Charlize Theron: I Really Appreciated Marijuana

UPDATE March 8: On the Jimmy Kimmel show last night, Theron said she had "a good solid eight years on the marijuana," and that now, after having a conversation with her mother about both of them getting off of sleeping pills and trying "a sleeping strain" instead, her mom showed up with some edibles. "So, I got some blueberry-covered chocolate ones, but if you want it faster acting ones, you can go for the mints," mom said. Asked how she slept after taking them, Theron enthused. "It totally works, it's amazing!" I'm thinking the brand involved is Kiva. 

In an interview with E! magazine to promote her new film Gringo, Oscar-winning actress Charlize Theron said of herself and marijuana, "Oh god, yes! I was a wake-and-baker for most of my life."

"Do you remember your first time?" E!'s Sibley Scoles asked. "Yeah, I was older," Theron replied. "But I really appreciated marijuana way more than alcohol or anything else. My chemistry was really good with it when I was younger."

In her early thirties, she quit after, "I just became boring on it." But now she says, "I'm open to retrying it again because now there's all these different strains and you can be specific with it. And I'm actually really interested because I have really bad insomnia, and I'd much rather get off sleeping pills and figure out a strain that helps me sleep better. So when I have a moment, I'm actually doing that with my mom. My mom has really bad sleep too." It's no wonder.

A photo of Theron smoking pot out of an apple was published in the National Inquirer in 2002. At the time, her publicist had no comment. But times have, apparently, changed.

Since Theron turned 30 in 2005, this means she must have made many of her best films during the years she enjoyed marijuana. She starred in five films in 2000 alone: Reindeer Games, The Yards, The Legend of Bagger Vance, Men of Honor, and Sweet November, and also appeared in The Cider House Rules, Mighty Joe Young, That Thing You Do, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion, and Monster (2003), for which she won the Best Actress Oscar.

In 2007, the South African–born actress founded The Charlize Theron Africa Outreach Project, to support African youth in the fight against HIV/AIDS. In 2008, she was named a United Nations Messenger of Peace.

In 2013, Theron shone at the Oscar ceremony where she danced with Seth MacFarlane and rescued a security guard who had a seizure on the red carpet. In 2016, Time magazine named her in the annual Time 100 most influential people list. She's currently receiving rave reviews for her "fearless performance as a woman snowed under by motherhood" in Tully.

Gringo, which opens in theaters on March 9,  is a dark comedy wherein Theron and co-star David Oyelowo try to sell a weed pill to Mexican drug lords. It also co-stars Amanda Seyfried, who played a bong-smoking lawyer in Ted 2 (2015) and thinks marijuana is a "wonderful thing."


Watch the E! interview. 

Annie Ross: Twisted and Terrific

Born into a Scottish vaudevillian family, Annie Ross was known as "Scotland's Shirley Temple" as a child performer. An aunt, actress Ella Logan, bought Annie her first record—Ella Fitzgerald's "A Tisket, A Tasket"—and at the age of four she knew she wanted to be a jazz singer. You can see her performing a jazzed-up version of "The Bonny Banks of Loch Lomond" on a 1938 Little Rascals episode. 

In 1952, Ross penned and sang scat-style lyrics to saxophonist Wardell Gray's composition "Twisted" and it was an underground hit, resulting in her winning Down Beat magazine's New Star award.

My analyst told me
That I was right out of my head
But I said dear doctor
I think that it's you instead
'Cause I have got a thing that's unique and new
It proves that I'll have the last laugh on you
Because instead of one head, I've got two. 

See Annie performing "Twisted" on Hugh Hefner's "After Dark." 

Ross was interviewed for the book Sassy: The Life of Sarah Vaughan by Leslie Gourse, 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. Later Annie would switch to herbal tea, but in the 1950s, she too liked to get high."

Ross performed with Louis Armstrong and idolized Billie Holiday, about whom she spoke on a recent BBC interview. She recorded seven popular albums with the vocal group Lambert, Hendricks & Ross between 1957 and 1962. During that time, she descended into heroin, and had an affair with Lenny Bruce. According to Jet magazine (11/6/69), she was arrested for drugs, as was Anita O'Day.

 She also had an acting career as an adult, appearing in "The Saint" with Roger Moore, and as a jaded jazz singer in Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993) (see her in the trailer below):


"Twisted" has been covered by a myriad of artists, including Bette Midler and Joni Mitchell (complete with a cameo from Cheech & Chong). In 1996, Ross recorded "Marajuana," the Arthur Johnston/Sam Coslow song first performed in the 1930s by Gertrude Michael and also covered by Midler.

