12/24)
Parker was a composer, arranger, conductor and teacher who authored over 500 pieces of music (operas, cantatas, choral suites, hymns) along with a wealth of arrangements based on folk songs and hymns. Her 1984 composition "Songs for Eve" is from an Archibald MacLeish poem; her "Echoes from the Hills" and "Heavenly Hurt," among others, are inspired by Emily Dickinson. In the 2020 documentary Alice: At Home With Alice Parker she tells how, when she was born in 1925 she was held up to the window for the neighbors to see on Christmas Eve. She died on that day at the age of 98.
Ruth Seymour (12/22)
A broadcasting executive known for her innovative work in public radio, Seymour's first venture into radio came at KPFK in Los Angeles from 1961 to 1964. From 1971 to 1976, she worked as program director there. She was fired in 1976, after the FBI raided the station in search of a tape KPFK had aired from Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army, which the station manager refused to turn over. Seymour broadcast the raid live, as it occurred. She joined the staff of KCRW at Santa Monica College in 1977 as a consultant and was named manager a few months later, in 1978. She retired from there in February 2010 after having helped the station "transcend its basement location to shape the culture in Los Angeles," bringing programs to the station such as "Le Show" (hosted by Harry Shearer); "Left, Right & Center"; "Morning Becomes Eclectic"; and "Which Way L.A.?" In 1996, KCRW became the first station other than Chicago's WBEZ to air "This American Life." She also supported programs that brought literature to the radio, including airing radio dramas adaptations of Babbitt and Ulysses. Known in Washington, D.C. as a fierce defender of public broadcasting funding and issues such as licensing and royalties for streaming, in 1997 she received Amnesty International's Media Spotlight Award.
Rose Ann Fuhrman (December 2023)
When few were covering the topic, Sonoma CA-based author Fuhrman wrote lively and accurate articles like “Cliffhanger in California” about Prop. 215, the 1996 initiative that made California the first state to legalize medical marijuana. When Prop. 215's spear-Head Dennis Peron died in 2018, she wrote on her Facebook page: "The passing of Dennis Peron feels like the closing of one chapter as another one struggles to write itself....A little less than 30 years ago I learned that marijuana prohibition was based on racist and other lies and had nothing to do with public safety. I hadn't given it much thought prior to that and had never tried it, automatically defaulting to the common view. Being a passionate advocate for justice, my new knowledge made activism for decriminalization or legalization inevitable.... I don't remember what led to my writing for Cannabis Canada (now Cannabis Culture) but a friend and neighbor took me to the original Cannabis Buyers' Club in San Francisco for a meeting, which was my access point. Intelligent, peaceful people who did (and many still do) great work."
Cari Beauchamp (12/14)
I had just written to Beauchamp after re-reading the Vanity Fair article she co-wrote with Judy Balaban about Hollywood's experimentation with LSD. I also picked up her book, Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Power of Women in Hollywood and found a couple of marijuana references there. Beauchamp was an award-winning author and historian who was a resident scholar at the Mary Pickford Foundation. She also wrote books about screenwriter Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) and Joseph P. Kennedy's influence on Hollywood, as well as editing and annotating Hollywood Secretary: Her Private Letters from Inside the Studios of the 1920s by Valeria Belletti. She wrote and co-produced a documentary film in 2000 based on Without Lying Down, also wrote the documentary film The Day My God Died about young girls of Nepal sold into sexual slavery, which played on PBS and was nominated for an Emmy in 2003. Before becoming a full-time writer in 1990, she worked as a private investigator and a campaign manager, and served as Press Secretary to California Governor Jerry Brown.
Ryan O'Neal (12/8)
The cocaine/meth/alcohol monster got him, leading to accusations of abuse from his kids and spouses, but in the end his daughter Tatum, who remains the youngest actor to win an Oscar for "Paper Moon" in which she starred with her Dad, had nice things to say about him, as did co-stars Ali McGraw, Barbra Streisand and others. Born on 4/20/1941, O'Neal was married to Leigh Taylor-Young, who baked pot brownies in "I Love You Alice B. Toklas," and was with Farrah Fawcett when she died of cancer, an even sadder Love Story.
