High-lights of the Smithsonian "Entertainment Nation" Exhibit and Report from DC and Mt. Vernon

The “Entertainment Nation” exhibit at the Smithsonian American History Museum in Washington, DC, highlights several Tokin' Women and men, and other sheroes and heroes. It opens with a pair of ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland as Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz," and the guide told us the exhibit was years in the making. (Garland was 13 years old when she sang "La Cucaracha" in a film short.)

The first Tokin' Woman I caught was Bessie Smith, with copy that said, "Pioneering African American blues women such as Bessie Smith sang about the virtues of economic and sexual independence from men...in 'Any Woman's Blues' she laments her affections for a man who continues to let her down." Smith also sang about reefer in "Gimme a Pigfoot" (1933). 

Included in the exhibit are Billie Holiday's 1939 recording of "Strange Fruit" and the Aretha Franklin album cover, "Young Gifted and Black" (a Nina Simone song), in front of the dress worn by Billie Jean King when she defeated Bobby Riggs in the 1973 "Battle of the Sexes." 

Very Important Pothead Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's jersey (#33) is included, along with a photo of Kareem executing a sky hook, and the text, "Basketball great Kareem Abdul-Jabbar ended his 20-year run in 1989 with a career 38,387 points, an NBA record that held until 2023...Early in his career he united his interest in Black history with his religious conversion to Islam and dedicated much of his time to social justice movements." Kareem made a study of the science on marijuana while a student at UCLA and decided to try it. He continues to activate with thoughtful commentary on his Substack site. 

 

Willie Nelson's red bandana is in the exhibit, and the accompanying text calls him a "bandana-wearing country music outlaw." It continues, "As the wolves of Wall Street prospered from Reaganomics, farm families struggled with doubling debt, interest rates at a staggering 21.5%, and collapsing crop prices.....Willie Nelson and other musicians took up their cause in a series of Farm Aid concerts that raised millions and moved a rural crisit to center stage." While wearing his iconic red bandana, Nelson recently chatted with Kaitlan Collins about the time he smoked pot on the White House roof during the Jimmy Carter administration.  

 

Presented along with the chairs sat in by Edith and Archie Bunker on "All in the Family" and Mr. Rogers' tennis shoes are the bullwhip and leather jacket Harrison Ford sported as "Indiana Jones" and a costume worn by Lucy Lawless as "Xena: Warrior Princess" (shown). Ford has never come out as a pot smoker, although some like Bill Maher have called for him to do so. Lawless came out as a supporter of medical cannabis in her native New Zealand in 2016. 

Sandwiched between a dress worn by The Supremes and Phyllis Diller's wig, gloves, and cigarette holder, a sort-of psychedelic poster (shown, above) is included with the sign, "Can you find the bands The Fugs and The Grateful Dead? Beat poets Alan Ginsburg and Neal Cassidy?" Beside a photo of a sign announcing an Acid Test, the caption says, "Many young Americans turned to countercultural entertainments, including recreational drugs, in hopes of finding themselves. In 1965 author Ken Kesey hosted the first of what he called 'Acid Tests,' parties fueled by the hallucinatory drug LSD, popularly known as acid....Acidheads sought pleasure and mind-altering insights, but recreational use of LSD sparked intergenerational debate about social norms and mainstream values." The debate continues: On a recent podcast, Joe Rogan and Matthew McConaughey discussed the nature of history of psychedelic experiences. 

Also depicted are Ellen DeGenreres's coming "out" and The Dixie Chicks' protest of the war in Iraq, asking the question, "When you protest what you feel are unjust or unnecessary acts by our government, are you a patriot or a traitor?" 

Already the Trump administration has scrubbed mention of his impeachments at the greater Smithsonian, and he has laid out his objections to the institution here. See it while it's still around. 

Around DC, I saw a few groups of National Guardsmen / other LEOs hanging around, not on patrol and looking bored (three at the Washington monument, six at the Lincoln). Tourists seemed largely ethnic (Asian, East Indian). Cab/Uber drivers all Arab. Service workers (restaurants, etc.) all Hispanic or Black. We are a melting pot. 

 

Another exhibit we saw, "The Two Georges" at the Library of Congress, quotes King George as saying George Washington would be the greatest man in the world for stepping down from office (something Trump ought to learn). Washington’s farewell address upon resigning the presidency, included in the exhibit, is read every year on his birthday in the Senate.  

The next day, I traveled to Washington's home Mt. Vernon, where I found out that this year's hemp seedlings there were eaten by geese. Since staffers had to go through much rigamarole from the state of VA to grow them, they decided not to replant this year. Generally they grow and process it onsite, I was told. I got to the spinning house where hemp is mentioned as a crop Washington grew. The period-costumed spinner there said it didn’t have to be carded as finely as linen, since it was mostly used for rope. 

