Tokin' Women and Others We Lost in 2024

This year we lost activists John Sinclair, Mari Kane, ED Denson, Nancy Udell and Peggy Hitchcock; Actresses Teri Garr, Maggie Smith and Gena Rowlands; Musicians Melanie and Kris Kristofferson, plus Grateful Dead bassist Phil Lesh and Super Deadhead Bill Walton, and (too) many more. Sadly, this page will be updated throughout 2024, with an emphasis on women and those connected with cannabis and its legalization, through their lives and/or work. 

Jean Jennings (February 3, 1954 – December 16, 2024)

 At 14, Jennings was an exchange student in Ecuador where she learned to drive in a Toyota Land Cruiser in the Andes mountains. At eighteen, she bought a used Plymouth Satellite with a 318 V-8 engine, painted it yellow, installed a roof light and a meter, and joined the Yellow Cab Company in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as an owner/operator. While there, she redefined the city taxicab boundaries, trained and created a training manual for new cab drivers, and was elected president of the Yellow Cab board. After writing for Car and Driver (1980–1985), she co-founded Automobile, where she continued to write her widely known column, Vile Gossip and got Jerry Seinfield to write for the magazine. Unabashed and outspoken, Jennings became an undercover spokesmodel at the 1988 North American International Auto Show, and on Good Morning America startled Diane Sawyer, live on air, after calling the new Chevrolet SSR, "bitchin," explaining to the clearly ruffled Sawyer that it was an acceptable California hot-rodding term. She taught an Oprah Winfrey Show audience how to change a tire and jump start a car. She was later the Chairman, CEO and host of the self-branded automotive website and blog, Jean Knows Cars (2012–2016), and edited the book Road Trips, Head Trips, and Other Car-Crazed Writings. 

Jeanne Bamberger (February 11, 1924 – December 12, 2024)

Bamberger was a child prodigy pianist who performed with the Minneapolis Symphony before she had reached adolescence. She became a Professor of Music and Urban Education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Adjunct Professor of Music at the University of California, Berkeley. She also taught at the University of Southern California, and the University of Chicago. In Chicago, she became interested in the education of young children, and particularly in the Montessori method. Her research interests included music cognitive development, music theory and performance, teacher development, and the design of text and software materials that fostered these areas of development. She won both a Fulbright Scholarship and a Guggenheim Fellowship, wrote several books and articles, and co-created MusicLogo, enabling students to write computer code to create tunes that could be immediately played out loud.

Mary McGee (December 12, 1936 – November 27, 2024)

The first woman to compete in motorcycle road racing and motocross events in the United States, McGee was the first person to ride the Baja 500. She competed in motorcycle road racing and motocross from 1960 to 1976, then began competition again in 2000 in vintage motocross events. Her last race was in 2012. In 2013, McGee was named an FIM Legend for her pioneering motorcycle racing career. She was inducted into the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 2018. McGee died from complications of a stroke at the age of 87 just one day before the release of the documentary Motorcycle Mary, which was released on ESPN's YouTube channel.

Barbara Taylor Bradford (May 10, 1933 - November 24, 2024)

Bestselling author Bradford sold her first magazine story when she was 10 years old. She went on to become a journalist, columnist and fashion editor. She was 46 when she saw her first novel published: 1979's "A Woman of Substance," the story of Emma Harte, a poor but plucky and beautiful Yorkshire servant who founds a business empire. The book was an international smash, selling more than 30 million copies, and set the template for strong and independent Bradford heroines who would feature in 39 subsequent novels – all bestsellers, many turned into films or mini-series. In 2007, Bradford was presented with the Order of the British Empire for her contributions to English literature. Source.