Norman Lear (12/5)
Prolific screenwriter and producer Lear was most known for the breakthrough sitcom All In the Family. Its spinoff, Maude, was about a liberated woman (Bea Arthur) who, in one episode, protested a young man's marijuana arrest by scheming to get herself arrested too. Lear also produced One Day at a Time about a divorced woman living on her own with her two daughters, and its recent reboot with a Latina cast starring Rita Moreno (shown), which aired a thoughtful episode about cannabis. Lear filed a First Amendment lawsuit against TV's "family hour" censorship, and founded People for the American Way (PFAW), a progressive advocacy organization formed in reaction to the politics of the Christian right.
Sandra Day O’Connor (12/1)
The first woman to serve as a U.S. Supreme Court justice, O'Connor was born Sandra Day in El Paso, Texas, the daughter of a cattle rancher. In her youth, she participated in cattle roundups as the group's only female rider, latter calling it, "my first initiation into joining an all-men's club, something I did more than once in my life." Day enrolled at Stanford University at the age of 16 and graduated magna cum laude with a B.A. in economics in 1950. At Stanford Law School she served on the Stanford Law Review with future Supreme Court chief justice William Rehnquist, who proposed marriage to her (she declined). After graduating from law school, because of her gender, she could only find employment as a deputy county attorney in San Mateo, California after she offered to work for no salary and without an office. She eventually became a judge and an elected official in Arizona, serving as the first female majority leader of a state senate as the Republican leader in the Arizona Senate. While serving on the Supreme Court from 1981-2006, she was one of three co-authors of the lead opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, in which the Court upheld the right to have an abortion as established in Roe v. Wade, and argued in favor of President Obama naming a replacement for conservative justice Antonin Scalia (before the Senate scandalously held up Obama's nomination of Merrick Garland, until Trump could be elected and name Neil Gorsuch, assuring the Court's conservative majority). She also joined the dissenting opinion in Gonzalez v Raich, in defense of state marijuana laws. After retiring, O'Connor succeeded Henry Kissinger (who died two days before her) as the Chancellor of the College of William & Mary. In 2003, she wrote a book titled The Majesty of the Law: Reflections of a Supreme Court Justice and in 2005, a children's book, Chico: A True Story from the Childhood of the First Woman Supreme Court Justice, was named for her favorite horse. In 2009, Justice O'Connor was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.
Shane MacGowan (12/30)
Born on Christmas Day in 1957, the "peerless and fearless" MacGowan was the co-founder, frontman and chief songwriter of the Pogues, which brilliantly and energetically combined punk rock with traditional Irish music and politics. In 1972, MacGowan was expelled from the school he was attending on a literary scholarship after being caught smoking pot in public, and at age 17, he spent six months in a psychiatric hospital due to drug addiction, where he was also diagnosed with acute situational anxiety. He struggled with drugs and alcohol throughout his life, and was dismissed from the Pogues for unprofessional behavior after missing concert dates, including opening for Bob Dylan. "Fairytale of New York," which MacGowan co-wrote and performed with Kirsty MacColl, remains a perennial Christmas favorite. Sadly, he died of complications from pneumonia at age 65 just as the Christmas season started this year. At the end of his life, “We used to go to Shane’s house and roll joints for him. We would watch Netflix with him,” said Andrew Hendy of Dundalk balladeers. "Shane will be remembered as one of music’s greatest lyricists. So many of his songs would be perfectly crafted poems, if that would not have deprived us of the opportunity to hear him sing them," said Ireland's President Michael Higgins in a statement.
Paul Sorvino brilliantly plays Kissinger in the Oliver Stone movie "Nixon," nailing indelibly the scene in which he prays on his knees with Nixon on the eve of impeachment. In the opera "Nixon In China" Kissinger is shown whipping Chinese workers into submission to the semiconductor. “People are a little shocked when he appears as the sadistic overlord,” director Peter Sellars told the New York Times. “But obviously he’s the man who’s responsible for Chile and for the secret bombing of Cambodia — the list of atrocities and acts of unspeakable violence is long. And that lurid stuff is behind the jolly and well-spoken diplomat. The surprise is, as always, no one is just one thing. That is one reason you make operatic characters.” My first political act, at the age of 14, was to campaign for George McGovern against Richard Nixon in 1971. After Tricky Dicky with Kissinger at his side won by a landslide, and bombed Cambodia by Christmas, I was disillusioned for decades. That Kissinger lived to be 100 while chewing on the cud of human misery just adds to the sickeningness of it all.
