At Its 40th Anniversary, "The Breakfast Club" Cast Says Pot-Smoking Scene Was Improvised

UPDATE 8/25: In honor of its 40th anniversary, "The Breakfast Club" will be shown in cinemas nationwide on Sept. 7 and again on Sept. 10.

The reunion of all five "The Breakfast Club" cast members on the 40th anniversary of the film is kind of hilarious, because they were still the characters they played.

In the iconic 1985 film that was said to define Generation X, Molly Ringwald played Claire The Good Girl against Judd Nelson as Bender The Rebel. Ally Sheedy played The Freak, Emilio Estevez The Jock and Anthony Michael Hall The Brain. Forced to serve high school detention together, the disparate characters bond after they smoke a joint together. 

Speaking of the film's writer/director John Hughes, Nelson said, "He was the first writer who could ever write someone who was young, without them being less," Nelson said. "Except less old." 

Telling the story of watching Hall perform his hilarious, stoned, "chicks can't hold deir smoke" routine, Nelson said that, "In the middle of close-camera coverage of the routine, the camera runs out of film but Hughes doesn't say, 'Cut.'... It's something I've never seen since. It's a reflection of his affection for the characters that he created."   

When the interviewer asked Hall how he managed to play being stoned because, "Surely, you'd never been stoned at 16 years old," the actor was quick to quip, "If I may, don't call me Shirley," an Airplane reference the crowd appreciated. Then in true Brainy fashion, looking down, he said, "Uh, was I stoned at 16, yeah maybe." Bender chimed in, "Some people start late." 

Easter/Ishtar Falls on 4/20 Once More

Once again, as in 2014, Easter Sunday falls on 4/20. This time, cannabis retailers seem to be co-celebrating the dual holiday, with Easter-themed decorations and events. 

Easter, the celebration of Jesus's resurrection, is the most sacred day of the Christian year. In ancient Babylon, around the spring equinox, people celebrated the resurrection of their god Tammuz, who was brought back from the underworld by his mother the fertility goddess Innana, known in Akkadia as Ishtar, pronounced “Easter” in most Semitic dialects. Flowers, eggs, goats and rabbits, among other agricultural products and animals, were the symbols of the holiday then, as now.

Ostara (1884) by Johannes Gehrts

Ishtar/Ostara and Her Connection to Easter

"In ancient Sumeria, Ishtar was held in high esteem as a heavenly monarch," writes Jeanne Achterberg in Woman as Healer. "Her temples have been found at virtually every level of excavation." The Ishtar Gate to the inner city of Babylon was considered one of the ancient wonders of the world.

Also called the Queen of Heaven, Ishtar was a compassionate, healing deity. Her medicine kit likely included plant allies, and one of them, known as the "aromatic of the Goddess Ishtar," was likely cannabis. 

As the land of Sumer became a perpetual battlefield, Ishtar
became the goddess of war and destiny, and became more
sexualized, even as women were restricted from education
and the healing arts.

In mankind’s first written story The Epic of Gilgamesh
(circa 2000 BC), the cruel king Gilgamesh calls Ishtar
a predatory and promiscuous woman, and rebukes her
advances, just before taking off with his buddy Enki-
du to chop down the great cedar forest. Gilgamesh’s
repudiation of Ishtar, some scholars say, signifies a rejection
of goddess worship in favor of patriarchy in ancient times.

One of the interpreters of the Epic of Gilgamesh, discovered in tablets at the Library of Ashurbanipal in Nineveh in the 1850s, was Leonidas Hamilton, who published a translation in 1884 that gives Ishtar top billing over Izdubar (Gigamesh), subtitled "The Babylonian Goddess of Love and the Hero and Warrior King." Hamilton writes, "Ishtar... may be identified with Eostre of the Germans, or Easter. To this goddess our Saxon or German ancestors sacrificed in April...from thence arose our word Easter, which the Saxons retained after their conversion to Christianity, so that our Easter-day is nothing more nor less than Ishtar's day." Hamilton cites the Hebrew and English lexicon from John Parkhurst. 

Some have tried to debunk the Ishtar/Easter connection, saying the holiday is named only after the German goddess Ostara (pictured), "the divinity of the radiant dawn" (Grimm), doubtlessly a reincarnation of Ishtar, who the Babylonians called "the morning star" and "the perfect light." 

