Bewitched, Bhang-ered and Bewildered

The Colorado NORML Women's Alliance has posted this photo (right) of Agnes Moorehead as Endora in TV's Bewitched smoking a hookah.

The shot is from episode #69 of the series, titled "Divided He Falls," which first aired on  May 5, 1966. In the story, Endora splits her daughter Samantha's straight hubby into his fun and work sides, so that the fun Darrin can accompany Sam on vacation.

When Endora works her magic, the screen is filled with green smoke. (Her character is introduced every week in a cartoon as black smoke.) Witches throughout the centuries have been associated with herbal medicine and persecuted for it.

The splitting of Darrin's personality is a rather apt metaphor for our divided culture: we simply can't accept that people can be hard working by day and smoke something fun at night. In the end of the episode, Darrin is re-integrated (as should be our society). 

According to the website "The Prop is Familiar" the same hookah was also smoked by Endora in episodes 71 ("The Catnapper," shown left) and 154 ("Samantha's Super Maid").

Dr. Bombay, the family's warlock doc, gets in on the hookah action in episode 107 ("There's Gold in Them Thar Pills"). The Old Man of the Mountain, the historic character who converted his assassins with hashish, smoked a larger hookah in episode 217 ("Return of Darrin the Bold").

Episode #163, called Tabitha's Weekend, which aired on March 6, 1969 has an interesting exchange after Endora is offered cookies by Darrin's (straight) mother:

"They're not by chance from an Alice B. Toklas recipe?" Endora asks. When told they were not, "Then I think I'll pass," is her answer. Tabitha, the junior witch, then turns herself into a cookie. Mrs. Stevens suffers from headaches and gulps the more prosaic sherry.

Moorehead, who had a long career on stage and in films, died of cancer in 1974. She was one of several cast members of the 1956 film The Conqueror who contracted cancer after being exposed to radiation while filming in Utah 137 miles downwind of the United States government's Nevada National Security Site. Three years earlier, extensive above-ground nuclear weapons testing occurred at the test site. The cast and crew totaled 220 people. By 1981, 91 of them had developed some form of cancer and 46, including John Wayne, had died of the disease.

Ironically, the government that assured filmmakers the site was safe also withhold the herb that not only relieves the effects of cancer and chemotherapy, it may well halt the progression of the disease. Yes, Dr. Bombay should recommend it. 

UPDATE 1/5/2015: TV's The Addams Family, from the same era, also regularly featured a hookah. 

Putting a Sassy Stamp on It: Sarah Vaughan Gets USPS Approval

UPDATE 4/16: Two days after Vaughan's 92nd birthday, her US postage stamp was released.

10/15: Vaughan is included in the new book Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory.

The Washington Post has leaked a list of luminaries for whom US postage stamps have been approved or are in the works. Listed as "in design development" are VIPs Janis Joplin and Steve Jobs. Approved subjects not yet in the design stage include VIPs Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Jim Morrison, Fats Waller, Freddie Fender and John Lennon.

Another honoree on the list who was not previously known as a Tokin Woman is the incomparable jazz singer Sarah Vaughan (pictured left).

According to Sassy: The Life of Sarah Vaughan by Leslie Gourse, in 1943 Vaughan joined the Earl Hines band, which featured Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker ("Bird"). Gillespie told people, "Sarah can sing notes that other people can't even hear," something he also said about Parker's sax playing.

Sarah, the band members say, wisely never had anything to do with heroin, though "undoubtedly she smoked marijuana with Bird and some of the other men on the road.....all night long, she liked to have a party, either in her room, or in Johnnie Garry's, or at some place in town. Sometimes the party was a marathon, with Sassy hanging out for three days at a time, never going to sleep, taking part in every kind of refreshment available--cigarettes, drinks, food, marijuana, maybe cocaine if there was any."

British jazz singer Annie Ross, who worked with Vaughan in the 1950s, was interviewed for Gourse's biography, which says, "As a very young woman, Annie, like Sassy, had enormous energy for a life in the fast lane; together they stayed up all night, drinking and smoking. Sassy liked marijuana and cocaine."

 

(Above: Vaughan dueting on the Ed Sullivan show in November 1957 with Billy Eckstine, who was targeted for a marijuana bust, as was his wife June.)

Buster Williams was 20 years old when Vaughan hired him in 1963, generously buying him a bass to play in her band. Gourse writes that Williams smoked marijuana for the first time with Sarah. "She had the uncanny ability to make her voice shimmer," he said.

Vaughan was still enjoying marijuana in April 1989, when Katie Neubauer, an organizer for the Tri C Jazz Fest in Cleveland "was wandering around backstage at the theater when she smelled heady marijuana smoke. She followed the scent to Sassy's dressing room, where the star was also enjoying a glass of brandy. Sassy then walked onstage and gave a magnificent performance. Katie was amazed that Sassy could perform so well while under the influence of brandy and marijuana." Afterwards, while Vaughan was chatting with scholarship funders at a cocktail party, Katie overheard Clark Terry say, "I wish that I could do with my trumpet what that woman does with her voice." Vaughan then presented Katie with a bouquet of roses she'd been given, saying "I can't take these on the road."

Asked by Dick Cavett if she could live up to her old nickname Sailor, "Sassy grinned, completely at ease, candid and articulate, and said she could outcuss Popeye, the Sailor Man. Would she give a sample? 'I most certainly will not,' she said with her very ladylike sweetness."

Born on March 27, 1924 Vaughan died in 1990. Village Voice jazz critic Gary Giddins called hers "the voice that happens once in a lifetime, perhaps once in several lifetimes."

Sarah's contemporary Ella Fitzgerald, who recorded "When I Get Low, I Get High" in the 1930s, already has a postage stamp.

P.S. I just read that Stuff Smith's "If You're a Viper," recorded by Fats Waller in 1943, was first recorded by blues singer Rosetta Howard in 1938. 

Miley Cyrus Tours in Cannabis-Leaf Leotard

UPDATE 10/15: Cyrus is included in the new book Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory.