At the age of 81, Ross sang "Twisted" at the 2011 MAC Awards, where she was honored with a Lifetime Achievement Award. A documentary about Ross's life, titled No One But Me, premiered at the Glasgow Film Festival in 2012.  She was reportedly working on her autobiography and still singing. See Annie's website.

Sadly, Ross died in 2020 at the age of 89.  She was planning a California tour.

10 Years After: Pot-Puffing Professor Tells Her Truth

On January 6, 2008, the Dallas Morning News picked up Cal State Long Beach professor and novelist Diana Wagman’s column: What my cancer taught me about marijuana, subtitled Why I – and a surprising number my friends – smoke pot. 

Among other things learned during chemotherapy treatment, like that eyelashes really do have a purpose and how wonderfully helpful her friends are, Wagman wrote, “What really shocked me was how many of my old, dear, married, parenting, job-holding friends smoke pot. …People I never expected dropped by to deliver joints and buds and private stash. … The poets and musicians were not a surprise, but lawyers? CEOs? Republicans?” 

Pain was the #1 reason Wagman’s 40- and 50-something friends still get high, she wrote, adding, “We're all beginning to fall apart, and a couple of tokes really take the edge off the sciatica, rotator cuff injuries, irritable bowel syndrome and migraines.” 

Wagman’s oncologist told her pot’s antinauseant properties were discovered 25 years ago, and that patients seem to like it today “because they would rather support a farm in Humboldt County than a huge pharmaceutical conglomerate.” When modern medicine’s anti-nausea drugs didn’t work for Wagman she lit up, finding it helped “a lot” but shocking her 15-year-old DARE-educated daughter. 

“I had come full circle in my life,” Wagman wrote. “The next time I had a toke, I stood in my bathroom with the fan on, blowing smoke out the window, but instead of my parents, I was scared my kids would find out I was smoking dope again.”

Wagman hasn't slowed down in the last decade, recently publishing her first young adult novel, Extraordinary October, “complete with trolls, fairies, intolerance, talking dogs...”

Visit Wagman's Website

Nikola Tesla, His Mother, and Hemp

Someone tweeted out this meme (right) and, not being one to spread false information when there is so much verifiable hempen history (and herstory) to be found, I did a little digging.

In Tesla's autobiography My Inventions, he wrote of taking apart the clocks of his grandfather as a boy. "Shortly there after I went into the manufacture of a kind of pop-gun which comprised a hollow tube, a piston, and two plugs of hemp," he wrote. "The art consisted in selecting a tube of the proper taper from the hollow stalks." Hemp does indeed have hollow stalks, so it seems the young Nikola was familiar with the plant.

A bag made by Tesla's mother
(Source: http://www.teslasociety.com)

Tesla called his mother Georgina-Djuka "a woman of genius and particularly excelling in the powers of intuition." He wrote, "My mother descended from one of the oldest families in the country and a line of inventors....she invented and constructed all kinds of tools and devices and wove the finest designs from thread which was spun by her. She even planted the seeds, raised the plants and separated the fibers herself....When she was past sixty, her fingers were still nimble enough to tie three knots in an eyelash."

It is quite probable that the seeds Djuka planted were hemp. Nikola was born in 1856 in a mountainous Serbian village in what was then part of the Austrian empire and is now in Croatia. Some of my ancestors happen to have lived during that time in a similar village only 200 km away, and I have confirmed that the national costume of the Gottschee people, as they were called, was made from hemp.

According to Gottschee and Its People (John Kikel, 1947):

Being separated from the mother country [Germany], the Gottscheer developed his own national dress. He obtained wool from the sheep which he raised himself, and the hemp which he planted, supplied him with the yarn from which he spun his own linen, which was known as ‘Konig.’ On Sundays and holidays, the men wore linen trousers that went just above the shoes, a jacked made of coarse material and a broad-rimmed large black hat.

The women’s apparel was very colorful and picturesque. They wore snow-white pleated linen aprons and, around their middle, they wore a bright red or brightly embroidered belt with long fringes hanging down their backs. Around their shoulders, they wore a colorful shawl. There was always a great deal of competition amongst the women as to who would have the prettiest dress when they made their next “Kirchgang” since they all made their own dresses . . . Until the latter part of the 19th century, this type of national dress predominated. 

Hemp is still grown and processed throughout Eastern Europe.

Djuka and Nikola didn't necessarily make rope and paper from it, but quite likely she spun and wove the hemp she grew and processed, and her young son played with the stalks and fibers. One can only speculate as to whether Djuka's "genius" and intuition, and that of her son, were enhanced by hemp.

Tallulah the Tosspot and Her Reefer Binge

Catching a still-sharp Tallulah Bankhead guesting on an old Merv Griffin show clued me in to the fact that she'd written a book, Tallulah, My Autobiography, which was the #5 nonfiction best-seller of 1952, according to a New Yorker profile by Robert Gottlieb.