It was also noted by our Mt. Vernon guide that while Washington had to be talked into opening a distillery, he at one time ran the biggest one in the US, after switching to growing wheat when the price of tobacco dropped in Europe. It was Treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton’s idea to place an excise tax on whiskey; he was a city boy who didn’t understand that subsistence farmers needed a cash crop. Washington reportedly didn’t feel the pinch at his level of production, and used his troops to enforce the law against the Whiskey Rebellion. 

 

I hear that today, a group of citizens that has walked from Philadelphia (once our nation's capital) to DC will present a copy of The Constitution to Congress as part of the We Are America march. As Trump continues to dismantle our Constitution and any dissent from the press while targeting left-wing groups and suspected narco-traffickers,  sending in troops to Memphis and betraying our country while enriching himself, let's keep the protests going.  

The Day Georgio Armani Died and All the Dominoes Fell (for Me)

When fashion designer Georgio Armani died on September 4, commentators noted how influential the Armani suits were as worn by Richard Gere in the 1980 film "American Gigolo." The plot had Gere's character, a male prostitute, framed for a murder after he begins an affair with the wife of a California senator and his handler sends him on a kinky sexual assignment. 

Sexual blackmail is the undercurrent of much of our politics these days, as the Jeffrey Epstein scandal comes close enough to Trump for him to pull out every possible distraction he can.  It made me think of the handmade sign I saw held by a Russian man at the "pussy power" march I attended after our Groper- and Grifter-in-Chief was first elected: "Trump is Kompromat," with a hammer-and-sickle image. 

The sign-carrying man told me that Putin commonly used sexual blackmail to control his political puppets, and Kompromat is what such compromising evidence is called. At the time, it had come out that Trump was involved in a "golden showers" event at a Russian hotel, and it was thought that could be enough to put him under Putin's control. 

Nowadays, Epstein's partner-in-crime Ghislaine Maxwell, after being interviewed at length by Trump's former lawyer, was quietly moved to a low-security prison, the first prisoner to be so transferred after a child sex trafficking conviction. 

Suddenly, this meme (above) popped up on social media, alleging that Maxwell's father developed the KGB "honeypot kompromat" scheme, which seemed to connect a lot of dots. I tried checking it out and was only able to confirm that Robert Maxwell was thought to be a triple agent, with ties to Israeli and Russian intelligence. Many mysteries remain, such as how Epstein amassed his wealth, what happened during the missing minute of videotape on the night he died in prison, and how deep his connections were to Trump, Bill Clinton, and many, many others. 

Sept. 4 happened to also be the day that many of Epstein's accusers appeared at a press conference in Washington, DC. Meanwhile, a second meme (below) popped up connecting Trump's mentor Roy Cohn (as depicted in the once-censored movie "The Apprentice") as also involved in sexual blackmail.  

Cohn was Sen. Joseph McCarthy's henchman during the shameful HUAC hearings that ruined many careers after people in the film industry were branded as communists and blacklisted by the studios.  

Which brings us up to today's news that actor, film industry leader, and activist Robert Redford has died. 

Redford appeared opposite Barbra Streisand in "The Way We Were," set during the 1940s when HUAC was in action. After reading (actually, listening to) Streisand's  autobiography My Name is Barbra, I was struck by the description of the scenes that were cut from the film, to de-politicize it. Now watchable in an extended cut of the film released on its 50th anniversary, the scene where Katie (Streisand) and Hubbell (Redford) break up originally centered on her having been snitched on to the HUAC committee as a communist. She sacrifices their marriage to save his reputation and career, not because of his brief infidelity (as the film puzzlingly depicts). 

Redford was vocal about his opposition to Trump's dictatorial ways, and now that rounding up liberals and their supporting organizations has been called for in the wake of the Charlie Kirk shooting, it's looking more and more like McCarthyism every day. With a lot of Kompromising material thrown in. 

UPDATE 9/19/25: Much to my horror, I saw Steve Bannon on his "War Room" podcast this morning touting the 2009 book "Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies," which he said Ann Coulter called the most important book next to the Bible.  According to its Amazon page, Author M. Stanton Evans "presents irrefutable evidence of a relentless Communist drive to penetrate our government, influence its policies, and steal its secrets."

