REVIEW: Jean Smart Is No "Hack" on HBO Series

Jean Smart in "Hacks" on HBO

I'm catching up with HBO shows since managing to subscribe two minutes before the premiere of the 20th season of HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher—and was rewarded with a funny and poignant New Rule about Senate Gary Candidate Chambers smoking weed in his campaign ad. 

Another reward: Catching Jean Smart's tour-de-force performance as the acerbic, veteran Las Vegas stand-up comic Deborah Vance in "Hacks." 

In the series, Deborah reluctantly hires the self-involved young writer Ava (Hannah Einbinder) as a joke writer. Ava is smart, sarcastic, and a somewhat stereotypical twenty-something. She sends a naked selfie to her ex, and takes Molly and cocaine to excess with a guy she meets, who encourages her to take a leap before tragically taking one of his own. It's established that Ava gets high when Deborah questions why she's been charged for three chicken parmesan dinners sent to Ava's hotel room in a single night. 

In Episode 6 ("New Eyes"), Deborah has an "eyelid refresh" at a spa/surgery center and takes Ava along for the weekend. Deborah, who pronounces that she doesn't like marijuana (saying, "Why would I want to take something that makes me feel lazy and hungry too?"),  agrees to take a cannabis gummy to deal with her pain when offered by Ava, who joins her. The two are soon laughing together and sharing insights about their lives, something women tend to do when they use cannabis together (but is rarely seen on TV or in films). 

2021 Tokey Awards

Tokin' Woman of the Year: Sha'Carri Richardson 

The world showed unprecedented support for a pot smoker (especially among women) when, after winning the 100m Olympic Trials on June 19 on Eugene, Oregon with a time of 10.86 seconds, sprinter Sha'Carri Richardson was disqualified after testing positive for marijuana. 

Congresswomen Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Barbara Lee were among the Congressmembers asking WADA and USADA to reconsider their decision. AOC tweeted, "Not to mention, marijuana is legal in Oregon where Ms. Richardson was when she used it," and, "Major league baseball, hockey and football all have removed penalties for marijuana use. It's time for the IOC and @usantidoping to do the same. #LetShaCarriRun." Following public outcry, the World Anti-Doping Agency announced it would review their marijuana ban for athletes. 

In an interview on NBC, Richardson said she was "blinded by emotions" after she found out that her biological mother had died when a reporter asked her about it days before her trial, and turned to marijuana to cope from the "triggering" and "nerve-shocking" news. "Who are you or who am I to tell you how to cope when you're dealing with a pain you never experienced before?" she asked. 

At the Olympics in Tokyo, three Jamaican women swept the 100m medals, and US gymnastics star Simone Biles removed herself from competition due to stress saying, "I have to focus on my mental health." Meanwhile, a study from cannabis tech company dutchie found cannabis consumers in the US and Canada are predominantly female, "especially as conversations about women’s health expand to include using cannabis for relief from things like menstrual pain and to help with sleep or stress."

Richardson says she'll be blessed if her suspension for THC ultimately helps other athletes. Let's hope she'll also help all who are discriminated against on their jobs for using cannabis. 

Top (and Terrible) Tweets of 2021

Our Top Tweets were so popular last year I've decided to give them a post of their own for 2021.

Which one is your favorite? Tell me in the comments. 
  

Top Tweets

Reforming cannabis law is not a partisan issue. Americans in both parties overwhelming support it. So, we just introduced a bipartisan bill with @RepDaveJoyce to encourage localities to expunge cannabis offenses.https://t.co/Ha5TTnKlWh

— Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@RepAOC) December 2, 2021

It’s weird that politicians focus on store locations, instead of the jobs that have been created by the cannabis industry and the post-pandemic recovery it offers. Retail alone has created around 27,000 jobs across the country (I myself have a staff of 20). Seems dumb to complain pic.twitter.com/zpuq3Wr2OL

— Jennawae McLean (@jennawae) November 26, 2021

https://twitter.com/tommychong/status/1417169361861693440?s=20https://twitter.com/tommychong/status/1417169361861693440?s=20

https://twitter.com/tommychong/status/1417169361861693440?s=20ps://twitter.com/tommychong/status/1417169361861693440?s=2

I just looked through 170 pieces of my kids’ halloween candy and NOT A GOD DAMN THC EDIBLE in here.
You promised free THC on halloween, narcs! pic.twitter.com/d2ls3mzOL8

— David Downs (@davidrdowns) November 1, 2021

I converted to Pantheism, so I can literally say, ‘I am weed’

— God (@thegoodgodabove) October 22, 2021  

Decriminalize drugs and this doesn't happen. https://t.co/y9JNlK3KxL

— Ngaio Bealum (@ngaio420) September 24, 2021

Tokin' Women And Others We Lost in 2021

Tanya Roberts (1/4)

One of Charlie's Angels and a Bond Girl (opposite Roger Moore and Grace Jones), Roberts dove into a pan of pot brownies in her comedic role as Donna's mom in That 70s Show. As Sheena, Queen of the Jungle (pictured), she tamed lions, like the ancient goddesses. 

Hal Holbrook (1/23)

Holbrook, who was wonderful in films likeAll The President's Men and Lillian Hellman's Julia, is best remembered for his Tony-award-winning portrayal of Very Important Pothead Mark Twain onstage in a one-man show he developed as a college student, Mark Twain Tonight!

 

Cloris Leachman (1/26)

The uniquely talented actress was known for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Malcolm in the Middle and Young Frankenstein. Leachman has a blast smoking cannabis with her granddaughter (Mickey Sumner) in the 2015 film This Is Happening, a role she played at the age of 89. And she assures another granddaughter (Shannyn Sossamon) that's she's familiar with weed in 2020's High Holiday.

