“I actually had a terrible experience,” Grumet said in an interview with HuffPost. “I was sleeping over at a friend’s house, and she had recently begun smoking weed. I wanted to try it with her, and I remember I just got a terrible migraine. So I didn’t try again until a couple years later.”
“There were just some members of the company who, I think more than anything, weren’t super excited about the title being just ‘Weed Shop,’” Heyman told HuffPost. “There were some instances of people not liking that they were doing a show about civil war, and then there were ads about a show called ‘Weed Shop.’”
“There are so many musicals that very overtly deal with sex, suicide, death and all kinds of subject matters that are deemed taboo and inappropriate,” she said. “It was kind of funny that having a show called ‘Weed Shop’ was such an edgy idea.”
When it came time to publicizing their show, Heyman said she and Grumet experienced similar difficulty. “There was a specific issue on Facebook when we created our fan page,” she said. “It got flagged because you can’t advertise for selling drugs on there, and we had to appeal it and say we’re not a weed shop ― which by the way is technically legal. It’s just a musical called ‘Weed Shop.’”
Grumet is an advocate for talking openly about cannabis as a way of combating the kind of bias that may have propelled the obstacles she and Heyman encountered. Throughout her creative endeavors Grumet works to foster a positive image of cannabis use and do that, she said, “intersectionally as a queer person and as a woman.”
“I came out to my friends as someone who was interested in women, not really knowing what that meant, when I was in 7th grade,” Grumet said. “And I came to college as an openly queer person, though I didn’t know that that’s what I wanted to call myself.”
As a cannabis user, Grumet said, she was one of the first of her friends to seek out a medical marijuana license in college and then to be vocal about her use. “It just seemed that if this was something that was legal then why not empower myself to do it,” she said. (Medical marijuana has been legal in California since 1996.)
“When I go to a party or social situation I am in control of what I’m ingesting because I bring it myself, and I don’t drink,” Grumet said. “At a party I’m usually the one with a vaporizer, or a joint and a lighter, or ready to pack the bowl, and it provides a place for me in a social setting. I always feel empowered by it, too. The first screenplay I ever finished was about a woman kingpin drug dealer at a very USC-type university because that’s what I wanted to see. I wanted to see a woman with that kind of power.”
But walk into any given cannabis dispensary ― especially on a big sales day like 4/20 ― and that’s not always the image of feminine power you’ll see. Dispensaries are notorious for hiring young, normatively good-looking women to work as “budtenders” in an effort to, as Grumet described it, “give off that friendly, sexual vibe in selling the product.”
“I knew I would have a really hard time if I wanted to get a job in that part of the industry because I don’t fit the mold of that kind of budtender,” Grumet said. When she’d peruse listings for potential openings, she said, the job descriptions frequently asked prospective applicants to “send pictures.”
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