When we traveled to the Emerald Cup in Santa Rosa a few years ago, several people insisted that we meet and interview Frenchy Cannoli. Little did we know then that our precious moments with him would add up to this little Legacy Video of his life story that we now share with you today, as an homage to the man, the loving legend and talented hashishin.
The 2017 Emerald Cup was an amazing venue. Farmers, distributors, entrepreneurs and aficionados all gathered to learn and share information about their favorite plant – Cannabis. What better way to enjoy the holiday season than with the fresh piney-scents of sweet pungent flowers in the air?
It was my first experience with people speaking about Cannabis freely in a gargantuan space filled with all iterations of the plant – dabs, flowers, salves, ointments, etc. The fairgrounds were packed to the rafters with all things Cannabis. It was frankly very stupefying, after all the decades I have had to look over my shoulder before whispering to only people I trusted about the topic of marijuana.
There was this one time in the 1980s when I was sitting on the local beach wall smoking a pipette when a bicycle cop busted me and put me in handcuffs. He rifled through my bag and found a film cannister with a bud in it. I tossed the pipette – a glass tube – onto the sand where try as he might, the cop could not find it. But that one bud earned me a $100 fine (that’s like $1,000 in today’s currency), derision from a “to-protect-and-serve” public servant, and a splash of PTSD.
So the idea of cruising through smoke-filled halls with wall-to-wall tables of goodies for three days was a dream come true.