Inhale. Exhale.

I have not posted any cat images for a while. I believe that this one best expresses my New Year's resolution. Basically: keep breathing. Do the next right thing. One step at a time. And alla that.

Confessions of an Undercover Herbswoman, Part 2

(Part 1 is available here.)

If one does not toke the pot in high school, college and dormitory life usually offers multiple opportunities to do so. During my first two years at college in Iowa in the late 70s, I turned such invitations down and stuck with the sugary carbonated concoction known as "Champale" and the occasional cigarette as my preferred intoxicants.

I was just plain afraid of repercussions. Our resident assistant was a full-on law-and-order dorm-marm who called the students on our floor together one day to announce her zero-tolerance policy on weed. “If I even smell it, I’m calling the police,” she told us. “I am NOT kidding.” I believed her. I was even a little worried to play my Rick James album, fearing that the party-hearty song “Mary Jane” might catch her ears and put me under suspicion. After all, it declared:

I’m in love with Mary Jane

I’m not the only one.

If Mary wanna play around

I let her have her fun

She’s not the kind of girl

That you can just tie down

She likes to spread her love

And turn your head around…

There were a couple of young women down the hall from me who liked to live on the edge, however. Dorm-marm occasionally tagged along when her football-player boyfriend traveled to away games. During these authority-free nights, the stonerladies down the hall would invite a few neighbors into their room, stuff a towel or two at the bottom of the door, and share their Midwestern ragweed with any who desired it. I did feel a certain pull and a curiosity – my roommate was a frequent guest and her frothiness upon emerging from the undercover toking room was appealing. But my paranoid musings kept me in check: Dorm-marm might unexpectedly return early. Even if I just sat with the stoners and handed the joint around without partaking, the smell would stick to my clothes. The police would be called and I, the Rick-James-album-owning brown-skinned girl, would be fingered. Dorm-marm would tell the police, “She listens to that ‘Mary Jane’ crap all the time, after all – what more do you need to know?” I’d be arrested and convicted for Smelling Like Pot and Listening to Subversive Pot Songs. This, I imagined, would carry a sentence of several years, perhaps decades. My career-minded parents, so proud of me for receiving a full college scholarship, would be terribly, abysmally let down. I would never become the astronomer or meteorologist I’d planned on being. My post-prison job prospects, if any, would likely be limited to burger-flipping, housekeeping, or movie theater ushering. (Though, admittedly, ushering held a certain appeal …)

Being an underage drinker, though? Dorm-marm had absolutely NO problem with that.

                                             *           *           *

In my sophomore year -- the fall of 1979 -- Milos Forman’s film version of Hair came out and was shown at the college theater. [Here is its delightful opening sequence]. Several friends and I got buzzed on Marlboros and Blue Nun wine before viewing it one autumn Saturday night. I was already familiar with its music (the Broadway cast recording, which I owned, also had lyrics that I felt I had to hide from the ears of dorm-marm) but the film version -- with its exuberant dancing, irreverent songs, trippy psychedelic sequences, and antiwar message – gave me an exquisite thrill. At movie’s end, everyone remained seated in open-mouthed awe for a few moments. That silence whispered: goddamn, that was good.

The film had overflowed with a rambunctiously vivid heartfulness and an effervescent abandon that was missing from my timid, studious, undeclared-college-major life. And, of course, the significant ingredient in the film’s liberating call of the wild was: drugs. Particularly pot, hash, and acid.

Not Champale. Not Blue Nun. Not Marlboro Lights.

I need to get ahold of some honest-to-God real mind-bending shit someday, I told myself. These sweet wines and pissy beers are for church-goers, accounting majors, and bourgeois bitches.

(to be continued)