Dale Spender (11/21)
Australian feminist scholar Spender was co-founder of Pandora Press, the first of the feminist imprints devoted solely to non-fiction, committed, according to the New York Times, to showing that "women were the mothers of the novel and that any other version of its origin is but a myth of male creation." Her book Man Made Language (1980), based on her PhD research, argues that in patriarchal societies men control language and it works in their favor, drawing parallels with how derogatory terms are used to maintain racism. She was a co-originator of the database WIKED (Women's International Knowledge Encyclopedia and Data) and associate editor of the Great Women Series (United Kingdom). Particularly concerned with intellectual property and the effects of new technologies, for nine years she was a director of Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) in Australia and for two years (2002–2004) she was the chair. Spender consistently dressed in purple clothes, a choice she initially made for its symbolic reference to the suffragettes.
Rosalynn Carter (11/19)
Asked by Katie Couric what was the most exciting moment in his life, winning the Nobel Peace Prize or being elected President, Jimmy Carter replied that it was when Rosalynn said she would marry him. The couple were married for 77 years, and the former president called her “my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished.” The eldest of four children born to a bus driver/farmer father and teacher/dressmaker mother, Rosalynn helped raise her younger brothers after her father died when she was 13. After helping Jimmy win the governorship of Georgia in 1970, she was appointed to the Governor's Commission to Improve Services for the Mentally and Emotionally Handicapped, and mental health became a lifelong cause. As the first of all First Ladies to have her own office in the White House, she attended Cabinet meetings and major briefings, served as the President’s personal emissary to Latin American countries, and led a delegation to Thailand in 1979 to address the problems of Cambodian and Laotian refugees. She was honored by the National Organization for Women with an Award of Merit for her vigorous support for the Equal Rights Amendment, and joined other First Ladies at the Houston conference celebrating the International Women's Year in 1977. In 1982, she co-founded The Carter Center in Atlanta to promote peace and human rights worldwide. Her autobiography, First Lady From Plains, was published in 1984. She and her husband contributed to the expansion of the nonprofit housing organization Habitat for Humanity, and they received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1999.
At the age of 6, Loring originated the role of Wednesday Addams on TV's The Addams Family (1964–1966). Afterwards, she joined the cast of the ABC sitcom The Pruitts of Southampton with Phyllis Diller. In the 1980s she played the character Cricket Montgomery on the soap opera As the World Turns and appeared in a few B slasher movies. In 1987, she married an adult film actor after meeting him on the set of the 1987 film Traci's Big Trick, on which she was a make-up artist and uncredited writer. Christina Ricci played the role of Wednesday in two movies in the '90s, and Jenna Ortega said she paid homage to Loring's groovy dance moves (above) while playing the role on the new smash Netflix series "Wednesday."
Cindy Williams (1/25)
Williams appeared as an American girl who turns on a staid British bank manager to pot in Travels With My Aunt, just before she played the quintessential American girl in American Graffiti. She went on to be paired with Penny Marshall as a writing partner, leading to a guest shot on "Happy Days" and their spin-off "Laverne and Shirley" (1976-1983). The show has a 1981 "lost episode" titled "I Do, I Do" in which the girls get stoned on pot brownies. David Lander, who played Squiggy on the show, was an MS sufferer and advocate for medical marijuana who told producer Garry Marshall that instead of patrolling the halls during the show he ought to put marijuana in the budget.
“I know this is good. It’s from Crosby.” - Rock roadie passing a joint in Almost Famous. Story.
NORML Advisory Board member, activist and musician Crosby stayed full of life and passionate about reform until the end, weeks before his 82nd birthday. "He was always, I repeat, always present for me, to defend my character and politics. He was funny, clever, and refreshing to be around," said Joan Baez, whose portrait of Crosby is on his last album cover. He's higher than Eight Miles High now.
