POT-SMOKING NUDIST SELLS MELONS ON THE BEACH -- NO JOKE

Even in recession, the world remains full of opportunity.

For example, have you ever considered a rewarding career in naked
fruit vending?

Or marketing your own line of cannabis cookies, naked?

Never crossed your mind? Me neither. I have no aptitude for nudity. I
always forget to take off my socks.

But without further delay, let me introduce someone with a nice set
of aptitudes, Mary Jean Dunsdon, who is at once an entrepreneur,
marijuana activist and nudist.

Her story is so quintessentially Canadian. Without the socks. Dunsdon
was born in Cold Lake. Her mother was a macrame maven; her dad an
Armed Forces fighter pilot. After high school, the army brat moved to
Vancouver to study theatre.

Somewhere in there she started smoking pot seriously and getting
naked at Wreck Beach. That led to an idea. That idea involved taking
her melons down to Wreck Beach and selling them nude to nudists. It
worked. Hers were the finest melons on the beach and the nude people
rejoiced in them.

Oh come on, I meant watermelons.

Dunsdon earned the nickname Watermelon, which is also now her stage
name. So no, Watermelon is not just your average comely, nudist pot
activist. She also does public speaking events, with stand-up comedy thrown in.

Thursday she was in Edmonton, wearing clothes. (Sigh). The student
association at MacEwan College invited her to speak at the downtown campus.

A number of students protested, claiming publicity posters with a
picture of Watermelon wearing only melons was obscene and demeaning
to women. But the student association, which hosts speaker events on
everything from sexuality to religion, stood its ground.

"The goal is to make students think," said Amy Trefry, one of the
association's vice-presidents. So Watermelon took to the stage to
tell her story of being arrested for her retail ventures.

It wasn't her melons that attracted police attention. It was her
extremely popular cookies, made with a very special ingredient.

Three times she was charged and three times she was acquitted for
allegedly selling cannabis cookies. Hers was a bit of a technical
victory, but victory nonetheless. She even revealed the key
ingredient to her Edmonton audience. My lips are sealed coppers.

After Watermelon's arrests, she became a bit of a doobie darling and
graced the cover of such trade magazines as High Times. All along she
kept going to Wreck Beach, smoking pot and selling melons and
gingersnaps. Recently, she invested some of her earnings into an old
theatre in Vancouver, where she hosts comedy and burlesque shows.

"Everything I learned about business I learned at Wreck Beach," she
tells me during a lunch interview. Gossipy tidbit: She eats steak and
wears clothes to eat lunch. (Sigh). She's also smart, funny and
articulate, as well as a health nut and runner. Often, she'll smoke a
joint and then go for a 10-kilometre run.

Watermelon prefers to be called a pot enthusiast, rather than a pot
activist. Her talk at MacEwan focused on the medicinal benefits of
the herb, as well as its safety, relative to other drugs. And she
talked about how many people have been convicted over the years and
the millions of tax dollars spent each year in cops and courts.

She asks: To what end? What if, instead, we legalized pot and taxed
it? Think about the millions in taxes that could be put to good use.
Think of the American tourists. Watermelon says pot laws insult her
personal sense of justice. Given that fast food, cigarettes, alcohol,
carbohydrates and prescription drugs are more lethal than pot, why
the moral and legal outrage?

But I have one more question for her. What about this nudity thing?
She just enjoys the feeling of being at the beach naked, she says.

In fact, a strange thing happens when people are naked all the time,
she says. The sexual tension and politics disappear. Put some clothes
on and the bad pickup lines begin. Take them away and body parts fade
into the background.

I'm not sure I can support nudity, then. I think a bit of naughtiness
makes the world a more interesting place. As for marijuana, well, it
seems to me it's high time -- sorry -- that we legalized it.

Our legislators look like hypocrites for the prohibition, given their
sanctioning of more dangerous drugs like alcohol and tobacco. Thus,
it appears our emperors are wearing no clothes.

Except for their socks.