WEEDS

Mary-Louise Parker is a very sexy actress. She’s around 46 but looks 36. My interest in the TV series, “Weeds,” now in its sixth season, is centered on her.

She plays Nancy Botwin, a seemingly Jewish suburbanite who, who, after the death of her husband, turns to marijuana dealing as a way to support her two sons. Although the show has many strange turns over its long history, I am going only on what I saw in a single evening—around four episodes during a marathon airing. Without knowing details of the evolving drama, what I saw presented a huge, self-sufficient narrative of its own. Of course, this narrative has as much to do with me as with the show itself.

Being from Jamaica, and quite familiar with the intricacies of the marijuana culture, I am on familiar ground. I’m also preoccupied with class and race—another bi-product of Jamaican heritage. And this show, while its ads feature all white people, the episodes I saw speak strongly to the melting-pot aspect of America. True, the staple characters are Botwin’s brother-in-law; a male city-council ally; her two sons; and a female part-nemesis whose story seems slightly detached from and parallel to the main one. But I was fascinated by non-white characters who might well not be part of the long-run of the series.

A Hispanic drug dealer is an unwelcome ally for Botwin; her wholesale dealers are an African-American mother and son, Conrad, an infatuated young worker in the bakery she owns is East Indian. The men, in their various fashions, are magnetized by her sensual allure, her classiness, her intelligence, her spunk. While the official descriptions of the series don’t mention this, her sexual proclivities, her openness to sex with men of any background—as in a very steamy sex scene with the Hispanic man--are very central to my take of the show’s meaning. This woman is a devoted mother. She doesn’t consume weed herself. The edginess of her world gets her into endless difficulties. She is also highly sensual, and can more easily engage sexually with someone for whom she has no tender feelings than with someone dear.

The themes I take away from my brush with the show is how hot it is. It’s a maelstrom of evolving cultural patterns in which class, race, sex, gender, drugs are seen from a perspective of change. And Parker as Botwin is the nexus of these changes.