The Acid Queen: Rosemary Leary

A new biography titled The Acid Queen sheds light on Rosemary Woodruff Leary, who was arrested with her husband Timothy Leary for carrying marijuana over the Mexican border, and during the infamous G. Gordon Liddy Millbrook raid, both in 1966.

The book's author Susannah Cahalan became interested in "mind opening" and psychedelics after her brain disorder autoimmune encephalitis was misdiagnosed as mental illness, spawning her bestselling book, Brain on Fire. 

Cahalan appeared by Zoom at a recent event in Berkeley, CA sponsored by the Women's Visionary Congress, a group that highlights psychedelic women who "often disappeared behind there more famous and florid male partners." She drew on Rosemary’s autobiography Psychedelic Refugee and her archives at the New York public library (where there are 400 boxes in Timothy's archives and only 25 for Rosemary, largely redacted FBI files).

Rosemary Woodruff, Cahalan writes, had her first mystical experience in 1943, the summer after her eighth birthday. Walking alone near her home, "she felt a tingling sensation rise up from her spine. The trees crackled with energy. She had plugged herself into the electrical grid, and the whole world flickered in confirmation of her sudden second sight: everyone and everything were connected. It happened for a second, a nanosecond, but that shining moment of divine union would stay with her....Other realms called. She longed to return to that blissful state."

The statuesque beauty worked as a model and a stewardess, professions in which "uppers" were regularly handed out to young women to keep them slim and active. In 1959, she had a small role in the film "Operation Petticoat" starring Tony Curtis and Cary Grant. During publicity for for the film, Grant went public for the first time about his use of LSD, telling a reporter that it saved his marriage to Betsy Drake (who lead him to try it). 

Living a Bohemian life in New York City, Rosemary dated jazz musicians and downed diet pills by day and marijuana at night. She "learned to find pleasure in the sensation of her heart beating in her ears when she smoked cannabis in jazz clubs. And how to portion out correct dosing of the hash fudge she baked from Alice B. Toklas’s famous 1954 cookbook. Like a growing number of Americans, Rosemary was joining an emerging drug subculture, not for medical or spiritual use, but for pleasure, identification, and belonging," Cahalan writes. A peyote experience made he realize she needed to leave her junkie boyfriend, packing her bags and leaving him the next day. 

Trumpty Dumpty Dumps on Us All

Humpty Trumpty by Barbara Kelley

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. 

RIP Diane Keaton, Who Played Charming Potheads on Film

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."

Art: Alejandro Mogollo

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 Address Cannabis, and Joe Rogan, in Her Book "107 Days"

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."

Trump and the UK's Cannabis Connections: Shakespeare, Kipling and Orwell, plus King Charles and Princess Kate

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 Kipling was 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." 

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." 

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.