Celebrating famous female cannabis connoisseurs throughout herstory to the present day.
All contents copyrighted. "Bright Leaf" artwork by Jean Hanamoto, camomoto at Spoonflower.com
Apart from watching our country's comedians (when they are permitted to air), about the only solace I have in these dark authoritarian days is attending peaceful protests like the huge No Kings Marches that happened on Saturday all over the nation. The camaraderie, the clever signs, and the knowledge that the resistance is alive, bolstered my spirits for another day of living in the USA.
But nothing quite prepared me for the uber-infantile, incredibly nasty and undemocratic AI video that Trumpty Dumpty posted on his social media after an estimated seven million Americans marched in protest of his administration's autocratic actions.
In the video, he sports a crown and flies a plane named King Trump that dumps massive shit bombs on protesters, including young left-wing influencer Harry Sisson (just after giving Charlie Kirk the Medal of Freedom). As the Turkish proverb goes, "When a clown moves into a palace, he doesn't become a king. The palace becomes a circus."
It was bad enough that the day before the rallies, Trump freed from prison and released from paying restitution the convicted fraudster George Santos, perhaps pandering to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has surprisingly become a critic of the Trump administration and is ready to vote to release the Epstein files.
UPDATE: CA Governor Gavin Newsom issued a statement, saying: “Diane Keaton was a true Californian. She was a self-described oddball, uniquely stylish, deeply creative, funny, and an acting legend who could steal the screen in comic and dramatic roles alike. She was in a class all her own, an icon."
The sad news hit today that Diane Keaton, who won an Oscar in 1977 for playing a charmingly ditzy pothead in Annie Hall (1977), has died at age 79.
Keaton, whose last name at birth was Hall, was doubtlessly an inspiration for her character in the film, which also picked up Oscars for Best Director (Woody Allen), Best Writing and Best Picture.
The original title was Anhedonia, meaning the inability to
experience pleasure. Allen's character suffers from the
condition until he meets Annie, who with all of her fumbling and self-consciousness is a
beautiful vessel of pleasure.
Alvy tells Annie that her whole body is an erogenous zone, and soon it is revealed that she insists on smoking pot before they make love.
When Alvy objects, comparing it to a comic getting a laugh too easily,
Annie tells him if he'd only smoke with her, he wouldn't have to see a
therapist. Cinemablend ranked her at #6 as only woman on their list of top 10 movie potheads on the strength of her performance.
Kamala Harris's new book "107 Days" about her presidential campaign says of her time as District Attorney of San Francisco:
"I was one of the first elected progressive district attorneys, looking for ways to keep nonviolent offenders out of jail rather than put them in it. I didn’t seek jail time for simple marijuana offenses. My Back on Track initiative, connecting offenders with services and jobs, and also taking care of their mental health by doing things like hooking them up with counseling and gym memberships, worked so well it became a model for other jurisdictions. It is true that prosecution rates for violent crime increased on my watch. If you rape a woman, molest a child, or take a life, consequences should be serious and swift. I don’t apologize for that."
Cannabis comes up only one other time in her book, discussing negotiations to be interviewed by Joe Rogan on his podcast. "I wanted to go on Joe Rogan’s podcast on October 25. He chose Trump instead," she recounts.
"I wasn’t in the weeds on any of it. I left that up to my staff," Harris writes. "They’d suggested topics that might interest Rogan’s audience, such as cannabis, social media censorship, and crypto. Rogan’s team said they just wanted to discuss the economy, immigration, and abortion. Again, I was fine with that."
In what must have reminded the Brits of Billy Bob Thornton's portrayal of the US President in "Love, Actually," Donald Trump made his second state visit to the UK, where he embarrassingly read a speech that praised British authors Shakespeare, Dickens, Tolkien, Lewis, Orwell, and Kipling. "Incredible people," he ad-libbed after reading the list.
At least three of those authors have possible cannabis connections, as do King Charles and Princess Kate.
Clay pipe fragments excavated from Shakespeare's Stratford-upon-Avon
home were found in 2001 to contain small amounts of cocaine and myristic acid - a
hallucinogenic derived from plants, including nutmeg. In Sonnet
#76, he wrote that a "noted weed"
inspired his creativity. His father dealt in contraband sheep's wool.
Rudyard Kiplingwas given "a stiff dose of chlorodyne" to treat a bout of dysentary in 1884 at the age of 18. This mixture of opium, tincture of cannabis, and chloroform "hit him with the force of a
revelation. In modern parlance, it 'blew his mind,'" writes a biographer. A character in Kipling's novel Kim, says, "News is
not meant to be thrown about like dung-cakes, but used sparingly - like
bhang."
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."
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.
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.)
