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.

2013 Tokey Awards

Tokin Woman is proud to bestow 

the following “Tokey” Awards for 2013, 

in recognition of the achievement, 

courage and compassion of the awardees 

(and in a few cases, the lack of enlightenment).

TOKIN WOMAN OF THE YEAR AWARD

Oprah Winfrey

VOICE OF THE PEOPLE AWARD

Bill Maher

"Our Kennedy"

CULTURAL AWARENESS AWARD

Carol Burnett: Hawaii 4-2-0

Bette Midler: "I'll Eat You Last"

Andy Cohen, Watch What Happens Live (Bravo)

Oprah and Martha Stewart Episodes

BLUNT MOVE OF THE YEAR 

Miley Cyrus, European Music Awards

FLIP FLOPPER OF THE YEAR

Lady Gaga

"WHAT'S THE BIG WHOOP?" AWARD

Jennifer Lawrence

Anne Hathaway

JUSTICE FOR ALL AWARD

Caroline Kennedy

BEST OPINION PIECE

Melissa Etheridge

"Pot Got Me Through"

Sanjay Gupta

Why I Changed My Mind on Weed 

BEST REPORTING AWARD

David Downs, East Bay Express

Greenwashing the War on Drugs

Ryan Burns, North Coast Journal
Pot POWs

TOP TWEET

The Colbert Report ‏@ColbertReport 24 Nov

"I'm no fan of drug addicts, just thinking about them makes me so angry I need another Xanax."

WHAT WERE THEY SMOKING? AWARD

US Supreme Court Rules Marijuana Not Medicine

A FOND FAREWELL TO:

Carolyn Cassady

Esther Williams

Ray Manzarek

Annette Funicello

Lou Reed

Hugo Chavez

Mike Gray

The Hindu God Shiva with the Goddess Parvati

See the 2012 Tokey Awards

Gracing the Emerald Cup

Scout, Grace Slick

The Emerald Cup's 10th Anniversary event at Northern California's Santa Rosa Fairgrounds last weekend was, by all accounts, a leap forward in acceptance and celebration around the cannabis plant. And oh yea, it was a great party too.

Music was provided by Big Brother and the Holding Company (sadly, without Janis Joplin), Canned Heat (who opened with a rocking "On the Road Again"), and Jefferson Starship (missing Grace Slick).

Slick was shoulder to shoulder with Janis as the strongest female rock and roll voice of the 60s. The girl could wail. On top of that, she wrote "White Rabbit" the rock anthem of its day with a haunting Bolero beat:

One pill makes you larger 
And one pill makes you small
And the ones that mother gives you 
Don't do anything at all
Go ask Alice
When she's ten feet tall.  

Asked about the song, Slick said, "...[P]arents read us these books, like Alice in Wonderland, where she gets high, tall, and she takes mushrooms, a hookah, pills, alcohol. And then there's the Wizard of Oz, where they fall into field of poppies and when they wake up they see Oz. And then there's Peter Pan, where if you sprinkle white dust on you, you could fly. And then you wonder why we do it? Well, what did you read to me?" (SOURCE: Got a Revolution! The Turbulent Flight of Jefferson Airplane by Jeff Tamarkin, 2003 Atria Books)

Slick has now put down the mike and picked up a paintbrush, and her visual art is as provocative and powerful as her music. At the event, her presence was decidedly present with a Wonderland display of her paintings and prints, kindly brought by Fine Art Productions in Santa Rosa. (She is also represented by Saatchi Art.)

Monterey, Grace Slick

In Monterey, a visual record of the pre-Woodstock Monterey Pop festival of 1967,  Slick lights a J for David Crosby and Jerry Garcia, flanked by Mama Cass and Jimi Hendrix. The Who, Joplin, John Phillips, John Lennon, Ravi Shankar, Gandhi and Alice (with a bunny on her head) are depicted. It reminded me of The Cup, and of Marie Laurencin's Les Invitees, a painting of a 1908 hashish adventure.

The rabbit is a big part of Slick's iconography, and she's invented a character named "Rescue Rabbit" who, in one painting, carries cannabis to the Capitol building in DC and in another ("Shootin Dope") fires a gun at its medicine cabinet. Another image has Alice perched on a mushroom, chasing a rabbit on a path where Timothy Leary appears as the mad hatter and Ram Dass is the caterpillar. Slick paints Alice smoking a hookah herself (only the grouchy Queen abstains) in Marikkesh.

P.L. Travers as Titania in A Midsummer Nights Dream

Just in time for Christmas: Another magical children's character, Mary Poppins, will be back on the big screen in Saving Mr. Banks. I notice in the original Disney movie, the children get high at a giggly tea party on the ceiling, and jump into a psychedelic chalk painting. Poppins creator P.L. Travers was a bohemian who was greatly affected by Gurdjieff and hung out with hashish-taker William Butler Yeats, who fostered her interest in world mythology.