Miley Cyrus, recipient of the 2013 Tokin Woman "Blunt Move of the Year" award for toking up onstage at the European Music Awards, has tweeted out an interesting wardrobe choice (left) from her 2/14 Vancouver concert to her 17 million followers.

Perhaps celebrating the fact that the US government has issued regulations allowing marijuana businesses to open bank accounts, Cyrus then crawled around in piles of money, while wearing cowboy boots emblazoned with dollar bills.

As CelebStoner.com points out, Cyrus also has a marijuana-themed website for her tour. And yeah, she's still sticking out her tongue.

Cyrus will take the stage in Tacoma, WA on Sunday before traveling to California for shows in Anaheim, Los Angeles and Oakland.

The singer recently announced she was proud of herself for refraining from smoking cigarettes for the past two months.  "I just want it to be back to where it's, like, organic, good weed," she told Ronan Farrow for the March issue of W Magazine. (For that, she's touring in all the right places.)

Cyrus also tweeted a picture of a guy smoking a huge pipe with the hashtag #superbowl on February 3.

Daughter of Marijuana Smuggler Wins At Olympics

Californian Julia Mancuso has become the most-medaled female skiier with her bronze win at the Sochi Olympics.

According to Wikipedia, Julia's father, Ciro Mancuso, was arrested and convicted of running a $140 million marijuana smuggling operation when Julia was five years old. Mancuso's sentence was greatly reduced because of his cooperation with the government in cases against other alleged organization members, and his lawyer Patrick Hallinan. As a result of his assistance to the government, Mancuso was reportedly allowed to keep $5 million in proceeds from his trafficking business.

It's kind of reminiscent of Shakespeare's father, who became a civic leader while smuggling illegal wool. When the government cracked down on the practice, young Will's education was interrupted and he was unable to attend a University, like his rival Christopher Marlowe. Source.

A new documentary about marijuana smugglers called Grounded just won a prize at the won Best Feature at the Pittsburgh Independent Film Festival and an Audience Award at The Skyline Indie Fest.

Also see: Seeming Stoners Win First-Ever Slopestyle Snowboarding Gold Medals

Father of US figure skater Jason Brown's coach is a "hippie" pot-grower

Seeming Stoners Win First-Ever Slopestyle Snowboarding Gold Medals

The first US Gold Medal at the Sochi Olympics went to 20-year-old Sage Kotsenburg, who hadn't even been expected to make the team. "Whoa how random is this, I made the finals," Kotsenburg tweeted, and told reporters "I'm so stoked to be here," at a post-win press conference, leading to puzzlement by Russian translators.

On a course so controversially dangerous that one of the riders broke his collarbone in practice, Kotsenberg decided at the last minute to try a trick he had never performed before for his Olympic run. He called his brother named (no kidding) Blaze to get his approval before attempting a backside 1620 Japan (which entails rotating 4 1/2 times) and winning the gold.

The following day, Jamie Anderson of South Lake Tahoe, California -- a clear favorite to win the women's slopestyle competition -- also won a gold for the US. Anderson called the opportunity to compete in the games "mind blowing" and said she was going into the event with "an open heart and open mind." She ended her interview with "namaste" and a flashed a peace sign.

Slate.com reported:

Based on the personalities of the two American gold medalists, it seems like being a slopestyle competitor is good for the soul. Despite all the pressure, Anderson—just like Sage Kotsenburg the day before—was maddeningly chilled out, sounding like a stereotypical stoner during interviews. In fact, her blissed-out attitude probably puts a lot of stoners to shame. 

It’s little wonder that British bronze medalist Jenny Jones calls Anderson “a bit of a hippy,” as Reuters notes. She wears “mantra beads” around her neck that were made by her yoga teacher in Breckenridge, who “made them for me with sacred energy put into them.” Anderson also wears a large quartz crystal she describes as “a powerstone” and a triangular moonstones, explains the Washington Post. And that’s just for starters. “You should see what’s in my backpack,” she said, according to Yahoo Sports. “A medicine bundle.”

The first-ever "straight" snowboarding medal was won by Canadian Ross Rebagliati in 1998, but he was almost stripped of his medal after testing positive for marijuana after the race. Rebagliati admitted that he had smoked marijuana in the past, but said the positive test was the result of accidentally inhaling nearby marijuana smoke at a going away party in his hometown of Whistler, BC. The Olympic committee allowed Rebagliati to keep his medal and he is now opening a medical marijuana dispensary specializing in "Ross's Gold."

Last year, the World Anti-Doping Agency that governs Olympic drug testing raised the threshold for marijuana tests from 15 ng/ml to 150 ng/ml of urine. Rebagliati had 17.8 ng/ml of THC in his urine and would have passed by today's standard.

Meanwhile, the author of an article in the National Law Review frets about workplace safety in the wake of the legalization wave. But if these Olympians are any indication, maybe the problem is that our workers aren't smoking enough to embrace life with the proper enthusiasm.

Also see: Daughter of Marijuana Smuggler Wins At Olympics.

Update 2/14: The US men's team were "stoked" to sweep the podium in slopestyle skiing, leading Bill Maher to joke it's "a sport invented by white stoners who call each other 'brah'." In the women's halfpipe snowboarding competition, Kaitlyn Farrington and Kelly Clark of the US team took the gold and bronze medals. Teammate Hannah Teter came in fourth, calling it "a bummer."

2/16:  An article about the relaxed standard for marijuana drug tests at the Olympics says, "Officials say that means an athlete who smoked some weed before the Olympics, or inhaled second-hand smoke, wouldn’t likely test positive in Sochi. Someone who failed the new test would have to be 'a pretty dedicated cannabis consumer,' WADA officials have said.

"Officials acknowledge that they have had problems finding the right balance between athletes who use marijuana to cheat and those who just enjoy a toke every now and then. Arne Ljungqvist, who heads the IOC’s medical commission and is also on WADA’s board, said the changes came after a long debate about the drug."