Alice May Brock (February 28, 1941 - November 21, 2024)

The woman who inspired and co-wrote Arlo Guthrie's song "Alice's Restaurant," set at Thanksgiving, died a week before the holiday at the age of 83. Brock met Guthrie while she was a librarian at the Stockbridge School in Massachusetts where he was a student, and her eatery in western Massachusetts is forever immortalized in the song, which became an anti-war anthem in 1967 while US boys were still being drafted into the Vietnam war. Brock wrote several books, including “The Alice’s Restaurant Cookbook” (1969) and “My Life as a Restaurant” (1976); she appears in a cameo performance in the movie "Alice's Restaurant." A GoFundMe site to help with health and financial issues late in her life raised $170,000 in a few days. A used Hardcover copy her cookbook in "acceptable" condition is on sale at Amazon for $4,629.66. It includes advice on subjects as varied as Your Attitude, Equipment, Improvising And Making Do, and The Supply Cupboard. In 1991, Guthrie bought the re-purposed church in Great Barrington where Alice lived and hosted the Thanksgiving dinner he sang about to house his archives and a community action center. The center hosted its 19th Annual free Thanksgiving dinner this year; plans for an exhibit of Alice's artwork there began just before she died. 

Quincy Jones (March 14, 1933 - November 3, 2024) 

The amazingly multitalented Jones's now-famous composition Soul Bossa Nova, which gave Austin Powers his mojo, was the inspiration for the ballet "Dear Quincy" in which the dancers smoke and share a pipe.  

Teri Garr (December 11, 1944 - October 29, 2024)

Garr's autobiography Speedbumps: Flooring it Through Hollywood (2005) reveals that she had encounters with pot when she was a young go-go dancer on TV shows like "Shindig!" and in movies like Pajama Party with Annette Funicello, and while hanging out with fellow acting-school student and VIP Jack Nicholson, with whom she appeared in his psychedelic movie Head (along with the Monkees and Funicello). Garr also writes about sending a boyfriend to buy a joint for them to share on a vacation in Maui (somewhat anonymously). Like Funicello, she suffered from MS, but its unknown if either actress used cannabis for it. Garr was perfectly cast as Phoebe's stoner mom on TV's Friends, and remains beloved for her comedic and adorable performances in Young Frankenstein, Oh, God!, Tootsie, Mr. Mom, among many others. Read more. 

Phil Lesh (March 15, 1940 – October 25, 2024)

Grateful Dead bassist Lesh's "intellectual, articulate and reflective" book, Searching for the Sound: My Life with the Grateful Dead (2005, Little, Brown) includes his description of the band's "forays into mind-altering substances." He wrote, "For me and my friends, these drugs (pot, acid, the other entheogens) were seen as tools -- tools to enhance awareness, to expand our horizons, to access other levels of mind, to manifest the numinous and sacred, tools that had been used for thousands of years by shamans, by oracles, in the ancient mystery schools, by all whose mission was to penetrate beyond the veil of illusion . . . These experiences were not embarked upon as escape from 'reality' -- they were explorations into the superreal." In 2020, Rolling Stone ranked Lesh as the 11th Greatest Bassist of All Time. Read more. 

Barbara Dane (May 12, 1927 – October 20, 2024)

"Bessie Smith in stereo," wrote jazz critic Leonard Feather of Dane in the late 1950s. Time wrote of Dane: "The voice is pure, rich ... rare as a 20-carat diamond" and quoted Louis Armstrong's exclamation upon hearing her at the Pasadena jazz festival: "Did you get that chick? She's a gasser!" On the occasion of her 85th birthday, The Boston Globe music critic James Reed called her "one of the true unsung heroes of American music." Dane was one of the many artists whom the FBI surveilled because of their activism, and her FBI file later became source material for her 2022 autobiography, This Bell Still Rings: My Life of Defiance and Song, where she revealed that she suspected her first husband of feeding the FBI information about her. Dane continued to be active well into her 90s. In addition to publishing her book, she continued to perform and appeared in a 2023 documentary about her life, The Nine Lives of Barbara Dane.

Mitzi Gaynor (September 4, 1931 - October 17, 2024)

Gaynor helped teach us tolerance by falling in love with a Frenchman with Polynesian children in the 1958 movie "South Pacific," set during World War II. Initially her character Nellie Forbush, a Navy nurse from Arkansas, rejects him on racial grounds, leading to the song, "You've Got to Be Taught" with its brilliant Oscar Hammerstein lyrics. A wonderful dancer, here Gaynor dances with Gene Kelly in "Les Girls" (1957).  