Renée Geyer (1/17)
Bonnie Raitt called the Australian Geyer, "One of the greatest singers I’ve ever known....Her husky, powerful and deeply soulful voice and phrasing has blown me away since I first heard her." Geyer had hits with her cover of James Brown's "It's a Man's Man's World," and "Difficult Woman," a song written for her, and sang back up for Sting, Chaka Khan, Toni Childs, Neil Diamond, and Joe Cocker, among many others. Her Ready to Deal (1975) was the first album co-written and co-produced by a woman in Australia.Asked once if she thought she would emulate the international success of fellow Aussies Helen Reddy and Olivia Newton-John, Geyer replied: no, because “I’m not a very well-behaved person.” Her memoir titled Confessions of a Difficult Woman is open about her alcohol and drug use.
Lupe Serrano(1/16)
Trained in Chile and Mexico City, Serrano joined the American Ballet Theatre in 1953 when "American audiences had rarely seen a female dancer achieve the soaring jumps, fleet footwork and swift turns that Ms. Serrano executed with aplomb." On a 1960 stop in St. Petersburg (then known as Leningrad), the audience was reported to have been so enthralled by her performance that they insisted she repeat her solo turn rather than simply take a bow. One who noticed was Rudolf Nureyev, who invited Serrano to dance with him after his defection in 1961. The two perform here the pas de deux from Le Corsaire, based on a poem by Very Important Pothead Lord Byron. Source.
Gina Lollobrigida (1/16)
"She makes Marilyn Monroe look like Shirley Temple," said her co-star Humphrey Bogart. Italian actress Lollobrigida overcame Howard Hughes's interference in her film career and won the Henrietta Award (World Film Favorite) at the 1961 Golden Globe Awards. She had a second career as a photojournalist in the 1970s, photographing, among others, Paul Newman, David Cassidy, Ella Fitzgerald, and Fidel Castro, publishing several books of her photography. Lollobrigida was an active supporter of Italian and Italian-American causes, particularly the National Italian American Foundation (NIAF). In 2013 she sold her jewelry collection and donated nearly $5 million from the sale to benefit stem-cell therapy research.
Lisa Marie Presley (1/12)
Lisa Marie's parents Priscilla and Elvis Presley divorced when she was four, and her father died when she was seven. Starting in her teens, she was reportedly sexually abused by her mother's boyfriend and experimented with alcohol and drugs. She credited Scientology for ending her addictions, and along with fellow Memphian Isaac Hayes, founded their Literacy, Education and Ability Program before renouncing the cult in 2014. In 2002, she testified before Congress against children being forced to take a "cocaine-like stimulant" (probably, Ritalin) for ADHD rather than a drug-free approach. Presley was a recording artist, and on the 30th anniversary of Elvis's death in 2007 she released a "duet" with her dad of "In the Ghetto" (shown), with proceeds benefiting the Presley Place Transitional Housing Campus in New Orleans, a project of The Elvis Presley Charitable Foundation that Lisa Marie chaired. Her death of a heart attack at the age of 54 was determined to be a result of complications from gastric bypass surgery she'd had years before. She died two days after Austin Butler lovingly thanked her in his Golden Globe acceptance speech for his portrayal of her father in Elvis.
Carole Cook(1/11)
An accomplished stage actress, Cook was a protégé of Lucille Ball, who applauded her "healthy disrespect for all things in general." Cook appeared on many TV shows and played the wife of Don Knotts in "The Incredible Mr. Limpett" and Grandma Helen in "16 Candles." In 2018, she became the subject of controversy when she said of then-President Donald Trump, "Where's John Wilkes Booth when you need him?" Paid a visit by the Secret Service, she quipped, "I said, 'I can't go to prison, the stripes are horizontal, they don't look good on me.'" She died three days shy of her 99th birthday.
Jeff Beck (1/10)
Among his many accomplishments, guitarist extraordinaire Jeff Beck really knew how to back up a woman, shown here with Imelda May. A member of the influential Yardbirds, Beck pioneered the use of the "talkbox" (here on the Beatles' "She's a Woman") and toured this year with Johnny Depp. "I loved him since I was 14," wrote Tokin' Woman Chrissie Hynde. "Sadly, he couldn’t influence my primitive skills on guitar - but my hair style was all his." Beck backed up Hynde on her 1999 pot anthem "Legalise Me."