Ljungqvist said WADA came to the conclusion that “marijuana can be a performance enhancing stimulant and it is therefore forbidden in relation to a competition.” However, because marijuana “is a socially more or less an accepted drug being used in social context” the threshold for a positive test during competition was increased.

"Marijuana has been controversial for years at WADA and there have been plenty of calls to drop it from the banned list," the Globe and Mail article stated. "Just about everyone agrees that taking marijuana immediately before a competition wouldn’t help, but some argue that dope can reduce stress, speed recovery and provide other advantages."

UPDATE 2/21: Anderson is considered "snowboarding's queen bee," says Forbes. She won gold again in 2018, a third Olympic medal, and 17 X Games medals, making her the winningest woman in X Games herstory. 

Anderson came back after a crash in 2019 that caused her to suffer a facial contusion to again win gold at the X Games Aspen in 2020. Olay Body has now dubbed her a “winter warrior,” someone who "pushes past the bitter cold to overcome anything and be fearless in her skin."

“I think it only takes a handful of role models who are like, ‘It’s cool to party and all, but I value feeling good and letting my body heal and recover and being able to perform at my highest level,’” Anderson told Forbes. “It seems to be in snowboarding it’s more so trending to be really healthy and conscious because everyone just wants to feel good.” The Jamie Anderson Give Back With Love program was established in 2013 to "offer scholarships and help kids get into sports and live healthy, active lifestyles."  

Anderson, who just turned 30, lives with her boyfriend, fellow pro snowboarder Tyler Nicholson, in Whistler (Rebagliati's home town). 

Pussy Riot Tries It (in the Netherlands)

During a remarkable interview on the Colbert Report, Nadya Tolokonnikova and Masha Alyokhina of Pussy Riot talked about their release from jail in Russia and their tour of prisons in other countries, speaking out about human rights abuses.

After they noted that there is a giant gap between the wonderful prisons in the Netherlands and those in the US, Colbert said, "I think all the prisoners in the Netherlands get to smoke pot, so people actually have a wonderful time while they're in there."

"Yeah, we had a great time there too," Masha said knowingly.

"We sang a fun song in a church," was the succinct way the young women answered the question about why they were jailed. Among their fun songs, they said, was one called "Putin Piss Off."

The mock conservative Colbert joked he would edit out any parts of their interview criticizing his friend Vladimir. They responded, "That's OK, we're making our own taping right now." Told in that case they would be searched, they said, "We've had two years of practice hiding things from searches."

The women called their release a "public relations stunt" for the Sochi Olympics and called attention to the 12 people imprisoned after the May 6 protest in Bolotnaya Square, serving terms ranging from 5-6 years. "While this is happening, no PR stunt can fix Russia's image."

Watch Part One of the interview here, and their comments about the Netherlands below:

Musgraves Follows Her Arrow -- To a Joint and Two Grammys

UPDATE 11/19: Musgraves crushed it at the 2019 CMA awards, where she had beautiful things to say about the female creative spirit, and how the earth needs it right now, while picking up one of two big awards. She also dueted with Willie Nelson, and the evening's hostesses joked about her enjoying "Willie's Reserve":

Carrie Underwood & Dolly Parton shout out Willie’s Reserve at the CMA’s @KaceyMusgraves @WillieNelson @reba @carrieunderwood @DollyParton @BioAnnie1 pic.twitter.com/4U7k7LK6xb

— Willie's Reserve (@WilliesReserve) November 18, 2019

UPDATE 9/19 : Sheryl Crow's kids thought Kacey Musgraves' marijuana was bad skunk

UPDATE 4/19: Kacey Musgraves as Bongs: A Twitter Thread

UPDATE 5/18: Musgraves guested on "Hello Sunshine" with Reese Witherspoon, who said she loves "Follow Your Arrow" because it was the first country song she'd heard about alternative lifestyles. 

UPDATE  5/16: 

 

Musgraves says one of the first songs she wrote after she moved to Nashville was "Burn One With John Prine."

UPDATE 7/15 - Musgraves has a new album sprinkled with pot references "like dab hits," along with a Willie Nelson duet, says CelebStoner. She will tour this summer starting July 9 in the US and UK. 

UPDATE 12/14 - Adding to her award count, Musgraves scores a Tokey for Best Video from Tokin Woman. 

Singer/songwriter Kacey Musgraves was nominated for four Grammys this year and on January 26 she won two: Best Country Album ("Same Trailer Different Park") and Best Country Song ("Merry Go Round").  The 25-year-old newcomer performed the song she co-wrote with Brandy Clark, "Follow Your Arrow," on the nationally televised awards ceremony, with the lyric:

Make lots of noise
Kiss lots of boys
Or kiss lots of girls
If that’s something you’re into
When the straight and narrow 
Gets a little too straight  
Roll up a joint or don't (I would) 
Just follow your arrow 
Wherever it points

The fresh-faced Musgraves looks a lot more like Princess Kate than a stereotypical pothead. The video for "Follow Your Arrow" features Musgraves in Daisy-Duke-short shorts, a cowboy hat and toy guns, reminiscent of the act of VIP Candy Barr. Like Tokin Woman Besse Smith on her 1937 recording of "Gimmie a Pigfoot," Musgraves waits until the last verse to add her own reefer admission. She sang it with the "I would" on the show.

In March 2013 the Hollywood Reporter called Musgraves "The Weed-Smoking, Ball-Busting, Girl-Kissing Country Singer," and reported in 2011, when "she signed to Lost Highway Records, the boutique division of Universal Nashville...for left-of-center artists" she "was doing sit-down acoustic gigs" playing songs with lyrics like, “My idea of heaven is to burn one with John Prine.” (The first song on the first John Prine album was "Illegal Smile.")