Trump Chief of Staff Pick Worked for PR Firm that Represents Trulieve Cannabis

Well, it looks like a woman will be in charge after all at the White House. 

Donald Trump has named as his Chief of Staff pick Floridian and longtime Republican operative Susie Wiles, which will make her the first woman to hold that position. 

According to the New York Times, Wiles worked for Ballard Partners, a Florida-based lobbying firm. According to their website, Ballard represents Trulieve, the mega cannabis company whose female CEO Kim Rivers reportedly met with Trump just before he announced he would be voting in favor of Florida's measure to legalize cannabis on the November ballot. 

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis strongly opposed the measure, charging that it would benefit only Trulieve, which contributed over $70 million to the Smart & Safe Florida campaign behind Amendment 3. The measure won a majority vote (56%) but fell short of the 60% vote it needed to become a Florida constitutional amendment, similar to the reproductive rights measure also on the state's ballot, which garnered 57% of the vote. 

Wiles helped DeSantis win the 2018 Florida governor’s race, but he later fired and denounced her; she then helped Trump crush DeSantis in the G.O.P. presidential primaries. She recently worked at the lobbying giant Mercury, whose clients include SpaceX, AT&T, and the Embassy of Qatar. Politico reports that until earlier this year, she lobbied lobbied Congress on “FDA regulations” for the tobacco company Swisher International while running the Trump campaign. 

Connie Chung Comments on Marijuana Strain Named for Her in New Memoir

In Connie: A Memoir, Connie Chung, who broke through stereotypes and stigmas as an Asian woman newscaster starting in the 1960s, reflects on and meets with the "Connie Generation" of Asian women named in her honor. 

She then rather surprisingly ends the book: 

"As gratifying as the Connie Generation is, I have one more distinction of superior recognition. 

"There is a strain of weed named after me. Yes, a strain of marijuana named Connie Chung. I have not a clue how it came about. I tried smoking marijuana in college, and unlike Bill Clinton, I did inhale. However, still being a straight [pun intended?] arrow, I am not a weed smoker, not that there's anything wrong with it."

Perhaps Chung enjoyed her dance with Mary Jane in her formative years. The youngest of 10 children born to recent Chinese immigrants, she had a long road to climb to get to the top of her profession. Thankfully, it seems she chose a better relaxant than others to take the edge off. Her namestrain has been described as, "known for its hazy head high which can lead you down the road of unwinding and relaxing." 

Chung surprised Today Show hosts Savannah Guthrie and Hota Kolb during a book-tour interview in September by bringing up her namestrain and its/her qualities at the end of the segment, joking that her husband Maury Pauvich would disagree about her being "low maintenance."  

Chung reporting from the House of Representatives

The book reads,

"Nonetheless, if you look up my pot namesake online, you will find my characteristics. I am immensely proud to boast that I am easy to grow. I am deeply relaxing and happy; I am helpful under deadline; and I cause dry mouth but very, very little of the scaries. My flavor profile is described as berry, earthy, piney, sweet, and blueberry, with a blast of berry on the exhale....And this is the trait that I find the most admirable: I am low maintenance."

Flabbergasted, Guthrie could only blurt out, "We didn't expect this interview to go in this direction." (In other words, I have no words.) "Did you bring any?" Guthrie more calmly and pertinently inquired. "No, you can get it online," Chung replied. 

Annie Nelson Leads Willie's Cannabis Community Event for Kamala

Last Thursday, October 24, Willie Nelson and his wife Annie D'Angelo Nelson hosted a star-studded Cannabis Community Call for Kamala. It was obvious that Annie was leading the charge on the call, introducing speakers and keeping the event flowing, as well as making pro-cannabis comments of her own.

“If we want to see legalization become a reality, we have to do what we can to elect Harris,” Willie said. “We need you to drag your friends to the polls if need be.” 

“At the end of the day, we can’t go on blaming her for enforcing the law when she was a prosecutor. That was the law, and that was her job,” he continued. “And we need to recognize when we have a real partner in this mission to legalization we’ve all been on, and in Vice President Harris, there’s no doubt that we have that partner.”