Art Show Kicks off San Francisco's 4/20 Week "Space Walk"

The “Higher Visions: Art of the Plant” and “Keep Glowing” blacklight poster exhibition at the Haight Street Art Center in San Francisco served as a fine and fitting opening party for this year's SF Space Walk today. 

A High-light is the brilliant “Stoned Wars” poster series from Emek, who I am told designed the poster for the concurrent Coachella Music Festival this year. Emek’s work includes take-offs on Star Wars characters and the Peter Tosh “Legalize It” album cover. I also liked the clever, feminist-minded digital collages from Alexe Reyes.

Female-run Moon Made Farms and Sonoma Hills Farm were collaborators on the exhibit. Plants grown by Moon Made are presented as in a herbarium, beautifully pressed and framed. In the blacklight poster exhibit, my favorite was the irreverent “Pink Jesus” poster designed for Sonoma Hills, featuring a female figure and the banner, “SHE HAS RESIN.”

Outdoors on the patio, stunning portraits of female growers from the Emerald Triangle are presented as part of “The Farm and Feminine” project from GrupoGreenlit. 

Inside, the wonderful documentary Tending the Garden was shown. It interviews couples practicing regenerative agriculture to grow cannabis and other crops in Humboldt and Mendocino counties, bucking the trend of corporatization that is squeezing out craft cultivators in California and elsewhere.

The exhibit, I am told, will be up through mid-May. The Center is open Thursday–Sunday, 12-6 PM.

The party kicked off a week's worth of daily events in San Francisco and the surrounding Bay Area. On Wednesday 4/16 Snowtill will drop their living soil indoor "Mirage" strain drop at 7 Stars in Richmond. And on Thursday 4/17 is a hand-picked sun-grown flower showcase at Solful in Irving St. in SF.  

The event will culminate in a 4/20 (Easter Sunday) reception at Mirus Gallery in SOMA featuring 10 brands. While you're in the city, you might want to check out the annual "Hunky Jesus" contest from the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.  

The Great Gatsby at 100

Let's raise a glass--and a J--to the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby, the jazz-age classic from F. Scott Fitzgerald that may be the first novel about a drug dealer. 

Fitzgerald had a distant cousin, Mary Surratt, who was hanged in 1865 for conspiring to assassinate Abraham Lincoln. But he was named for his ancestor Francis Scott Key, who wrote the lyrics to “The Star Spangled Banner.” 

Raised in a middle-class family with an alcoholic father in Rochester, NY and St. Paul, MN, he excelled in the Catholic schools he attended and became one of the first Catholics to attend Princeton University.

Apparently, he was a bit of a rebel. The protagonist of his second novel The Beautiful and Damned (1922) has this exchange with a friend:

“Did they ban cigarettes? I see the hand of my holy grandfather.”
“He’s a reformer or something, isn’t he?”
“I blush for him.”

Anthony Patch, who stands in for Fitzgerald in the story, is the grandson of Adam J. Patch, a reformer in the mold of Anthony Comstock (for whom Patch is named). In 1873 Comstock created the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, an institution dedicated to supervising the morality of the public Patch speaks disdainfully of the “shocked and alarmful eyes” of “chroniclers of the mad pace of America.” 

Fitzgerald wrote his third novel,  The Great Gatsby, published on April 10, 1925, while living in Europe and friendly with fellow Lost Generation authors Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway and others.  Known to be a serious drinker, in 1929, he contributed to the New Yorker an autobiography of a life spent drinking. Since while he was partying and writing marijuana "reefers" will still legal and available, I wonder if he did more than drink, and if The Great Gatsby reflects this.

Sidney Bechet and the Steppenwolf

In 1926, novelist Herman Hesse attended performances of the Revue Nègre featuring Josephine Baker and Sidney Bechet. Steven C. Tracy, professor of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts, writes that the character of Pablo in Hesse's novel Steppenwolf was "inspired by Bechet's playing."

The novel's narrator Harry (Hesse) is older than more staid than the free-wheeling Pablo, who plays music ecstatically. (Hesse was 20 years older than the Creole musician Bechet.) Harry is introduced to Pablo by a character named Hermine, an androgynous creature named it seems for Hess and perhaps Hermes, the god who transports souls to the underworld. With a face "like a magic mirror to me," Hermine seemed to know all about Harry, though he muses, "Perhaps she might not understand everything of my spiritual life, might not perhaps follow me in my relation to music, to Goethe, to Novalis or Baudelaire."  

