Marijuana Pepsi Sawyer says she's never smoked the drug she was named for in the pot-fueled '70s. And her favorite beverage? Orange soda.

Born in 1972 in Beloit, Wisconsin, Sawyer is a school teacher with a comical name.

She recalls about her upbringing: "Every single class, the teacher is taking attendance out loud, and as they slowly get down through the J's, I'm just like here it comes. 'Marianna? Marijuana?' And all the students turn to see who it is."

Sawyer says her mother Maggie picked the name:

"She said that she knew when I was born that you could take this name and go around the world with it. At the time as a child, I'm thinking yeah, right. You named my older sister Kimberly. You named my younger sister Robin.'"

Her parents divorced and her father became a Jehovah's Witness.

Sawyer graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and received her Master's at Georgia Southern. After living in Chicago and Atlanta, she returned to Beloit last year, where she now works as a substitute teacher.

"They could make a movie about her," says Carlton Jenkins, who taught at Beloit High when Sawyer attended the school in the '80s. "I could almost write a book on Marijuana myself in terms of a young student who's been so resilient and taken even her name and made it into a positive."

Source: Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel


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