In between shilling for a company that sells gold and spouting his usual dangerous nonsense, Bannon was derisive of people calling for unity after the horrible, indefensible Charlie Kirk shooting. You can have your kumbaya moments, he said, but I'll only call for unity after we've won, and only on our terms. After the attack on Paul Pelosi, Kirk said on his podcast, "Why is the conservative movement to blame for gay schizophrenic nudists that are hemp jewelry makers breaking into someone's home -- or maybe not" before suggesting "some amazing patriot" ought to bail Pelosi's attacker out. In recent weeks, Kirk came out against rescheduling marijuana and continued to call for the release of the Epstein files. None of which, or any of the many other disturbing things he said, means that he deserved to die, nor did Jimmy Kimmel or Stephen Colbert deserve to be silenced.  

Women Get Short Shrift in Hank Williams and Leo Tolstoy Biopics

So, finally women's stories (aka herstories) are being told, but often through the lens of men. Two biopics I tuned into of late tell the story of women married to famous men, and the miserable lives they lead trying to steer their husbands away from their demons, and have their own ambitions squashed. 

First I watched I Saw the Light, the 2015 biopic of Hank Williams, who penned an astonishing number of great country songs in his short life.  Bob Dylan has named Williams as a key influence in his work (just after Woody Guthrie). Nora Jones and Dylan are among the many artists who have covered Williams songs. 

Tom Huddleston as Williams is sufficiently lanky, and does a fine job singing and moving like Hank did onstage, even on "Lovesick Blues," with the characteristic yodeling that earned Williams the moniker "Lovesick Blues Boy." The song's performance at his 1949 Grand Ole Opry debut is depicted, without showing the six encores he earned that day. 

We see precious little of Williams's performances in the film, which instead focuses on his turbulent relationship with his first wife, Audrey Sheppard—well played by Elisabeth Olsen—and his mother, played by the always-excellent Cherry Jones. As depicted, Sheppard, a singer/songwriter herself, did much to advance Williams's career, and wanted to share the spotlight with Hank, but she wasn't considered an asset to his career by the (male) musical hierarchy. Hank's alcoholism and womanizing, along with the usual life-on-the-road challenges, helped to tear their marriage apart just before his tragic and untimely death in a car accident in 1953, at the age of 29. 

Using her married name Audrey Williams, Sheppard did have a recording career, starting with "Leave Us Women Alone," where she seems to have had her say at last. 

Next I watched "The Last Station," depicting the last days of Russian author Leo Tolstoy, in an Academy Award-nominated performance by Christopher Plummer. Playing his wife Sofia "Sonya" Tolstoy is the also-Oscar-nominated Helen Mirren, depicted largely as a money-grubbing shrew objecting vehemently to the machinations of his acolytes, who encourage him to give away his personal property and the copyrights to his books, instead of leaving them to his wife and children, (The couple had 13 children, 8 or 9 of whom survived into adulthood.)

Raised in wealth and privilege, Count Tolstoy enlisted in the Army after gambling debts ruined him. Horrified by the death toll and brutality of war, and inspired by Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, he wrote the sweeping War and Peace, considered by many to be one of the best novels ever written. At one point he went to live among the Bashkirs, a Turkish sect associated with cannabis. 

Tolstoy became a "spiritual anarchist" and pacifist, and his ideas on nonviolent resistance, influenced by the teachings of Jesus in the Bible—as expressed in such works as The Kingdom of God is Within You (1894)—were an important influence on Mahatma Gandhi, among others. In his last novel Resurrection (1899), the nobleman Dmitri Ivanovich Nekhlyudov realizes that the earth cannot really be owned and that everyone should have equal access to its resources and advantages, hinting that Tolstoy had such a view. 

The daughter of a court physician and named for Sophia, the goddess of wisdom, the Countess Tolstoy's maternal great-grandfather, Count Pyotr Zavadovsky, was the first Minister of Education in Russia's history. On the eve of their wedding, the 34-year-old Tolstoy famously shared with his 18-year-old bride his diaries, detailing his many previous sexual relations, and the fact that one of the serfs on his family's estate had borne him a son. 

Mirren is shown acknowledging this in "The Last Station," and lamenting the fact that while she was an early editor on her husband's writing (copying the lengthy "War and Peace" six times), now she "didn't matter." Sofia was left to shoulder the burdens of running the family farm and raising their children, while dealing with Tolstoy’s disciples showing up and living on the family estate. She contemplates killing herself with an opium overdose, and when Leo leaves her at the very end of his life, she tries to drown herself and is kept from seeing him before he dies. A tragedy as great as the fate of Anna Karenina. 

Sofia's diaries weren't published until 100 years after her death, reportedly because Russian authorities did not want negative press on Tolstoy. Her plight brings to mind the famous quote by Karl Marx's mother, who reportedly said, "If only Karell had made capital instead of writing about it." 