"Mild evocations of lesbian smooching and marijuana may not seem radical outside the world of mainstream country," the Reporter continued. "But it seemed like a huge risk when Musgraves chose that song, of all the ones on her album, to perform at a UMG luncheon for hundreds of country radio programmers at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium last month. Any doubts she had about performing the song disappeared when attendees started laughing uproariously after the first line and applauding furiously after the first chorus. Afterward, the radio types were all abuzz about what a brilliantly catchy and clever ditty it was… and how they could never play it on their stations." (Country fans: call your local stations and request this song!)

Musgraves' "Same Trailer Different Park" album jumped to No. 12 from No. 28 on the Billboard chart after the win. The "Follow Your Arrow" video has had 2 million views (see it below):

Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas and Jenny Reefer

Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas

Born on February 3, 1874 was the hostess with the mostest, art collector extraordinaire, avant-garde writer and wit Gertrude Stein.

Much has been made of Stein's longtime companion Alice B. Toklas and her hashish fudge, a recipe for which appears in The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, published in 1954. When Toklas's American publisher objected to the "illegal" recipe, she reportedly feared many would assume Stein's writing happened while under the influence (which certainly seems possible, if you read it).

Toklas disavowed knowledge of the recipe, writing in a letter to Donald Gallup* composed on 12-19-21 October 1954, "I hope you were as shocked as I was by the notice in Time of the hashish fudge. I was also furious until I discovered it really was in the cook book! Contributed by one of Carl's most enchanting friends—Brion Gysin—so that the laugh was on me. Thornton [Wilder] said that no one would believe in my innocence as I had pulled the publicity stunt of the year—that Harper had telegraphed from London to the Attorney General to see if there would be any trouble in printing it." Hear Toklas reading the recipe and commenting about it in a 1963 interview.   

It's possible that Stein and Toklas were more conduits for a younger generation of partakers, like Gysin and his friend VIP Paul Bowles, who lived with Stein and Toklas for a time. The Lost Generation was, after all, mostly lost in liquor. However, among Stein's art purchases was the first painting ever sold by Marie Laurencin, which appears to be a painting of a hashish party held in 1908.

Robert Indiana's costume for Jenny Reefer.

An interesting character by the name of Jenny Reefer appears in "The Mother of Us All," a 1947 opera about the life and career of suffragette Susan B. Anthony for which Stein wrote the libretto. Reefer is described as "a mezzo-soprano; a comical feminist, outspoken and opinionated." Sounds like a pothead to me.

Stein and Toklas's greatest significance was in bringing expatriate writers and artists together at their Parisian salon. That tradition was carried on by 1970s superagent and pot lover Sue Mengers, of whom CBS President Leslie Moonves said,  “She was the modern-day Gertrude Stein. People would gather and exchange ideas and talk about things that were not talked about anywhere else in town.” Tokin' Woman Mama Cass Eliot was also compared to Stein. 

Kathy Bates played Stein in Midnight in Paris; Pat Carroll played her in the one-woman show Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein. The San Francisco Board of Supervisors voted in 1989 to rename a block of Myrtle Street between Polk Street and Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco as Alice B. Toklas Place, since Toklas was born one block away on O'Farrell Street.

Agnes Moorehead as Endora in TV's Bewitched

In the 1968 film I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, Leigh Taylor-Young turns Peter Sellers onto pot brownies, causing him to transform.

An episode called "Tabitha's Weekend" that aired on TV's Bewitched on March 6, 1969 has this interesting exchange: Endora (the grandmother witch) is offered cookies by Darrin's (straight) mother. "They're not by chance from an Alice B. Toklas recipe?" Endora asks. When told they were not, "Then I think I'll pass," is her answer. Tabitha, the junior witch, then turns herself into a cookie. (Mrs. Stevens suffers from headaches and gulps the more prosaic sherry.)

Perhaps this is why Rob Thomas, the singer/songwriter of the highly successful band Matchbox Twenty, called his first band "Tabitha's Secret." (Thomas tells CelebStoner he's a "huge" pothead and advocate for legalization.)

*Donald Gallup was a well-known scholar of American Literature, who served as the curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature for over thirty years. In 1940-41 he and Robert B. Haas prepared for the Yale University Library A Catalogue of the Published and Unpublished Writings of Gertrude Stein, and he and began collecting Stein and Toklas's materials after meeting them while he was stationed in Paris during World War II. In 1958 he succeeded Carl Van Vechten as the literary executor of the Stein estate. 

Apparently Gallup and Van Vechten (presumably, the Carl of mention) had a hand in producing Alice's cookbook. Toklas wrote, "It's not necessary to tell you that the pieces selected and their arrangement move me deeply. Gertrude always used to say—Let's put them first into groups and then break them up by contrasts—which is just what you have done. You and Carl have done such marvels because of the purity of your purpose which permits inspiration to flow unimpeded. Thank you—dear Donald." 

Gertrude and Alice met the younger painter and writer Brion Gysin in the 1930s when he lived in Paris. Toklas wrote Gysin in Tangiers on 26 February 1952, giving motherly advise about finances, and calling Jane Bowles [the wife of VIP Paul Bowles, a friend of Gysin's]  "strange as an American but not as an Oriental." She signed off, "Affectionate good wishes to you—dear Brion always." Bowles had lived with Stein and Toklas. On 24 February 1954 she wrote to Gysin offering help with a UNESCO investigation being conducted on him. On 11 June 1957 she wrote congratulating him on a New York showing, signing it, "So many good wishes to you and fond love." On 27 November 1958, in a letter to Ned Rorem, she wrote that Gysin "is here [in Paris, or maybe staying with her] and painting beautifully—working hard." 

On 14 March 1953, Toklas wrote to her friend Louise Taylor, letting her know that in order to receive an advance on the cookbook, she needed to come up with 12,000 more words, and so was opening up a chapter to contributions from friends. She asked Taylor if she could include Taylor's Circassian Chicken recipe, and said she would be including contributions from the Van Vechtens, Marie Laurencin, Isabel Wilder, and "undoubtedly" Brion Gysin. She complained in the letter of exhaustion from jaundice; Toklas was in ill health and so depended on contributions from friends. The book has a section titled, "Recipes from Friends," in which the Hashish Fudge recipe appears, attributed to Gysin and misspelling cannabis as "cannibus." 