The Paris Review asked Travers, "What do you think of the books of Carlos Castaneda?" She replied:

I like them very much. They take me into a world where I fear I will not belong. It’s a bit more occult than my world, but I like Don Juan’s idea about what a warrior is and how a warrior should live. In a way, we all have to live like warriors; that’s the same as being the hero of one’s own story. I feel that Castaneda has been taken into other dimensions of thinking and experiencing. I don’t pretend to understand them, and I think I understand why Castaneda is so slow to give interviews and tries to separate himself from all of that. He doesn’t want to explain. These things can’t be explained in ordinary terms. . .

How To Make An American Pot Party

After I gave a slide show presentation titled, "Women and Cannabis: A 4000-Year Herstory" at the First Annual Cannabis and Healing conference for women in Wilton, California, a lovely lady came up to me and said that the women spoke pot in the movie How to Make An American Quilt. It's true, both in the book and the movie, which takes place in a town called Grass, California.

"Sometimes in motel rooms between their children’s homes, Glady Joe and Hy drink whiskey and smoke a little reefer. It is their secret. They say it helps them sleep better in strange beds. They buy it from a grandchild in graduate school, a young woman named Finn Bennett-Dodd. Who has promised not to betray them to her parents or the other relatives. Finn understands that, more than the fact that pot is illegal, it upsets people when two elderly grandmothers indulge in this private ritual."    ---Whitney Otto, How To Make An American Quilt 1991

In the movie, sisters Glady Joe (Anne Bancroft) and Hy (Ellen Burstyn) smoke a joint on the porch with their grandniece Finn (Winona Ryder) after she arrives for a visit. They start talking about family secrets, and Finn asks: "Was it a mistake, letting you two smoke?"

This leads to giggles.

Bancroft is bogarting badly when Burstyn reaches over to ask for a toke. After she has hers, she's able to tell her story. Finn, who's come to do a master's thesis on her quiltmaking relatives while deciding whether or not to get married, gets a lesson in life at the quilting bee. A rare appearance by Maya Angelou as the master quilter is a treat; Lady Jean Simmons appears as Em and Lois Smith has a pivotal role as Sophia. 

Bancroft originated the role of Hellen Keller's teacher Annie Sullivan on Broadway in The Miracle Worker and was unforgettable as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate. She brought class to everything she did, from The Naked Street (1955) to The Turning Point (1977) to the Queen Bee in Antz (1998). She finally worked with her wonderfully incongruous husband Mel Brooks in To Be Or Not to Be (1983), which is not to be missed. 

Burstyn is no slouch either: she was great in Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, but never got good roles (The Exorcist? really?). She is down on drugs of any kind in her autobiography, saying they messed up a friend, and made the dismal Requiem for a Dream about a drug addict. She, and most of us, don't seem to understand there's a world of difference between a joint on the porch and holes in your brain.

Ryder, who played Jo in Tokin' Woman Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, always does interesting projects, like A Scanner Darkly and her work with Pacino (Looking for Richard and Simone).

UPDATE 8/16: Ryder is getting rave reviews for her role in Netflix's Stranger Things and is all the rage again with a generation that grew up on Beetlejuice and Heathers. Netflix is also airing American Quilt. 

Iris Tree: Poet Adventuress

Iris Tree photographed by Man Ray

You preach to me of laws, you tie my limbs
With rights and wrongs and arguments of good,
You choke my songs and fill my mouth with hymns,
You stop my heart and turn it into wood.

...Age creeps upon your timid little faces
Beneath each black umbrella sly and slow,
Proud in the unimportance of your places
You sit in twilight prophesying woe

So dim and false and grey, take my compassion
I from my pageant golden as the day
Pity your littleness from all my passion
Leave you my sins to weep and whine away!

Thus begins Iris Tree's first book of poems, published in 1919.

The daughter of famed English actor and impressario Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree, Iris was a free thinker and sybarite from an early age. In 1912, at the age of 15, she went to Milan where her sister Viola was studying singing. From there, she wrote to a friend: "I am rather a success here; my hair is admired...I am trying to keep as pure as possible but it's rather difficult. I am in love with a beautiful Italian called Ludovici who gives me lessons in the language on a crimson sofa."  A few weeks later she wrote, "I am having a glorious time, living a somewhat bohemian life and eating bohemian spaghetti....I want to do so many things and of course I shall end by doing nothing. Women never do anything except spoil the lives of men - that is their only consolation."

Back in England at the Slade school the following year, she and her friend Nancy Cunard secretly rented a studio where they "gave clandestine feasts and talked through the night by the light of guttering candles, reading poetry aloud and smoking cigarettes." (The Rainbow Picnic, Daphne Fielding, 1974) "Forbidden playgrounds were investigated..They drank beer in public houses and wine at the Cafe Royal."