Guest speakers began with Colorado Governor and cannabis legalization advocate Jared Polis, who called Harris “the first major party candidate to support leaving it up to the states.” He opined that while Joe Biden has done "very little" on legalization, Harris’s support for marijuana legalization is part of her “freedom agenda.” He added, "Finally, they have the rescheduling sitting there. We hope they approve it, but that’s just the first step.”

Cannabis activist/entrepreneur and 2016 Tokin' Woman of the Year Whoopi Goldberg spoke next about how cannabis can help with women's health issues like menstrual cramps. “It’s really important that we get these things thought of as normal,” she added. “When we talk about cannabis, it should not be something that is ever thought of as something harmful, because it’s not, and we have so many ways of using this, and Kamala knows this.” 

Country singer/songwriter Margo Price, also a cannabis entrepreneur, announced that she's already voted for Harris and feels good about voting for the first major party candidate to embrace cannabis legalization (as well as, the whole democracy thing, doing right by women and children, etc.) 

Kiki de Montparnasse: Je Me Drouge

Man Ray, Le Violon D’Ingres, 1924. Kiki is the model.

In the preface to the 1929 book Kiki's Memoirs, Ernest Hemingway wrote, "She dominated the era of Montparnasse more than Queen Victoria ever dominated the Victorian era." He was describing the woman known Kiki de Montparnasse, a muse, chanteuse, painter, actress, and cultural icon like no other. 

Born Alice Prin in 1901 to an impoverished single mother in Paris, she was required to work menial jobs from the age of 12 at places like print shops and shoe factories. Finding joy in self decoration, she "would crumble a petal from her mother's fake geraniums to give color to her cheeks and was fired from a nasty job at a bakery because she darkened her eyebrows with burnt matchsticks." (Source.)

Uninhibited by posing in the nude, she was determined to make a living as an artists' model while still in her teens, which caused her mother to turn her out of the house. The proprietress of Rosalie's restaurant in the Montparnasse district of Paris took pity on the young Alice, and often fed her. Rosalie's or La Rotonde may be the place where Modigliani, one of dozens of artists who painted or sculpted portraits of Kiki, paid his bill by slipping Futurist painter Gino Severini a chunk of hashish. (Source: Modigliani: A Life by Meryle Secrest, p. 106). 

In 1921, Kiki began an eight-year affair and artistic collaboration with the photographer Man Ray, during which time he influenced her style and took hundreds of portraits of her, including the iconic surrealist image Le Violon d'Ingres (Ingres' Violin) and Noire et blanche (Black and White). She also acted in experimental films shot by Man Ray. 

With a distinctive pointed-nose profile, Kiki also possessed "an extraordinary complexion which you could put makeup on in any form, and she did, too," said Lee Miller, Man Ray's subsequent collaborator and lover. "She was absolutely a gazelle," Miller said. (Source: Kiki Man Ray by Mark Braude, p. 229). "She had the short bobbed hair and unconventional look and really an energy, I think that people just really competed to capture," her biographer Mark Braude told The Octavian. "The bob and that whole fringe cut became ubiquitous by the end of the '20s. But when she started in 1921, 1922, that was actually a dangerous thing." (Kind of reminds me of when Tokin' Woman Patti Smith invented the shag haircut on herself and soon everyone copied her style.)

Kees van Dongen, Portrait of a Woman with a Cigarette

(Kiki de Montparnasse) ca. 1922-1924,

JE CONNAIS LA DROUGE

In Kiki's memoir, illustrated with her portraits and her own drawings, she tells of her introduction to cocaine while still a teenager (and a virgin). In a chapter titled, "Je Connais La Drogue" (I Know Drugs) she writes: 

"A sculptor for whom I pose entrusts me with an errand to run on the Champs-Élysées. I have to deliver a statuette to a gentleman of high importance. But he warns me that I must not be frightened by what I will see and above all, if I see money lying around not to worry about it."