On 24 April 1953, Toklas wrote to Carl (who she called "Sweetest and only Papa Woojums") about the "difficulty in getting the miserable cook book finished" which had been a "tormenting and very unsatisfactory effort." (In this letter she recounts the last words of Baby (Stein). "About Baby's last words. She said upon waking from a sleep—What is the question. And I didnt answer thinking she was not completely awakened. Then she said again—What is the question and before I could speak she went on—If there is no question then there is no answer."

Source: Letters of Alice B. Toklas: Staying on Alone. Edited by Edward Burns. Vintage Books Edition, January 1975. 

Ellen's Neat, Sweet Tweet

Ellen DeGeneres has tweeted the following to her 24 million followers: 

US marijuana sales might top $2.3 billion this year. I'm not saying I support it. I'm just saying it's now available in the Ellen Shop.
— Ellen DeGeneres (@TheEllenShow) January 22, 2014

At last check, the little Tweet that Could had 31.5K retweets and was favorited 44,300 times.

I've never heard Ellen say she's smoked pot but she sure can dance. And some of her bits: about forgetting where she put her car keys, or losing track of time, or spending a morning petting her cat instead of working -- well, they sound like she's had experiences like many other Mark Twain award recipients have (including Twain himself). She even voiced a forgetful fish in "Finding Nemo."

DeGeneres slipped in a mention of buying rolling papers in her 2000 special The Beginning, and did a funny bit about rolling papers when she was the first woman to host the Oscars in 2007. She will be hosting again this year on Sunday, March 2.




In September 2013, she interviewed Norwegian brothers Vegard and Bård Ylvisåke on her talk show about their intentionally terrible song "What Does the Fox Say?"

"I don't know a lot about Norway, but I'm gonna assume marijuana is legal there," DeGeneres joked, before finding out that "fox" in Norwegian is slang for the weed. "It all makes sense now," she said.

UPDATE 10/17 - Ellen has responded on air to a video titled, "Does Ellen Smoke Weed?" She said that the Ellen depicted from 20 years ago might have smoked,  and that one of her writers smokes, but says she doesn't.

Lila Leeds and Dirty Deeds

Lila Leeds was 20 years old when the actress was arrested with VIP Robert Mitchum for marijuana in 1948. While Mitchum's star power, and the money the studios had invested in him, carried him through the ordeal that followed, Leeds never recovered from the incident.

Under contract to MGM, Leeds appeared with Red Skelton in The Show Off (1946); one of of her bit parts was in Lana Turner's vehicle Green Dolphin Street, where she plays a Eurasian woman who drugs the leading man and rolls him. When the film was released, she wasn't even credited for her part.

"It left her shaken up, depressed," wrote Lee Server in Robert Mitchum: Baby I Don't Care. "She would spend long nights at the bop clubs in Hollywood, chasing her blues away. Lila had always been jazz-happy and she knew many of the local musicians. She smoked reefers with them in their dressing rooms and in the parking lots, even at the tables if the owners were cool."

"I smoked socially," Lila said. "The way some people take a drink. Pot doesn't affect me much--just makes me sleepy and relaxed."

Leeds vamping in "Lady in the Lake" (1946)

At the time of her arrest with Mitchum, Leeds was engaged to Turner's ex-husband Steven Crane. Their daughter Cheryl Crane's book Detour: A Hollywood Story says: "Dad knew that Lila had smoked pot ever since she tried it at a St. Louis party three years before with members of the Stan Kenton orchestra, and sometimes she overdid it....She was often stoned, and his friends cautioned Dad that she had a problem, but he knew pot was no enslaving 'devil's weed,' as it has been painted in the unintentionally hilarious 1936 cautionary film Reefer Madness."

After Leeds was arrested on August 31, 1948, Stephen Crane fled to Europe rather than become entangled in scandal. There he tried his hand at writing a gossip column titled, "Champagne and Vinegar." In his debut column he wrote about the Mitchum bust, saying, "Yet if Mitchum should come to Paris he could attend a small private jive club on the Left Bank where waiters come around to the tables and roll the marijuana cigarettes for you." No less than three Hollywood stars, he noted, were "seen entering" the place the previous week.

In a police deposition, Leeds accused her roomate Vicki Evans of being a police informer, and said that Mitchum was framed for the offense (Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Sept. 27, 1949). Leeds said she and her roomate often smoked reefers together but Evans refused to smoke them on the day of the bust, and she was the one who let police in. Evans (real name: Florence Fidele of East End, Pittsburgh) denied the charge two days later in the same paper. Neither Evans nor bartender Robin Ford, who brought Mitchum to the scene of the arrest, were tried for the incident.

As a Eurasian in Green Dolphin Street (1947) 

Crane writes that Leeds was introduced to heroin by fellow inmates at LA County Jail, and it lead to addiction. Other than the awful Reefer Madness-style anti-drug film She Shoulda Said No (aka The Devil's Weed), Leeds never had another film role. She became so destitute that she hocked the three-carat diamond ring Stephen had given her for $750. In the '70s, she worked as a faith healer for addicts.

Leeds lives in four films TCM will be airing in the coming months:
GREEN DOLPHIN STREET (1947) FEBRUARY 25
THE SHOW-OFF (1946) MARCH 18
LADY IN THE LAKE (1946) MARCH 23
APRIL SHOWERS (1948) APRIL 10

Jennifer Lawrence resembles Lila; she's the perfect actress to play her in a long-overdue biopic. Personally I suspect Lana Turner might have had something to do with the arrest of her seven-years-younger rival (similar to a plotline in the 1997 movie LA Confidential).

Ann Coulter Shows Her Lack of Humanity About "Potheads"

According to an interview last night with CNN's Piers Morgan, Ann Coulter's preferred country would be one where people smoke and work themselves to early deaths on tobacco. Her stated reasoning: not only do people "stay up all night working" hyped up on nicotine, they die young, saving Social Security costs.

