WHOA, LIKE... HOW DO YOU REMEMBER LINES, MAN?

LOS ANGELES -- It was pot that made him famous and pot that helped put him
in prison. So it seems only natural that Tommy Chong's first big gig since
leaving the joint would be in a play called The Marijuana-Logues.

"I'm trying to change my image," jokes the taller, bespectacled half of
comedy's ultimate doper duo, Cheech and Chong.

Only in this case, it's not entirely a joke. At 65, with his long dark hair
and beard turning seriously grey, Chong may still be talking about pot --
but he's doing it off-Broadway.

"I'm trying to go from nightclubs to the legitimate stage," he says of his
role in the three-man ensemble show at New York's Actors Theatre. "I love
the fact that it's in New York. Legitimate theatre. New York. That's always
been my dream."

If that sounds surprising, it turns out that the Edmonton-born Thomas B.
Kin Chong is full of surprises. For one thing, he's soft-spoken and
articulate -- nothing at all like the character he's played in films,
nightclubs and on television and comedy albums for more than 30 years. The
father of six says he hasn't touched marijuana in two years, joking that's
why authorities found nearly a pound when they raided the Pacific Palisades
home he shares with Shelby Chong, his wife of more than 30 years.

"In the old days, they wouldn't have found a seed," Chong says with a
laugh. Chong was never charged with marijuana possession because the agents
who arrested him were looking for smoking materials made by Nice Dreams, a
company named for one of his Cheech and Chong films, and had not included
marijuana in the search warrant. He ended up serving nine months after
pleading guilty to conspiring to sell drug paraphernalia.

Despite the persona he developed over the years, Chong says he was never
that much of a stoner, and his humour was about "cracking up at all the
stupid things stoners do."

For example, not showing up at the show on time.

"My fans usually show up the day after I go on," he jokes. Then, breaking
into his more recognizable laid-back stoner drawl: "I was going to come
down sooner, man, but then I fired one up and I got here -- next year?"

Chong describes the three-man show, which has been running off-Broadway
since March, as a parody of Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues, with the
three actors comically addressing the rites and rituals of getting stoned.

"Instead of talking about our private parts, we spend the night talking
about our smoking parts," he says. The Marijuana-Logues runs in New York
through most of December and then on the West Coast (with cities to be
announced) beginning in February.

Footsteps

Chong's following in the theatrical footsteps of his daughter Precious, who
was in Winnipeg last spring to star in Mating Dance of the Werewolf at MTC.

Since his release from jail in July, Chong has finished an autobiography,
started on the play and is planning to return next year to That '70s Show
and his recurring role as Leo, the stoned-out, aging hippie. He doesn't
know yet how his absence will be explained. "Maybe they'll say I was in
jail," he chuckles.

After that there is the long-awaited return of Cheech and Chong. He and
Cheech Marin haven't made a film together in 20 years, but a new one, still
untitled, is in the works. It will reunite Pedro and Man, the bumbling
dopers who staggered through the 1970s and 1980s in such films as Up in
Smoke, Nice Dreams and Still Smokin'.

Chong and Marin say they began planning their reunion before Chong's arrest
- -- the first brush with the law either had in 50 years. Chong acknowledges
being busted for joy-riding in Canada when he was 15. As for Marin, now 58,
"My dad was a cop," he says, explaining his impulse for staying out of trouble.

The two met in Canada, where Marin had moved after studying English at
California State University, Northridge, and where Chong was running a
topless nightclub that offered improvisational comedy.

Cheech and Chong were ahead of their time in some respects. Decades before
multiculturalism became hip, the Canadian-born Chong, whose truck driver
father was Chinese, and Cheech, the Mexican-American son of a Los Angeles
police officer, could bill themselves as the world's only
"Chicano-Chinese-Canadian comedy team."

Though their act had its limits, its appeal endures.