Opening the door at the address where she is sent is a man of 40 years who "has the face of a bon vivant and a nose as if he had a bad cold!" He takes her on a tour of the apartment where, "Before letting me into another, darker room, he demands that I undress and put on a beautiful Chinese dress, white silk socks and golden slippers. In this room, all the wonders are gathered: the most beautiful collections of butterflies, lace, carpets, shawls. It's enough to give you a stiff neck. I want to see it all at once! It's magical."

She then writes, "I had noticed that from time to time he opened a pretty gold box from which he took, with a very small gold shovel, a pinch of white powder that he put in his nose; immediately afterwards he became very eloquent and I listened to him open-mouthed! 

"I took advantage of a moment when his back was turned to take a pinch of it myself and sniffed it. A while later, I felt very light; I was no longer thinking about anything. Life seemed beautiful... beautiful!"

Tamara de Lempicka: Surviving in Style

Tamara de Lempicka, "Young Woman in Green" (1931)

Just opened in San Francisco at the De Young museum: A retrospective of the work and life of Polish-born artist Tamara de Lempicka, the first exhibition of its kind in the US. 

Born Tamara Rosa Hurwitz, either in Warsaw or St. Petersburg to a family of Polish Jewish elites that encouraged her artistic interest with a tour of Italy. She married Tadeusz Lempicki in 1916, just before the October Revolution of the following year sent them fleeing Russia to Paris. Using the feminine declension of her husband's surname, Lampicka enrolled at free academies in the artistic community of Montparnasse, and began a lesbian affair with poet Ira Perrot, the subject of her first portraits. She began exhibiting at the Salon des Independants, held annually in Paris, under the masculine name Lempitzsky.

The timeline of Lempicka's life at the exhibit says that in 1922, "Tadeusz grows intolerant of his wife's affairs, cocaine use, late nights spent at clubs followed by valerian-induced sleep, and long work sessions listening to Richard Wagner at full volume." The couple divorced the year she painted a portrait of him, wherein his left hand (where his wedding ring would be worn) is purposely left unfinished. Lempicka picked up her paintbrush to support herself and her child,  exhibiting in the United States, and with the Société des Femmes Artistes Modernes in Paris. She subsequently married Baron Raoul Kuffner, becoming Baroness Kuffner.

Molly Tuttle, Brandy Clark and Patti Smith Rock Hardly Strictly Blue-Grass

The Annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass free music festival, held in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park through the generosity of investment banker/banjo player Warren Hellman, tends to have its musical acts comment on being in the city once called Yerba Buena. 

In 2023, Rufus Wainwright opened his set with his song "Beautiful Child" by saying it was written on acid and mushrooms on Yoko Ono's farm, gesturing to the crowd and saying, "so, it feels proper." 

Very Important Pothead Kris Kristofferson, who died just before this year's festival, dueted with Merle Haggard on his satirical song "Oakie from Muskogee" at the 2011 fest. "I think when someone's 70 years old, they ought to be able to smoke anything they want to smoke," Haggard began, bringing cheers from the crowd for the verse, "We still wear our hair grow long and shaggy / like the people in San Francisco do." Kristofferson added his own clever verse, which he sang with a wry smile: "We don't shoot that deadly marijuana / We get drunk like God wants us to do." 

Tuttle (center, in green) with her female fiddle and bass player at HSB.

This year, Molly Tuttle brought her righteous bluegrass band Golden Highway, with which she's won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass Album two years running. Tuttle spoke of being raised in California and said she was offered her first pot brownie at Hardly Strictly when her mother brought her to the festival. Now a Tennessean, Tuttle rocked the crowd with her song, "Down Home Dispensary" from this year's Grammy-winning "City of Gold" CD.

Hello legislator the voters have spoken
There’s too much politickin' and not enough tokin’
It’s an economic agricultural wonder
So legalize the southland and roll us a number
Hey mister senator I’m asking you please
Put up a down home dispensary in Tennessee

Tuttle also performed the guitar solo and vocal on Tokin' Woman Grace Slick's "White Rabbit," another nod to San Francisco. The song was also performed at the fest by the three female back-up singers from the pot-friendly Dead cover band Moonalice, which includes in its lineup 84-year-old Lester Chambers, who performed the Chambers Brothers classic "Time Has Come Today."