In the contentious interview, Coulter also declared "alcohol is good for you"  and said everyone should have a glass or two every day. She admitted that she's drank before going on TV, which Morgan said perhaps explained a lot.

Coulter pulled out the "people don't drink alcohol to get drunk" argument, to which Morgan correctly replied, "Yes, they do," and  Coulter admitted "you might get a warm feeling" after drinking wine.

She then went with the "marijuana legalization is bad for commerce" argument, using as an example a lazy pool guy who was a "pothead," extrapolating from there to conclude that those who smoke pot can perform no useful tasks (like founding Apple or Microsoft).

Morgan's argument that no one's ever died of a cannabis overdose didn't fare well with the death-loving Coulter, who claimed young people are having early heart attacks because they're potheads, but "at least they'll save me money if they just go ahead and die." 

"How humane of you," was all Morgan could say.

 Watch the video below:



Perhaps Coulter is extra angry just now because Bill Maher publicly said he'd never slept with her on HBO's Real Time last week. While interviewing Republican Marlee Matlin about her marriage to Democrat James Carville, Maher said he couldn't get serious about dating a Republican for moral reasons.

If ever someone needed to learn how to relax and smoke a joint, it's Ann Coulter. Maybe then she'd find her lost humanity.

A Little Leeway from the Washington Post

Following the Ruth Marcus I-smoked-pot-but-others-should-go-to-jail-for it column, the Washington Post has now published two opeds from its columnists in favor of marijuana legalization, one by E.J. Dionne Jr. and today's by the "mostly right of center" Kathleen Parker.

Dionne asserts he's not interested in smoking marijuana, partly because he fears it might lead him back to nicotine. Parker says she partied in her youth, and has given it up in favor of caffeine (she's a Starbucks gal).

Admitting that she once lied to her young children about her pot-smoking past, Parker now says, "The correct answer to all such questions is that any drug, including alcohol, is bad for children, hence a drinking age, even if many ignore it. Children’s brains aren’t fully formed, and they are not yet aware of the dangers that accompany impaired judgment. Mind-altering chemicals are bad for adults, too, if abused. But adults at least can make informed choices."

Parker takes pains to point out that Marcus's stance "isn’t hypocrisy, which I embrace in the service of civilization, so much as perspectives developed through maturity and experience." Her own perspective, as the parent of a three teenaged boys, lead her to support legalization, because, "I couldn’t imagine then or now that children might be labeled criminals for behaviors that mostly required parental attention."

Parker writes, "Regulate and tax the tar out of it, please, but let’s stop pretending that pot consumers are nefarious denizens of the underworld. Among those who enjoy a recreational smoke are the folks selling you a house, golfing on the ninth hole and probably an editor or two here and there."

Parker, known as a conservative columnist, showed how astute her thinking was when she called for fellow former puffer Sarah Palin to step down as VP nominee in 2008, calling her "clearly out of her league."

Meanwhile, Nancy Grace has gone off the deep end on this issue, raising a Reefer Madness-style specter of "people on pot that shoot each other, that stab each other, that strangle each other, that kill whole families — wipe out a whole family.”

As an example, she talked about the first pot case she saw as a prosecutor, with a “...gorgeous lady standing in the middle of the courtroom crying, and I didn’t understand what was going on. They said she was a stockbroker. She had got addicted to pot, ended up losing her job, wrecked her car, couldn’t make her house payments on her house, so her husband got custody of the children, and now she has no house, no car, no family, nothing.” Even if true, she didn't stab or strangle her family. And arguably, stockbrokers are the real criminals in our society.

Just In Time for the Stupor Bowl: Study Shows Alcohol, Not Marijuana, Related to Domestic Violence

Promoting the wrong Bud.

As the Super Bowl with its glorification of alcohol consumption approaches, NORML reports that men's consumption of alcohol, but not cannabis, is associated with intimate partner violence, according to survey data published this month in the journal Addictive Behaviors.

Investigators at the University of Tennessee and Florida State assessed whether alcohol intoxication and/or cannabis use by college-age men in a current dating relationship was associated with increased odds of physical, sexual, or psychological aggression toward their partner over a 90-day period. They reported: "On any alcohol use days, heavy alcohol use days (five or more standard drinks), and as the number of drinks increased on a given day, the odds of physical and sexual aggression perpetration increased. The odds of psychological aggression increased on heavy alcohol use days only." By contrast, authors determined that "marijuana use days did not increase the odds of any type of aggression."

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, nearly 3 in 10 women and 1 in 10 men say they have experienced rape, physical violence, or stalking (or a combination of these things) by an intimate partner. Furthermore, these estimates are low, the CDC says, since many people don't report the problem to police, friends, or relatives.

Add emotional abuse to the mix of physical and sexual assault, and 1 in 4 women and 1 in 3 teen girls will experience domestic violence in their lives, says Katie Ray-Jones, president of the National Domestic Violence Hotline, an anonymous service that handles some 22,000 calls each month, mostly from women. (Domestic violence victims are overwhelmingly female. Southworth estimates male victims account for between 5 to 15 percent of victims, some of whom are involved in same-sex relationships.)

The Stupor Bowl is awash with beer ads; FoxNews even celebrates the 18 best ones. Thanks to an exclusive sponsorship good through 2015, only Anheuser-Busch will be running ads again this year at the great grunt fest. The company hasn't described its plans for 2014 yet but in the last Super Bowl the brewer ran six ads spanning four and a half minutes, including one for Budweiser, two for Bud Light, two for Budweiser Black Crown and one for Beck's Sapphire.

I met one of the Bud Girls (pictured) at an event in the early 90s, and said to her, "You're promoting the wrong bud." I was surprised by her answer: "I agree with you."

