A Toke of Their Esteem
Few Stars at High Times' Awards Show, but the Joint Is Buzzing

By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 26, 2006

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.

"I'm going to go out and grab Patrick on the street," says the colleague, "and get a roll or a wrap or something."

"Oh, you can do it in one of these back rooms," says Bloom, suggesting a convenient place to light up.

"No, I mean we're going to eat a sandwich."

Aside from seven major categories, which are voted on by readers in an online poll, Bloom himself decides who wins the 15 other Stoneys. To get nominated, a show/movie/DVD needs either obvious stoner content -- i.e., a big fat joint and munchie jokes -- or a subtle scene or two with some marijuana in it. Bloom watches everything, it seems, with an eye for his favorite herb, which is why "Brokeback Mountain" was nominated this year for best pot scene in a movie.

"It's very subtle, but there's a scene where the two guys are passing a joint back and forth," Bloom says.

Of course, a one-man nominating and judging system is somewhat unconventional, but a batch of strict rules and an organized academy of voters would really cut against the unstructured spirit of the Stoneys. The event had some of the hallmarks of an awards show, including a curvaceous blonde to hand out the trophies and envelopes containing the names of the winners. But aside from the host and a few guests, virtually everyone onstage was some white male whom nobody had ever heard of. And some of them tried to be funny. Like the guy who said "Robert Duvall" as everyone awaited the name of the winner of the best actor in a TV series. It actually was Justin Kirk, a star of "Weeds," and one of the few in-the-flesh winners to appear all night.

"You all disgust me," quipped Kirk. "I don't smoke marijuana. It's a gateway drug."

A comic named Doug Benson, of the VH-1 show "Best Week Ever," won Stoner of the Year. He said he'd like to thank his mother and father, even though they would never hear about this award, "so if you see them, be cool." This killed. And so did this joke, which Benson said he wrote not long ago while he was you know what:

"I recently saw a dog in a cage and the cage had a sign that said 'I bite.' And I was like, that is good to know, doggy. But that is not the most important thing about you. You should make a sign that says 'I make signs.' "