Tree by Augustus John

Iris wrote:

I was born in 1897
I have a fringe -
I have whiskers - 
I have a studio in 
Fritzroy Street...
I have had 28 
lovers, some more 
some less...
I drink absinthe.
I borrow money.
I have loved men
I have loved women...
I am a soul.
I am an artist.
I am wanton.
I am a hypocrite.

At 17 she met her lifelong friend, Welsh poet and "King of the Bohemians" Augustus John at one of Lady Ottoline Morell's Thursday gatherings.  In an unpublished essay, In Praise of Augustus John, she wrote, "At Ottoline's there were all kinds of dress-ups. Her rooms were scented with pomanders, pot-pourri and packed with genii in full cry....John's basso profundo muttering rare but penetrating sentences...At first meeting I experienced an immediate intimacy as if I was part of his landscape which has remained in my vision ever since. "

Tree traveled with her father to Hollywood in 1915 (as revealed by Oscar Levant in his book The Uninportance of Being Oscar). Levant called her "a charming and witty woman." When she met her first husband Curtis Moffat in New York in 1916, he "looked like a prentice wizard of magus out of a fairy story, especially in the black cloak he habitually wore at night when he took her out to explore the more raffish quarters of the city: the Bowery, Harlem, Greenwich Village and the dockside." (Fielding)

In his memoir Chiaroscuro (1952), John writes of taking hashish jam supplied by Princess Violette Murat at a dinner party at the Moffats' home in Hampstead:

Having helped myself to the first dose I had almost forgotten it when, catching the eye of Iris Tree across the dinner table, we were both simultaneously seized with uncontrollable laughter about nothing at all. This curious effect repeated itself from time to time throughout the evening.

Iris may have written of the event, or a similar one, in her poem:

Suddenly 
Shutting our lips upon a jest 
As we are sipping thoughts from little glasses, 
A gun bursts thunder and the echoing streets 
Quiver with startled terrors...

Much of Tree's poetry of the time deals with the horrors of WWI, juxtaposed against the wild and free bohemian life she was living, still railing against the bourgeoisie: 

You have never known
Delight of dying slowly,
Poisoned with raptures...
Nor felt your souls go blowing like balloons
Tossed by impulsive hands...
You have not felt the abandon
Of light love
Dragged by the hair across a slippery floor...

Contrary to her youthful assessment of women's worthlessness, Tree accomplished much in her life, as well as writing remarkable poetry and acting as muse and model to other artists.  She came to America to act in Max Reinhardt's play The Miracle in 1925, and there met her second husband, Friedrich Ledebur. The two roamed around California, gypsy style, with their son, then moved back to Europe where they were involved in the Chekhov Theatre Studio.

Around 1940 Tree relocated to California and rented a house in the Ojai Valley, the Shangri La where the movie Lost Horizon was filmed.  There she attended lectures by Krishnamurti, and along with him, Aldous Huxley and others, founded The Besant Hill School near Ojai.

Tree also established the Ojai theatre festival, where she played Lady Macbeth and "gave a magnificent performance, even though her stage fright was immeasurably increased by the presence in the audience of her friends Lillian Gish, Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo." She and other members of the Chekhov studio performed her play Second Wind.

French author Simone de Beauvoir wrote of meeting Tree in California in 1947 when her theatre company was preparing to perform Macbeth. "She was extremely beautiful, as I can see in a photograph taken by Man Ray. She traveled widely and always moved in artistic and literary circles," she wrote in America Day by Day. According to Beauvoir's biographer Deidre Bair,  Tree "enjoyed teasing that ‘the Mauvais Tempts [Bad Times] had arrived" with Beauvoir, who thought Tree was "fascinating, beautiful and intelligent, but she was not amused by her jest."

Tree's cameo appearance in La Dolce Vita

Tree owned an apricot ranch for a time, acquired a barn by the sea on an estate once owned by Robert Louis Stevenson, and once took up residence in an apartment built over the merry-go-round on the Santa Monica pier.  She appeared in the 1956 film version of Moby Dick in which Ledeber played Quequeg. She also appears in a cameo, reading poetry as herself, in Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960).

The early 1960s found Tree living in Geneva with her son, where she hosted the Huxleys and followed Krisnamurti. Like Huxley, she lost many of her personal papers in California. "Another link between Iris and Aldous Huxley was that she too had taken mescalin," wrote Richard Morphet of the Tate Gallery. Her biographer Daphne Fielding describes encountering Tree in France where she tried a hallucinogenic mushroom said to produce "beatific visions in glorious Technicolor." Fielding claims Tree didn't really how to ingest them, but the chapter ends with someone suggesting she'd gone to the Pyrenees because, "Maybe it's good mushroom country."

At the end of her life Tree was forbidden to indulge in cigarettes, coffee and wine for medical reasons. "I feel a traitor," she said, "abandoning Baccus the Mind-Shaker and Ganymede the Cup-Bearer." She died in England in 1968, her last words being, "It's here, it's here... Shining...Love...Love....Love."