Melinda Dillon(1/9)
“Melinda Dillon was such a great actress, with a wonderful delicacy about her. She was a delight to direct in Prince of Tides," Barbra Streisand wrote. Known and loved as Ralphie's calm and loving mother in A Christmas Story (1983),Dillon got her start when, as Second City's first coat-check girl, she leapt to the stage as a last-minute understudy. She was nominated for a 1963 Tony Award for her Broadway debut in the original production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Oscar-nominated for Best Supporting Actress for Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Absence of Malice(1981), in which she played a Catholic woman tormented by a reporter's coverage of her abortion. Nominated for a Screen Actors Guild Award for her performance in Magnolia (1999), she also played Woody Guthrie's wife and singing partner in Bound for Glory (1976, directed by Hal Ashby), and Paul Newman's lover who also slept with women in Slapshot (1977).
Fay Weldon(1/4)
Over the course of her 55-year writing career, she published 31 novels, including Wicked Women (1995) and Mantrapped (2004), but was most well-known as the writer of The Life and Loves of a She-Devil which was the basis for the 1987 movie "She Devil" starring Tokin' Women Meryl Streep and Roseanne Barr. A self-declared feminist, Weldon's work features what she described as "overweight, plain women" and spoke out against the "appalling" lack of equal opportunities for women, and the myth that they were supported by male relatives. Later she took flack for telling BBC in 1998 that rape wasn't the worst thing that could happen to a woman, and championing faked female organisms in her 2006 book What Makes Women Happy.
Marilyn Stafford(1/2)
In 1948, Stafford went with friends interviewing Albert Einstein for a documentary film, getting her first lesson in using a 35 mm camera in the car on the way and making Einstein her first portrait. She worked as an assistant to the fashion photographer Francesco Scavullo and in 1958, while six months pregnant, traveled to Tunisia to document the plight of Algerian refugees. When her photo of an Algerian refugee nursing her child (shown) appeared in The Observer, Stafford became one of few women photographers working for national newspapers. Throughout her career she photographed war victims, fashion photos and street scenes (often combined), and portraits of Indira Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Edith Piaf, Sharon Tate, Donovan, Joanna Lumley, and Twiggy among many others.
Edith Lank(1/1)
Author, advice columnist, and blogger Lank wrote or co-wrote ten books on real estate and one on Jane Austen. Her books include the Home Buyers Kit and Home Sellers Kit, and her syndicated weekly real estate column "Housecalls" appeared in more than 100 newspapers and web sites, leading USA Today to dub her the Dear Abby of real estate. In 1984 Lank won the Matrix women in communication award. She filed her last column in 2019 while writing "86 and Holding," a blog about adventures in aging. She died at age 96.
Lise Nørgaard (1/1)
Journalist and writer Nørgaard was known for her precise and often humorous portrayals of Danish cultural life. She wrote numerous novels, compilations of essays and short stories, and from 1978 to 1982, she co-wrote the television series Matador. The memoir of her childhood, Kun en pige (Just a girl), became a bestseller in 1992 and is considered her masterpiece. The work was adapted into a feature film in 1995. Nørgaard died in her sleep at the age of 105.
Fred White(1/1)
White began playing the drums in high school and toured with Donny Hathaway, recording Donny Hathaway Live, which Rolling Stone named one of the top 50 live albums. In 1974, he joined his brothers Maurice and Verdine White in the funk band without equal, Earth, Wind & Fire. White also played with The T-Box Band and Little Feat, and worked for Motown Records. EW&F guitarist Sheldon Reynolds died on 5/23/23.
It's a bittersweet year when our top Tokin' Woman was sentenced to serve nine years in a Russian penal colony, despite international outcry about her arrest for the petty crime of having a couple of vape pens in her luggage at a Moscow airport.
Brittney Griner, 32, a seven-time WNBA All-Star center for the Phoenix Mercury, won Olympic gold medals with the U.S. women’s national basketball team in 2016 and 2021. She played for the Russian team UMMC Ekaterinburg for several years, as do many WNBA stars who are not paid anything like their male counterparts in the US.
