A Toke of Their Esteem

Few Stars at High Times' Awards Show, but the Joint Is Buzzing

NEW YORK -- Here's what you get when a bunch of stoners organize an awards show featuring a bunch of stoners honoring stoner-related entertainment:

Giggles, smoke, miscues, "mari-juuuuaaaaaana!" shout-outs, rambling speeches, more giggles, more smoke, and every once a while, dead silence on an empty stage.

Here's what you do not get: celebrities. They were in strikingly short supply at the fifth Stoney Awards ceremony Tuesday night at B.B. King's, a nightclub in Times Square.

The show, a creation of the weed-smitten editors of High Times magazine, is an attempt to raise the magazine's profile and boost its ad revenue by luring movie and TV stars into its orbit and making pot seem . . . mainstream. Categories include best stoner movie, best TV series, best actor and actress in a movie, best stoner DVD, best unreleased film, best pot scene in a movie and stoner of the year.

But the most famous face in the house belonged to Christopher Knight, better known as Peter Brady, the middle son on "The Brady Bunch." Along with his wife, Adrianne Curry, he showed up to accept a trophy -- a working water pipe -- as winners of best reality TV series for "My Fair Brady."

"I want to thank my husband for sitting there and watching me get high the entire taping of the show," burbled Curry, clutching her Stoney.

But most of the famous and semi-famous stayed away as if the event had the measles. Many winners sent a producer or director to accept on their behalf, or they taped a video acceptance speech. Even Tommy Chong -- yes, the man who put the Chong in Cheech and Chong -- was a no-show. Maybe it's because he served time after a 2003 conviction for selling drug paraphernalia and was worried about taking a victory lap in a room full of tokers.

Whatever the reason, he missed the chance to walk down a green carpet that the High Times crew rolled out near the entrance of B.B. King's. Moments after the show started -- late, if you can believe it -- the entire room was bathed in a pungent haze. Nearly every award presenter and accepter announced that he or she was, like, really really stoned. The rapper Redman, the evening's host, harped on his baked-ness each time he staggered onstage.

Pot-smoking remains illegal in New York, but the event's organizers were banking on, and got, some tolerance from both the management of B.B. King's and the cops, who were nowhere in sight. "It would probably be a bad idea to put a bong on the table or something like that," says Steve Bloom, a High Times editor at large, speaking a few hours before showtime Tuesday, as he and colleagues scrambled to put together the event. "B.B. King's attitude was sort of don't ask, don't tell."

Bloom has organized the Stoneys since their inception in 2000. The show started small, in a modest downtown club, and grew over the next few years. But the show was canceled in 2004, as the magazine tried to reinvent itself as a more broadly countercultural rag -- with pieces on politics and prostitution, for instance, in addition to a lot of close-up horticultural photography. That strategy apparently infuriated the inhaling multitudes who have been High Times' core audience since its inception 32 years ago. (Circulation is now "about 150,000," Bloom says.) After a year of this experiment, management changed course again, laid off some staffers and reclaimed the high ground, if you will.

"We have gone back to our marijuana roots," says Bloom, an 18-year veteran of the magazine, with offices on Park Avenue South in Manhattan.

Bloom is sitting in a backstage room, which at the moment is filled with swag bags for what will pass for VIPs this evening. Among the goodies: something called Da Bombe Blunts, a bag of Sea Salt Toasted Hemp Seeds and a bag of peanut-butter-filled Hempreztels. Bloom is awaiting the evening's programs, to be placed at every table in the house, and they finally arrive from the printers, carried by a High Times colleague.