The daughter of an Alabama Senator, Bankhead won a beauty contest at the age of 16, and headed to New York City to start an acting career around 1918. She starred in Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat and had a "calamitous" stage run in "Antony and Cleopatra" in 1937, around the time when she tried "reefer." She achieved stage success two years later with her "commanding performance" in Lillian Hellman’s “The Little Foxes.” (She lost the film role to Bette Davis, who later imitated Tallulah in All About Eve).

In addition to her acting, Tallulah was a member of the Algonquin Roundtable and known for her wit. One witticism was, "Only good girls keep diaries. Bad girls don't have the time." She also said, “I'm the foe of moderation, the champion of excess. If I may lift a line from a die-hard whose identity is lost in the shuffle, 'I'd rather be strongly wrong than weakly right'."

Chapter 4 of her autobiography, titled "Flirtation with Sin" begins, "You've heard, I'm sure, about Tallulah the tosspot!" She asserts that her party girl reputation happened mostly because of her waggish nature. For instance, her association with cocaine, she claims, came from a joke she told at parties shortly after she arrived in New York with acting ambitions. Writing that she had become "numbed and nauseated" and full of remorse after drinking, "Thereafter when offered a drink at parties, I'd say, 'No, thank you. I don't drink. Got any cocaine?' Thus did I start the myth that I was an addict."

After she repeated the line at one party, the host offered her some "glistening crystals" of coke, and she felt compelled to try it, feeling "no sensation save that born of another achievement." Months later she was given heroin instead of cocaine and, "The effects were pleasant and dreamy. The world seemed uncommonly rosy, but not for long." She soon became "actively ill." "I've never touched either since, except medicinally," she declared.

She then wrote of a physician in London who sprayed cocaine in her throat to help with laryngitis. Filling his prescription for pills labeled "Cocaine and Menthol" at a London pharmacy, and "obsessed with a desire to shock people, I whipped the vial out at every opportunity." When asked, "Isn't it habit-forming?" she'd reply, "Cocaine habit-forming? Of course not. I ought to know. I've been using it for years." She continues:

"Since I'm in my narcotic phase I might as well let you in on my reefer binge, if a handful of reefers spread over four weeks can be so classified. I was carrying on a lopsided duel with Cleopatra when I first tested marijuana on the cue of a friend who swore reefers were the next thing to ambrosia."

"They may have been ambrosia to him, but my first one only brought on a fit of giggles and an overpowering hunger. Hunger is something I can't afford to create artificially, since I'm always either dieting or about to start. At the time I was deep in theosophy, and Madame Blavatsky's Isis Unveiled and Secret Doctrine. My giggles over, unreliable witnesses report I started to spout poetry of my own coinage. Very good it was, swore those perjurers.

"What with Cleopatra, back income taxes, a lost love and other considerations too gruesome to set down here, I was depressed, not to say broke. The reefer consumed, I felt that I had the key to the universe. Never more need I fret and worry. The complexities of my life became crystal clear. For a few moments so vivid seemed my comprehension of the things that conventionally haunt me I felt kinship with God." 

Quite the experience! However she then goes on to say, "In retrospect I distrust my emotions. Perhaps it was the spell of Madame Blavatsky. Perhaps I'd fused Poe and his laudanum with me and my reefer. Thus exalted, shortly I repeated the experiment. It didn't come off. I was closer to the pawnbroker than to God." She says those two experiences were "the sum of my trifling," and concludes, "Fortunately my skirmished with forbidden fumes and philters never created in me any craving, physical or mental, any desire to promote an experience to practice."

On drinking, she wrote, "Tippling? That's something else again. I enjoy drinking with friends, even though I know it occasionally leads me to conduct not easy to condone....I'm not a compulsive drinker. I'll drink what and when I damn well please." Later in her life, she mixed alcohol with prescription drugs, reportedly to her detriment.

Tallulah may have been the model for this 1937 cartoon, published the year that the Marijuana Tax Act effectively made marijuana illegal in the US. In it, marijuana represented by a woman who resembles Bankhead is literally being kicked out of a pharmacy by federal inspectors (up until then, cannabis had been available in pharmacies in various formulations).

In 1948, Bankhead and other cast members were accused of using marijuana during the New York City production of Noel Coward's play "Private Lives." She contacted the FBI and requested an FBIHQ tour for John Emory, her husband, and Director Robert Sinclair. She also corresponded with Director Hoover.