President Biden announced on December 8 that Griner has been freed. She was exchanged for Viktor Bout, an arms dealer accused of supplying Al
Qaeda, the Taliban and rebels in Rwanda. (Apparently, on the world stage,
carrying a couple of vape pens is equated with arms dealing. But then, of course, the US is arguably the largest arms dealer in the world. Convicted arms smuggler Oliver North never did jail time and is a longtime Faux News host and commentator; he was briefly head of the NRA until he ousted for extortion in 2019.)
Many think Griner was taken as a political prisoner, just days before Russia invaded Ukraine in March. The announcement of her arrest came on the heels of a ruling
whereby an Israeli court froze the Russian government ownership of a
Jerusalem church, reportedly part of a deal struck in 2020 for the
release of American-born Israeli citizen Naama Issachar,
who was convicted for smuggling 10 grams of hashish through the Moscow
airport. She had been sentenced to seven-and-a-half years in prison.
Griner, who said she noticed an inordinate amount of customs agents at the airport the day she was arrested, never denied carrying the vape pens, only saying it was an oversight that she packed them. On the witness stand, she said that she used cannabis to deal with the pain from injuries she's suffered during her career. "The benefits from medical cannabis definitely outweigh the painkillers that they prescribe," she said. "The painkillers have really bad side effects. Medical cannabis, there are honestly no side effects that harm you."
Very Important Pothead and top all-time NBA scorer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar wrote in support of Griner (the day after we Tweeted him, asking him to). NBA champ Steph Curry gave a shout-out to Griner on her birthday at the Warriors Ring Ceremony in October. He and Megan Rapinoe—the soccer star with a Portland-based CBD company—spoke of Griner's plight at the ESPY Awards in July, the same month that Rapinoe was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom wearing a blazer
with the initials ‘BG’ and a flower embroidered onto the
lapel in tribute to Griner.
Biden called Griner "an incomparable athlete" who "endured mistreatment and a show trial in Russia with characteristic grit and incredible dignity" at the press conference. He mentioned US Marine Trevor Reed, who was brought home from Russia in April in exchange for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot convicted in the US in a cocaine trafficking conspiracy. Not mentioned was Marc Fogel, a Pittsburgh native who was sentenced to 14 years after airport workers found half an ounce of marijuana in his luggage when he went to Russia to teach in June. Free Marc Fogel.
Pointer was the last surviving member of the original Pointer Sisters trio that had a string of hits starting in 1973 with the Allen Toussaint funk anthem "Yes We Can Can" featuring Anita's lead vocal. With her brother Fritz she penned the 2020 book Fairytale: The Pointer Sisters' Family Story about the sisters' roots in the Oakland, CA Black Power movement and their rise to fame. Of their early days of success, she wrote, "We were having fun, but not what I'd call getting wild. We drank, smoked cigarettes, and occasionally had a little pot." But saddled with debt and a grueling touring schedule, both younger sisters June and Ruth succumbed to hard drug addiction (cocaine and crack), and Anita also lost her only child Jada to cancer in 2003. The Sisters, who started their career singing backup vocals for acts like Grace Slick and Betty Davis, had a number two hit in Belgium in 2005, covering the Eurythmics/Aretha Franklin song "Sisters Are Doin' It for Themselves" with Belgian singer Natalia. In December 2017, Billboard ranked The Pointer Sisters as the 93rd most successful Hot 100 Artist of all-time and as the 32nd most successful Hot 100 Women Artist of all-time.
The lyrics Anita sang should inspire us all as we enter 2023:
Now's the time for all good men To get together with one another We got to iron out our problems And iron out our quarrels And try to live as brothers
And try to find peace within Without stepping on one another And do respect the women of the world Remember, you all had mothers
We got to make this land a better land Than the world in which we live And we got to help each man be a better man With the kindness that we give
I know we can make it I know darn well, we can work it out Oh, yes, we can, I know we can, can Yes, we can, can, why can't we? If we wanna, yes, we can, can
Barbara Walters (12/30)
A chapter in the new book, The Activist's Media Handbook by David Fenton is titled, "How Barbara Walters Saved Abbie [Hoffman] From a Long Prison Term" and describes how in 1980, Fenton was able to arrange an exclusive interview with Walters and the infamous Yippie! activist Hoffman, then underground after being arrested for selling three pounds of cocaine to undercover agents. Fenton convinced Walters to get into a plane without knowing where she was going, lest the FBI would be alerted, and describes how she interviewed Hoffman "like a Jewish mother meets her long-lost Jewish son" for a full hour, which aired on ABC's 20/20 (pictured.) "As a result, a week later when [Hoffman] turned himself into the Manhattan district attorney, he served only fifty-four days in jail," writes Fenton. That's the kind of clout Walters had. Yes, she blazed many trials, broke many barriers, and started The View to give women a voice, but this—and the time she got Bing Crosby to say that he was for marijuana legalization, and asked President Obama about the topic after Colorado and Washington legalized in 2012—are my favorite stories about her.