"The Super Bowl does not cause domestic violence, and it doesn't increase domestic violence, but it does increase the public's awareness of the issue, which will help victims learn about help and resources," says Cindy Southworth, vice president of development and innovation at the National Network to End Domestic Violence.

Dangerous enough: alcohol-related car crashes are 75% greater in California on Super Bowl Sunday than on other comparable Sundays in January and February, according to a 10-year analysis of fatal and injury crashes from 2002 to 2011 by the Automobile Club of Southern California.  

As Americans are slowly weaned off the # 1 cause of domestic violence - alcohol - an updated report by the University of Kentucky’s Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences finds marijuana’s CBD cannabinoid could reduce brain damage incurred through prolonged and heavy alcohol consumption. A revised report in the Journal of Pharmacology Biochemistry and Behavior noted; “transdermal delivery of cannabidiol attenuates binge alcohol-induced neurodegeneration in a rodent model of an alcohol use disorder.”

Meanwhile, in the wake of marijuana legalization in Colorado and Washington, NFL's commissioner Roger Goodell left the door open for medical marijuana use by NFL players, saying "I don't know what's going to develop as far as the next opportunity for medicine to evolve and to help either deal with pain or help deal with injuries, but we will continue to support the evolution of medicine," even while it was noted that it's still against their collective bargaining agreement.

My, Oh Maya

UPDATE 10/15: Angelou is included in the new book Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory.

Revered author Maya Angelou, the first poet since Robert Frost to read a poem at a Presidential inauguration, wrote about her experiences with marijuana in Gather Together in My Name, the second installment of her autobiography after the acclaimed I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. 

Angelou, who started life as Rita Johnson from Stamps, Arkansas, was raped at the age of 7, and had an illegitimate child in her teens. Working as a waitress to support her son in San Diego, 18-year-old Rita met two lesbian prostitutes who frequented the bar where she worked. One night, the women invited her to their house for dinner. Angelou recounts:

"Let's have a little grifa before dinner." Johnnie Mae gave an order, not an invitation. She turned to me. 
"You like grifa?"
"Yes. I smoke." The truth was I had smoked cigarettes for over a year, but never marijuana....I was prepared to refuse anything else they offered me, so I didn't feel I could very well refuse the pot....

I inhaled the smoke as casually as if the small brown cigarette I held were the conventional commercial kind.
"No. No. Don't waste the grifa. Hand it here....try it like this..." 
I opened my throat and kept my tongue flat so that the smoke found no obstacle in its passage from my lips to my throat....

The food was the best I'd ever tasted. Every morsel was an experience of sheer delight. I lost myself in a haze of sensual pleasure, enjoying not only the tastes but the feel of the food in my mouth, the smells, and the sound of my jaws chewing. 

"She's got a buzz. That's her third helping." 

...I decided to dance for my hostesses. The music dipped and swayed, pulling and pushing. I let my body rest on the sound and turned and bowed in the tiny room. The shapes and forms melted until I felt I was in a charcoal sketch, or a sepia watercolor. (pp. 52-55)

By the end of the evening Rita had arranged to rent the women's house, putting them to work for her as prostitutes, with her barganing for their services with cab drivers and taking a cut. Meanwhile, she read Dostoevsky and studied dance. Soon the arrangement turned sour and she had to flee back to Stamps, where drinking Sloe gin "numbed my brain" and she had to make herself sick to get rid of the poison.

Rita went back to the West Coast and tried joining the Army in San Francisco, but was turned down because the The California Labor school, where she'd studied dance and drama, was deemed a Communist organization. So she started waitressing again, and smoking pot.

Smoking grass eased the strain for me. I made a connection at a restaurant nearby. People called it Mary Jane, hash, grass, gauge, weed, pot, and I had absolutely no fear of using it. In the black ghetto of the forties, marijuana, cocaine, hop (opium) and heroin were only a little harder to obtain than rationed whiskey. Although my mother didn't use anything but Scotch (Black & White), she often sang a song popular in the thirties that at its worst didn't condemn grass, and at its best extolled its virtues.

"Dream about a reefer five foot long
Vitamin [sic] but not too strong
You'll be high but not for long
If you're a viper..."

I learned new postures and developed new dreams. From a natural stiffness I melted into a grinning tolerance. Walking on the streets became high adventure, eating my mother's huge dinners an opulent entertainment, and playing with my son was side-cracking hilarity. For the first time, life amused me. ...

I disciplined myself. One joint on Sunday and one on the morning of my day off. The weed always had an intense and immediate effect. Before the cigarette was smoked down to roach length, I had to smother my giggles. Just to see the falling folds of the curtains or the sway of a chair was enough to bring me to audible laughter. After an hour the hysteria of the high would abate and I could trust myself in public. (p. 154). 

After a brief stint dancing professionally, she met a married man who told her her, "It's gauge that's breaking my marriage....My silly dilly wife stopped letting me have any and she goes around laughing and giggling all the time." She flushed her pot for him and soon let him lead her into prostitution herself, where she was told if she was good she'd be given some "white girl" (cocaine) but, "They won't let you smoke hemp, though. They say it makes a 'ho too frisky. 'Hos get their heads bad and forget about tending to business."

At the close of the book, another man named Troubador shows her how he shot heroin, and makes her promise to keep her innocence. He gives her his clothes to sell so that she can escape and head back to her Mother's house.

In the following autobiographical installment, Singin' and Swingin' and Gettin' Merry Like Christmas, Rita is discovered while dancing at a strip club in San Francisco and develops a Calypso singing act, changing her name and eventually finding her way to activism with Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, as well as writing with the encouragement of James Baldwin and others.

Maya Angelou received over 50 honorary degrees and three Grammys. She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Arts in 2000 and the Lincoln Medal in 2008.

PS: During the outpouring of tributes from everyone, including President Obama, after Angelou's death, I learned that she was the first African-American woman to operate a cable car in San Francisco (in her teens!) Cable cars use hemp fiber in the center of their steel cables. Another cannabis connection.