In late 1951, Bankhead fired her personal secretary, Evyleen Cronin, for stealing money from her. In a public trial over the incident, Cronin's lawyers alleged that Cronin's job included "paying for marijuana, cigarettes, cocaine, booze and sex." Cronin also testified that Bankhead taught her to roll marijuana cigarettes. Because of this, Bankhead may have been the inspiration for the Alexandra de Lago character in Tennessee Williams's Sweet Bird of Youth, whose young male companion (played by Paul Newman in the 1962 film adaptation, pictured) tries to blackmail over her use of hashish. She is also said to be the inspiration for Cruella de Vil in Disney's One Hundred and One Dalmations.

Rumored to have had an affair with Billie Holiday, Bankhead once said to a stranger at a party, “I’m a lesbian. What do you do?” She was friendly with Eleanor Roosevelt, campaigned for Truman and Kennedy, and in the early fifties, during McCarthysim, she said, “I think Senator McCarthy of Wisconsin is a disgrace to the nation.” Her final public appearance was on the “Tonight Show” (where she chatted with Paul McCartney and John Lennon).

Tallulah Bankhead died in 1968 when a bout of Asian flu was more than her emphysema could tolerate. Before slipping into a coma after being hooked to a ventilator in a New York City hospital, her only discernible words were barely audible requests for codeine and bourbon.

Grace and Frankie and Ruth and Maria

Season 4 of the Netflix series "Grace and Frankie" starring Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, is now available for binge watching, preferably while stoned.

The pot jokes begin in Episode 1, when Grace's daughter Brianna (June Diane Raphael) gets "buzzed" with Frankie (Tomlin), while Grace (Fonda) drinks martinis with her other daughter Mallory. Afterwards, Grace asks Brianna, "Why don't you take after your mother and drink, instead of smoking doobies with your burned-out Aunt Frankie?"

At least Grace notices that Mallory is drinking earlier than usual (while swigging a mid-day martini herself). Her advice about her daughter's hurt feelings over her ex-husband is to hurl her anger at him, as she acts the angry drunk herself. In a later episode, Brianna is told by her boyfriend that she's using marijuana as a coping mechanism, like her mother uses booze. Since she'd been smoking since breakfast, that may have been true. Nobody in the series gets high like people really do: having insights or meaningful conversations after expanding their minds.

While their ex-husbands ponder having more sex with a hot younger man, Grace does all she can to rebuff a younger suitor (Peter Gallagher) and Frankie leaves her lover man in Santa Fe so she can return to her family. The women fear that one of their vibrators-for-the-elderly product has sent a little old lady to more than her "little death."

"You're famous for not being able to multitask," Grace tells Frankie. "You can't even task." Pot-loving Frankie is portrayed as so unreliable that she can't be left alone with her granddaughter. Meanwhile, Grace's ex-husband reveals she has only "not drank" a few times, and delineated the three terrible stages of her alcohol withdrawal. Grace pops pain pills to deal with a knee problem (which could lead to overdose, given her alcohol intake) and we get to see her horrible scar after her knee surgery. Oh, and Frankie's daughter-in-law must have her baby without an epidural. But the men have no health issues at all except for feeling fatigued after being arrested while protesting for gay rights. (Judge Hempstead gets them out of jail.) It's the women (not their husbands) who are sent to live in assisted living, which they manage to escape by season's end. I liked Fonda as this Grace much better.

It's nice that the season came out on Women's March weekend because there's a mention of Susan Faludi's Backlash, which is a great book. The stoner "Friend" Lisa Kudrow guest stars in the first two episodes, and no less than Talia Shire plays Frankie's long-lost sister Teddy who used to give her a hard time about her "reefer."

Netflix has also brought back "Disjointed" starring Kathy Bates as a pot dispensary operator for 10 more episodes. The season opener, a 4/20 special, starts with a sweet musical number and has Bates's character Ruth confronting her earlier activist self. She decides to convene a cannabusiness women's empowerment group, where the women fight among themselves until Dabby (Betsy Sodaro as womankind's answer to Cheech & Chong) saves the day (in a way).

The writers haven't gone anywhere with the tension established in last season's pilot between Ruth's hippie values and those of her son, an MBA who sees the dispensary more as a business. Instead they did the whole thing in parody, complete with poop jokes and a rip-off of "The Help."

There are some genuine scenes with Bates's love interest (played by of Peter Riegert of Animal House), and with Maria (Nicole Sullivan), wherein Ruth introduces the concept of "Grasslighting" to her friend.

Budtender Jenny (Elizabeth Ho), a young Chinese woman, must deal with her mother's disapproval when she chooses to heal with herb instead of staying in medical school. (Too bad she couldn't do both.) She does a nice segment on Chinese hempen history, which could be good for awareness because the show is available with Chinese subtitles.

Season 2 of "High Maintenance," co-created by Katja Blichfield, is now showing on HBO.

A Her-Storic Golden Globes Ceremony

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