Harry tries conversing with Pablo about classical music, but their conversations lead nowhere. Hesse writes: 

His business was with the saxophone in the jazz-band and to this calling he appeared to devote himself with love and passion.... Apart from this, however, he confined himself to being beautiful, to pleasing women, to wearing collars and ties of the latest fashion and a great number of rings on his fingers. His manner of entertaining us consisted in sitting beside us, in smiling upon us, in looking at his wrist watch and in rolling cigarettes—at which he was an expert. His dark and beautiful Creole eyes and his black locks hid no romance, no problems, no thoughts.....

Once when I showed a certain irritation, and even ill-humor, over one of the fruitless attempts at conversation he looked in my face with a troubled and sorrowful air and, taking my left hand and stroking it, he offered me a pinch from his little gold snuff-box. It would do me good. I looked inquiringly at Hermine. She nodded and I took a pinch. The almost immediate effect was that I became clearer in the head and more cheerful. No doubt there was cocaine in the powder. 

Hermine told me that Pablo had many such drugs, and that he procured them through secret channels. He offered them to his friends now and then and was a master in the mixing and prescribing of them. He had drugs for stilling pain, for inducing sleep, for begetting beautiful dreams, lively spirits and the passion of love...."

Sidney Bechet: Viper Mad

Watching "Finian's Rainbow" for St. Patrick's Day, I was reminded that Don Francks, who played Woody in that movie, was a Canadian Native American who gave up alcohol at the age of 21 and liked to sing a medley of "Smokin' Reefers" and "Viper Mad." 

From what I've been able to uncover, "Viper Mad" is a Sidney Bechet composition that was first recorded as "Pleasure Mad" by the likes of Blossom Seeley, Whitey Kaufman, and Ethel Waters starting in 1924. Bechet's co-author was composer and lyricist Rousseau Simmons. But in 1938, just as the Marijuana Tax Act took effect, Bechet recorded the tune as "Viper Mad" with lyrics like: 

Wrap your chops
'round this stick of tea
Blow this gage
And get high with me
Good tea is my weakness
I know it's bad
It sends me gate and I can't wait
I'm viper mad

Jasmine Crockett and Cannabis

While most Democrats are wringing their hands over the Trump/Musk takeover of our democracy, Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas has been telling it like it is. PBS's Evan Smith introduced her as someone who has "emerged as the raised voice and clenched fist" against Trump/Musk in an "Overhead" interview a few days ago.  Asked by Smith about her fellow Democrats' response to Trump, she said, "Resistance means different things to different members of the caucus. For me, it's to get a little rowdy."

The NRCC has homed in on Crockett, after she spoke at the Democratic National Convention last August, when she praised Kamala Harris for holding police to account over the death of Brianna Taylor in a botched drug raid. 

Now I see under the headline, "How a marijuana case fuelled Jasmine Crockett's rise to presidential critic" that during her time as a public defender, "a black juvenile caught with a brownie laced with marijuana in small towns was granted a mandatory felony conviction." Reportedly, Crockett refused to accept a plea bargain for a 17-year-old black client being tried as an adult as an accomplice to murder. Facing 47 years in prison, he was offered 10 years instead for pleading guilty to a drug possession charge. Crockett maintained there was no evidence for her client's crime and got the case dismissed. 

In 2021, Crockett filed House Bill 1233, to make it easier to prescribe low-THC cannabis under the Texas Compassionate Use Program. “What’s a medical refugee? One of the countless folks leaving Texas for a state with medical marijuana so they can receive the lifesaving treatments they need. We can not let stigma and politics interfere with medicine and evidence-based treatments. That’s why I filed HB 1233,” Crockett wrote in a series of tweets on 4/20. “Doctors know what’s best for their patients — not the government. HB 1233 gives physicians full discretion over medical cannabis treatments including the dosage, potency and route of administration. Medical marijuana isn’t just used to treat uncomfortable conditions — physicians rely on this to treat deadly ailments and see great results not achieved through traditional pharmaceuticals.”