PPS: Angelou isn't the only revered US poet to sing the praises of pot. In his book of Haiku She Was Just 17, former poet laureate (2001-2003) Billy Collins wrote:

So many nicknames for you 
But none as lovely as 
marijuana

NOW AVAILABLE: Tokin' Women: A 4000-Year Herstory.

Nancy Grace the Nattering Nay-Sayer

HLN host and former prosecutor Nancy Grace is back getting flack for yet another wild and scandalous statement. When asked by CNN's Brooke Baldwin about Colorado's new, hugely successful pot legalization law, Grace called it "a horrible idea."

Grace first raised the specter of stoned cab driver or airline pilots, and when Baldwin countered with the idea of responsible use in one's own home, she responded, "Your home, where you're supposed to be taking care of your children, or cooking on a gas stove or lighting a fireplace? Not a good idea."

“When I’m at work, I don’t want my babysitter high on pot,” Grace said. “The ones that are disagreeing are lethargic, sitting on the sofa eating chips. Pot, it makes you fat and lazy.” Grace, who claimed to have read "every shred of scientific data" ever written about the subject, must have missed the one that found pot smokers are skinnier and healthier than their counterparts. Ditto for Tina Brown, who Tweeted, "...legal weed contributes to us being a fatter, dumber sleepier nation even less able to compete with China."

At least Grace pointed out that drivers should only be prosecuted if they're impaired, not if they happen to have metabolites in their urine or hair. But that didn't stop her from scare-mongering about driving at the outset of the interview. At the end of the segment, she accused Baldwin of being pro-pot because she interviewed a Colorado tour operator about his pot tours.

Grace is no stranger to hyperbole, and loves to sensationalize cases involving children and drugs. According to Wikipedia, the Supreme Court of Georgia twice commented on Grace's conduct as a prosecutor, once  in a 1994 heroin-trafficking case in which the Court declared a mistrial, saying that Grace had "exceeded the wide latitude of closing argument" by drawing comparisons to unrelated murder and rape cases. An episode of The Newsroom deals with the difficulty of presenting real news opposite the sensationalism of Grace's handling of the Casey Anthony case.

In September 2006, 22-year-old Melinda Duckett committed suicide following an interview conducted by Grace concerning the disappearance of Duckett's 2-year-old son Trenton. Toni Annette, dubbed the "vodka mom" by Grace, who brought a bottle of vodka onto her set in an attempt to mock Medrano following the death of her infant son, committed suicide by setting herself on fire after the interview.

On the lighter side, one website responded to Grace's latest rant with a VIP-heavy story titled, "Hi, Nancy Grace: Here Are Some ‘Fat and Lazy’ Pot Smokers Who Never Amounted to Anything." D Funk Time Michaels @darinlovesbacon tweeted, "As a fat and lazy person, I don't appreciate Nancy Grace accusing me of smoking pot."

Meanwhile a satirical news story claiming 37 died from overdoses on the first day of legalization in Colorado has made dupes out of millions, including Sweden's Chief Justice Minister, Beatrice Ask.

If Grace and Ask are concerned about crime (as they should be), they shouldn't miss the new study finding that states who've passed medical marijuana laws, and their neighboring states, have fewer assault and property crimes.

UPDATE 1/18/2014 - Grace has really gone off the deep end on this issue, raising a Reefer Madness-style specter of "people on pot that shoot each other, that stab each other, that strangle each other, that kill whole families — wipe out a whole family.”

As an example, she talked about the first pot case she saw as a prosecutor, with a “...gorgeous lady standing in the middle of the courtroom crying, and I didn’t understand what was going on. They said she was a stockbroker. She had got addicted to pot, ended up losing her job, wrecked her car, couldn’t make her house payments on her house, so her husband got custody of the children, and now she has no house, no car, no family, nothing.” Even if true, she didn't stab or strangle her family. And arguably, stockbrokers are the real criminals in our society.

The Young Turks showed an interesting mash up of Grace on the topic. 

Marcus Misses the Mark on Marijuana

Among the list of journalists now admitting they've smoked pot is Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post, who also joins the ranks of hypocrites who nonetheless don't think it should be legal.

In Marcus's post-legalization column on the subject, she admits:

I have done my share of inhaling, though back in the age of bell-bottoms and polyester. Next time I’m in Colorado, I expect, I’ll check out some Bubba Kush. Why not? They used to warn about pot being a gateway drug, but the only gateway I’m apt to be heading through at this stage is the one to Lipitor. 

Yet she continues, "Still, widespread legalization is a bad idea, if an inevitable development" and goes on to quote chapter and verse from government propaganda straight from the ONDCP.

She writes:

I’m not arguing that marijuana is riskier than other, already legal substances, namely alcohol and tobacco. Indeed, pot is less addictive; an occasional joint strikes me as no worse than an occasional drink. If you had a choice of which of the three substances to ban, tobacco would have to top the list. Unlike pot and alcohol, tobacco has no socially redeeming value; used properly, it is a killer.

Yet she concludes: "On balance, society will not be better off with another legal mind-altering substance. In particular, our kids will not be better off with another legal mind-altering substance."

Oh, for heaven's sake. That old argument? Nothing about freedom to choose the less harmful substance? As though prohibition is working to keep teens away from pot.

Marcus, a Harvard law graduate from Philadelphia, is supposedly a liberal Democrat and has two teenage daughters. Write to Marcus at ruthmarcus@washpost.com

P.S. Colbert took on Marcus and David Brooks on his first show of 2014. Favorite line: "I applaud Marcus and Brooks for taking a stand against legalizing the pot they smoked."

Denver Does It!

Among other beautiful synchronicities, the city of Denver became the first in the country to legalize adult marijuana sales this morning, one day after what would have been the 70th birthday of VIP John Denver, a marijuana fan and author of "Rocky Mountain High," one of Colorado's official state songs.

The Mile-High City was the site of the first US arrest for marijuana after it was effectively made illegal across the country in 1937. Today, people from all over the country stood in line for hours in Denver to buy a legal high.