Ian Tyson (12/29)
Canadian folk music legend Tyson was, according to Suze Rotolo, the one who turned Bob Dylan onto marijuana. In her memoir A Freewheelin' Time, Rotolo writes, "I swear it was Ian Tyson who offered up the first taste of marijuana when Bob brought him to the flat one afternoon. Ian had a friend back home who had introduced him to their stuff you could smoke that would get you high. Bob didn't think I should try it until he had tested it, but later on I did." Writing about sitting around with Tyson and his partner Sylvia listening to records, Rotolo wrote, "We reveled in the joy of discovering something we had never heard before. And this wasn't just for music; it was about books and movies, too. We were a young and curious lot." Tyson wrote "Four Strong Winds" the day after he heard Dylan introduce his new song "Blowin' In the Wind" in 1962.
Vivienne Westwood (12/29)
“I don’t think punk would have happened without Vivienne," said Tokin' Woman Chrissie
Hynde, who before forming the Pretenders, was an
assistant at Westwood's London shop. “I was about 36 when punk happened and I was upset about what was going on in the world,” the influential fashion designer and activist told Harper’s Bazaar in 2013.
“It was the hippies who taught my generation about politics, and that’s
what I cared about — the world being so corrupt and mismanaged, people
suffering, wars, all these terrible things.” Westwood wardrobed The Sex Pistols and Boy George, and created Oscar gowns for Kate Winslet in 2006 and Zendaya in 2015, for a look (pictured right) that prompted Giuliana Rancic to comment, “She looks like she smells like patchouli oil and weed.”
Jo Mersa Marley (12/27)
The grandson of Bob Marley was a recording artist and DJ who was aiming "to do something new with my roots," as he once told Rolling Stone. He began performing onstage at age 4 with Ziggy Marley and the Melody Makers —
his father Stephen, his uncle Ziggy, and his aunts Cedella and Sharon — during
that group’s concert finales. He moved to Florida at age 11, where he
studied studio engineering and observed his father and uncle Damian
Marley working in Stephen’s Lion’s Den studio before starting to make his own music. He died at the age of 31, reportedly of an asthma attack.
Franco Harris (12/20)
When he made the Immaculate Reception, his Italian mother was reportedly praying the Rosary and listening to Ave Maria. Harris died three days before the 50th anniversary of his most famous play, to commemorate which there is a statue in the Pittsburgh airport (pictured). Harris told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette in 2017, "I feel in any state that has approved medical marijuana (as 28 states hosting 20 of the NFL’s 32 teams have), the league should remove medical marijuana from being a banned substance....I will tell you this, if it ever comes to a point where I do need pain management, I’d feel very lucky and happy now that we have medicinal marijuana in Pennsylvania.”
I just saw the terrific documentary This Changes Everything about the exclusion of women in the film industry, particularly as directors. One segment was about "The Bechdel Test" for a film, something that came from a comic book in the 1980s.
To pass the Bechdel Test:
• It must have at least two female characters
• They must both have names
• They must talk to each other about something other than a man.
My version of the test for films with Tokin' Women would be:
• It must have at least two female characters
• They must smoke marijuana with each other
• They must talk about something meaningful while stoned
I just went through my fairly comprehensive list of Tokin' Women in Movies and TV and found that only in rare cases do women smoke pot together in film or on TV.
It's been 10 years since I spun off my VeryImportantPotheads Blog into this Tokin' Woman blog. I've had nearly half a million views on its pages, thanks to you, my readers!