Both stories made me think of the memoir of Carolyn Cassady, the wife and mother Neal left behind while he took off On the Road. I'll be reading Sofia's diaries and listening to more of Audrey's music. 

Pitcher Tug McGraw on Smoking Grass (not Astroturf)

I did some investigation after spying a meme purporting that pitcher Tug McGraw once said, when asked if he preferred grass or Astroturf, "I don't know, I never smoked Astroturf." Turns out, it's true, and there's more to the story. 

Sly's Stony Name and Brian Wilson's "Good Vibrations"

It's a sad week when we lose two musical luminaries: Sly Stone and Brian Wilson. 

Sly & the Family Stone's Greatest Hits was one of the first albums I selected from the Columbia Record Club my family belonged to just after my 13th birthday. It opened with, "I Want to Take You Higher" and was full of positive, uplifting messages like, "You Can Make It If You Try" and "Everybody Is a Star." 

"Everyday People," the band's first #1 hit, was a perfect transition for me from nursery rhymes to rock and roll,  in the rhythm of a jump-rope rhyme with a funky twist: 

There is a blue one 

who can't accept the green one 

For living with a fat one, 

trying to be a skinny one 

Different strokes for different folks 

And so on and so on and scooby-dooby-dooby 

Ooh, sha-sha 

We got to live together 

 

The man who became known as Sly Stone was born as Sylvester Stewart in Denton, Texas, and raised in the Bay Area city of Vallejo in Northern California, where he performed gospel music starting at the age of 4 or 5 with his siblings (and future bandmates) Freddie and Rose. Already a successful songwriter and music producer by the age of 19, he produced Grace Slick's song "Somebody to Love" for her original band The Great Society. He soon became a popular D.J. at the San Francisco radio station KSOL.

In his memoir "Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)," he writes of that time:

That was when I completed my name. Back then, when they added a new on-air voice, they usually made up a DJ name. I was already using the Sly from the blackboard, but I didn't know the rest yet. "Sly Stewart" didn't sound quite right. Someone at the station, maybe Tom Johnson, tried to pin "Sly Sloan" on me. That didn't work at all-you couldn't even get it out of your mouth right. "Give me a few days to think of something better," I said. It didn't take that long. 

I went on the air and introduced myself as Sly Stone. I was cooking with a bunch of ingredients. It sounded right. I was already smoking marijuana. And there was a tension in the name. Sly was strategic, slick. Stone was solid. (Ray Charles would even have a song called "Let's Go Get Stoned," too, but that wouldn't come out for a few years yet.) Once I had my name, I started making up little rhymes around it and putting them on-air. I'm Sly Stone of KSOL, goodness for your mind, body, and your soul. 

The Wide and Wild World of Nancy Kwan

Upon the publication of her memoir, "The World of Nancy Kwan," acting legend Nancy Kwan was interviewed, partly in Cantonese, by Ronny Chieng on The Daily Show. Noting that she worked with and hung out with some of the top Hollywood icons of the 1960s, Chieng asked her, "What kinds of drugs were they doing back then?"

The 85-year-old actress cleverly turned the tables on Chieng, asking him, "What drugs do you do?" When he said he didn't do drugs, she assented, "Well, I don't do drugs either." Chieng joked that she could tell him the answer later in Cantonese, and she laughed.  

Kwan Tells the Opium War Tale

Born into a prosperous Hong Kong family with a British actress and model as her mother, Kwan begins her book by describing the Opium Wars, by which Britain gained control of Hong Kong and forced the importation of opium to balance trade. 

"The island's natural harbor made it a convenient stopping place or British trading ships (the ones from other Western countries) sailing to and from Southeast Asia," she writes. "These merchants were unhappy about their commercial dealings with China because they were at the wrong end of a trade imbalance. There was a high demand for Chinese imports such as tea, silk, and porcelain in European countries, but the Chinese were less interested in Western goods. The British East India Company solved the problem by licensing private traders to operate a market guaranteed to become a booming business: the opium trade."

"Opium was used for medicinal purposes in China but not for recreation until these foreign merchant ships provided a steady supply—and collected hefty payments in gold and silver. Predictably and as planned, a large percentage of the Chinese population became addicted to the drug. When the emperor saw the negative effect that opium addiction had on his country, he tried to ban it and destroyed a large shipment, causing British merchants to lose a fortune. They cried foul, and and the first of two 'Opium Wars' ensued in 1839. England was a stronger military power than China and easily won the war, then demanded more favorable trade terms."

As a child escaping the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during WWII, Kwan writes that she contracted an unspecified illness and, lacking access to a doctor, was treated by her aunt with traditional, medicinal herbs, and recovered. 

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."