Reefer Madness

Reefer Madness

The 1936 cult classic movie Reefer Madness has been called one of the worst movies ever made. I suppose that is what made it a cult classic. It was produced by a church group as a cautionary tale for the youth of America to warn them about the hazards of recreational drug use (mostly marijuana) and how it could lead to harder drugs, personal failure and general societal malaise. In overshooting its mark, it instead gave rise to a feeling that the older generation didn’t have a clue and that none of what the movie decried was factual. It almost sounds like a reverse diagnosis of what we are experiencing today with the Coronavirus Madness that we are experiencing every day on national TV, hosted by the Ass in the Hat himself. Rather than the “establishment” being the purveyor of misinformation, it is the anti-establishment (a.k.a. Trump and his right-wing cronies like Mark Grenon and his MMS brand of bleach disinfectant). When people are forced to suspend belief because they are being inundated with lies and actually harmful advice, it hurts everyone because no one knows what to believe or tends to follow good advice for fear that it too is bad advice. The “We Are On Our Own” thinking is gaining momentum daily at the expense of mounting American lives.

But in this weekend “Extra” story, I am not going to harp on either Trump or Coronavirus, no matter that I despise both. Instead I want to talk about a story posted this morning on the blog from my friend Steve Larsen (https://stevelarsen.net/blog/). He tells the story about running into another Steve Larsen who had jumped ahead of him to get stevelarsen.com and the relationship he has built over time with that Bizarro Steve Larsen. I too had a similar encounter with a doppelgänger, so I thought I had better share it.

My name actually started off in 1954 at my birth as Richard Albert Prosdocimi. That was my father’s birth name and it was from the Bolsano region of Italy, near the Slavic-influence countries (hence the Slavic-sounding name). That name seemed to satisfy my father while he lived in Venezuela, where my parents met and lived for 8-9 years. Strangely enough, my mother’s maiden name was Uher, a shortened version of the Slavic name Uhrovic. One can only wonder what my mother was thinking trading Uhrovic for Uher for Prosdocimi. When we moved to California in 1958 my father apparently found Prosdocimi a career-limiting name. His first priority was to shed his life-limiting family (he left my mother, sisters and I shortly after getting his free-pass the the United States), and then turned to his ill-fitting name. In 1962, while my mother was in graduate school in Wisconsin, my father changed his name to the more American-sounding Marin, which had been his mother’s maiden name. I came home from summer camp to be told by my mother that I had a new last name. She explained that for legal reasons she felt it was better to keep pace with dear old Dad’s name changes….though I suspect she was tiring of spelling Prosdocimi for people as well. That was momentarily problematic since my neighborhood nickname had been Pros. But these things pass and I became Richard Albert Marin.

Despite my mother’s dislike for nicknames, I chose to adopt Rich as my nickname (not that she ever once called me that). Not Rick, not Richie and certainly not Dick. I would be Rich Marin, which for some reason worked for me.

Fast forward to my college years when Cheech & Chong were all the rage with their dope-smoking pitter-patter comedy. Tommy Chong was the real heavy-duty doper, but Cheech was no slouch either. Cheech was none other than Rich Marin by legal name. Funny coincidence, but nothing more.

Fast forward again to 1989 when I bought a house in the Hamptons. As it turned out, Cheech’s entertainment success had caused him to take up summer residence in the Hamptons. By 1989 no one was really listing their numbers intentionally in the white pages of the telephone directory, but we still had landline phones and you had to specifically ask to NOT be listed, which seemed a bit pretentious. Google was still a ways off. So, one night at 2am I was awoken by a call to my Quiogue residence whereupon a sky-high stoner asked, “Hey, are you Cheech Marin, Dude?” I said I was not and hung up. He only called perhaps three more times that night before getting it through his vapor cloud that I was not Cheech. This happened every so often in the Hamptons, but I was too lazy to delist myself and figured it would get old soon enough.

In 1992 I bought my first of several ski houses in Deer Valley, Utah. I loved to ski and I loved the groomed slopes of Deer Valley. I averaged probably 35 ski days a year (I was a pretty decent skier) and had great family fun along the way. Life was much easier and cheaper out there if you committed to Deer Valley by getting a Deer Valley credit card, so I did that. Suddenly, one day I got called by Deer Valley and asked to come into the office at the base lodge at 11am. I had no idea what was going on, but suspected I had been caught speeding on a blue run or something. When I got to the office they asked me to sit and wait for the Director of DV Skiing. All of a sudden, in walked a short long-haired guy with a pair of powder skis, generally called Fat Boys because of their shape. He was seated next to me and the Director came out to talk to us together. It turns out that my partner in crime was none other than Cheech Marin. The problem was that we both had Rich Marin Deer Valley credit cards and it was causing enough confusion that Deer Valley wanted one of us to agree to a change of card name. I immediately said he should use Cheech and I would use Rich. He demurred saying that he didn’t like being that “obvious”.

That’s when I pointed to his Fat Boys that had long reefers painted on them and I suggested his secret was probably out already. He laughed. He laughed even more when I told him owed me many nights sleep, Dude, for all the Hamptons wake up calls. That really got him laughing and he finally agreed to my name change suggestion.