The blog has covered politics, movies & TV, music, sports, and herstory (ancient and modern). I've done interviews and reviews, and compilations of books, movies, and songs. I've covered beauty queens, cannabis events and exhibits, and recorded my own travels. I've celebrated International Women's Day, Women's History Month, Black History Month, and 4/20. I've given out "Tokey" awards, and published tributes to fallen Tokin' Women.
The Top 10 Most Viewed Posts on the Tokin' Woman blog are:
#1. My, Oh Maya I spotted Maya Angelou as one of only five women on a list of influential marijuana users put out by the Marijuana Policy Project in 2012. Never content to repeat news without digging as far to the bottom of it as I can, I looked up MPP's reference, a Harold Bloom biography, and took it out of the library. Bloom referenced Angelou's book Gather Together in My Name, and reading it lead to my most-read 2014 post on her, where she describes beautifully her marijuana experience in the context of her extraordinary life.
#3. "Did Richard Nixon Finger Lucille Armstrong for a Pot Bust?" One of my favorite posts and biggest coups came from a lucky tip I got from an elderly trumpet player in Los Angeles. He'd toured with Louis Armstrong and said Louis told him a story about Richard Nixon carrying a valise full of marijuana through an airport for him in Japan, just before Louis's wife Lucille was busted for carrying what was likely her husband's pot. Ricky Riccardi, Director of Research Collections for the Louis Armstrong House Museum in NY, began referring people who asked him about the incident to my post.
#4. The Day John Denver Died Few knew that John Denver admitted to smoking marijuana in the 1970s. He's the kind of pothead I most like to report on: someone accomplished and admired whose image isn't like a caricature of a typical pot user. Having spotted his admission in a stack of old High Times magazines a friend gave me, I first covered him on my VeryImportantPotheads website. I took the occasion of the airing of a documentary about him to blog about it, noting that—as so often happens—a celebrity's marijuana use goes unmentioned, or barely so, in such films.
#5. Was the Woman Who Smoked Pot with JFK Murdered by the CIA? This was my post for the 50th anniversary of JFK's assassination, an event seared into my brain since, as a first grader, I got sent home from school and shockingly saw my teachers (the usually stoic nuns) in tears. The strange and tragic death of JFK's lover Mary Meyer is connected in this post with the deaths of two other women: Dorothy Kilgallen and Marilyn Monroe.
Three of of my other herstorical posts made it into the Top 10:
I also covered recent findings about a recently discovered Viking ship buried for 11 centuries with the remains to two women/shamanesses, along with a small leather pouch containing cannabis seeds. Also, a recent discovery of cannabis resin on an ancient Israeli altar that I connected to the goddess Asherah.
Other recent herstorical (and a couple of historical) discoveries:
My 420th post is about the new book The Immortality Key that further connects goddesses and priestesses to ancient religions and their psychedelic sacraments.
#9. 2016 Tokey Awards My Tokey Award posts, where I pick a Tokin' Woman of the Year and give awards in other categories, are always popular. This 2016 post featuring Whoopi Goldberg made it into the Top Ten; another popular one was my 2015 Tokey Award post with Melissa Etheridge as Tokin' Woman of the Year. I met Melissa at a Women Grow event in Denver, and she told me she'd tweeted out the news on New Year's Eve that year.
Rounding out the top 10 is this post, combining my loves of art and activism, which got a boost from activist circles. Invited to see the premiere of the Netflix TV series "Disjointed" where Kathy Bates plays a cannabis dispensary owner, I asked a couple of women I knew who were real-life dispensary owners. One of them, Chelsea Sutula of the Sespe Creek Collective, couldn't attend after she was arrested for doing just what Bates was doing on TV.
One of my favorite moments over the past decade was meeting Chelsea Handler in 2019 and handing her my book (and getting a picture). I also met Leigh French, whose breakthrough "Share a Little Tea with Goldie" bit marked the first female pot smoker depicted on TV, when I gave her a "Tip of the Teacup" award in 2015. I was honored to meet a Jamaican DJ who corroborated my theory that cannabis was among the spices that the Queen of Sheba brought to King Solomon, and I traveled to Barcelona to see the "We Are Mary Jane" exhibit in which, much to my surprise, I was included.
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