Cicely Tyson (1/28)

Tyson shone in Sounder (1972) and Roots (1977),  played Harriet Tubman in A Woman Called Moses (1978), won an Emmy for The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974), took a Tony for the 2013 Broadway production A Trip to Bountiful, and was wonderful in The Help (2011, pictured). She was recognized with a Kennedy Center honor, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, and an honorary Oscar. Raised in the Baptist church, she was unable to distinguish between her husband Miles Davis's marijuana use vs. hard drugs. Her death came two days after she published her own autobiography, Just As I Am, and just after it was announced that the Biden/Harris administration would be fast-tracking the Tubman $20. I guess at the age of 96 her work was done.

Anne Feeney (2/3)

Songwriter and activist Feeney's song "Have You Been to Jail for Justice?" was recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary and she performed with Pete Seeger, Loretta Lynn, John Prine, and the Indigo Girls. She served on the executive board of the Pennsylvania chapter of the National Organization for Women and co-founded Pittsburgh Action Against Rape. She died of COVID-related pneumonia at age 69. 

Christopher Plummer (2/5) 

A Shakespearean actor best known for his role as Captain von Trapp in "The Sound of Music," Plummer had a long and illustrious career, including playing VIP Rudyard Kipling in The Man Who Would Be King and a pot dealer in the  2018 film Boundaries where he shared a Pax with Peter Fonda

 

 

Mary Wilson (2/8)

Wilson's 1986 memoir, Dreamgirl: My Life As a Supreme describes meeting the Beatles in New York in 1965 and, "The first thing I noticed was that the room reeked of marijuana smoke." The Supremes had an  R&B #1 hit in 1970 with “Stoned Love,” featuring lead singer Jean Terrell (Mary's in the middle in this video).

Film Review: "Mama Weed"

Mama Weed, now on Amazon Prime and YouTube, stars the accomplished French actress Isabelle Hupppert and is based on the book The Godmother: A Crime Novel by Hannelore Cayre, which won the 2019 Grand Prix de Littérature Policière, France’s most prestigious award for crime fiction. 

Huppert plays Patience Portefeux, a middle-aged Arabic language PhD working as a police interpreter on drug cases, while worrying about paying for her mother's care facility and her own retirement. Her boss, with whom she's having an affair, offers to take care of her but, true to her deceased husband's memory and not really into following the law, she takes a different path. 

Patience's father, it is revealed, was a penniless Algerian immigrant who skirted the law out of necessity, and she has sympathy for the people she spies on through police wiretaps, "all to send kids to jail to get radicalized for three grams of hash." Or, as Cayre writes, "The interpreter was simply a tool to accelerate the act of repression." Patience sometimes colored her translations or "invented things" to help needy defendants, or did the opposite when they tried to implicate their poorly-treated wives or girlfriends. 

 

"From the first day of my professional life, I had understood that there was no logical point to my work," Patience says in The Godmother.  "Fourteen million cannabis users in France and 800,000 growers living off that crop in Morocco. The two countries are friendly, yet those kids whose haggling I listened to all day long were serving heavy prison sentences for having sold their hash to the kids of cops who were prosecuting them and and of the judges who were sentencing them, not to mention all the lawyers who were defending them...

"I can only think though—even if my cop boyfriend insists I'm wrong—that this excess of resources, this furious determination to drain the sea of hash inundating France, teaspoon by teaspoon, is above all else a tool for monitoring the population insofar as it allows identity checks to be carried out on Arabs and Blacks ten times a day." 

Did the Black Dahlia Murder Have a Marijuana Connection?

The gruesome 1947 murder and mutilation of 22-year-old aspiring Hollywood actress Elizabeth Short, who became known as the "Black Dahlia," remains unsolved until this day. 

A 2017 book, Black Dalia, Red Rose by British author Piu Eatwell makes the case for an LAPD coverup involving the smearing of their own chief police psychiatrist Dr. Joseph Paul De River because he prescribed marijuana to his wife for severe pain. 

Eatwell, who was able to get the FBI file in the case (but not the LAPD records, which are still under seal), presents evidence for bellhop and one-time mortician's assistant Leslie Dillon as Short's killer, acting at the behest of nightclub owner Mark Hansen because Short refused to date him exclusively, or work as a prostitute. Eatwell theorizes that the LAPD knowingly let Dillon off the hook because Sergeant Finis Brown, one of the case's two lead investigators, was in cahoots with Hansen during the days when LAPD's infamous "Gangster Squad" had ties to mob figures.  

In 1949, police came close to arresting Dillon after he sent a quasi confession under a pseudonym to Dr. De River, an expert on sexual crimes who wrote a book titled The Sexual Criminal: A Psychoanalytical Study. De River interrogated Dillon, getting him to implicate himself.  In testimony before a grant jury, the doctor was critical of LAPD and its investigation into the Black Dahlia case, making him an enemy of corrupt members of the police force. 

On March 2, 1950, just after Dr. De River spoke at a luncheon meeting for the Parkview Women's Club on the subject of "Juvenile Delinquency and the Home's Influence in Its Prevention," he was asked to stop by the city attorney's office where he was interrogated by officers of the State Division of Narcotic Enforcement about a series of prescriptions he had written between December 1949 and January 1950. The doctor explained to agents that he had written them as painkillers for his wife Gladys, who had been in severe pain after a botched spinal surgery to treat her ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease, for which, it turns out, cannabis may be helpful).