Marijuana Pepsi has ‘grown into her name’
It isn’t easy going through life with the name Marijuana Pepsi.
But by all accounts, Marijuana Pepsi Vandyck is thriving. In fact, she just got her PhD last month, so she’s Dr. Marijuana Pepsi Vandyck now.
The 46-year-old’s unusual name made her something of a local legend when she was growing up in Beloit, Wis., in the 1980s. Rumors about the origin of her moniker swirled around, with some claiming that her mother picked it out because pot and Pepsi were her two favorite things, and others insisting her parents had been consuming both substances shortly before their child was born or conceived.
In 2009, Jim Stingl, a columnist at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, finally caught up to her. It turned out that, yes, Marijuana Pepsi really is her legal name, and her mother had chosen it over her father’s objections.
“She said that she knew when I was born that you could take this name and go around the world with it,” Vandyck, who at the time was using her ex-husband’s last name, told him. “At the time as a child, I’m thinking yeah, right. You named my older sister Kimberly. You named my younger sister Robin.”
The rumors about the name’s origins weren’t too far off: Her parents were “products of the postWoodstock era when reefer was rampant,” the Journal Sentinel reported. Her aunt, Mayetta Jackson, told the paper that cannabis was everywhere in 1972, the year that Marijuana was born, and after smoking, the couple liked to cool off with a sweet, fizzy can of Pepsi.
“I thought it was crazy,” Mayetta Jackson said of the name, “but they were such fun-loving people that it suited them.”
She’s insisted that people call her by her birth name, refusing to take the much easier route and go by Mary or Mary Jane, like so many well-meaning people advised her to do. She told the paper that her name was a lesson that she hoped to pass onto other children who were struggling, she said, adding that she intended to get her doctorate and find a job advising college students.
Now, Vandyck lives on a 3-acre hobby farm near the Illinois-Wisconsin border where she raises pigs and chickens with her husband, who owns a welding business. Together, they have four children, including her teenage son.
As she predicted a decade ago, her full-time job involves helping underprivileged students. She works as the director of a program at Beloit College that serves students who come from low-income backgrounds, are first-generation college students, or have disabilities. On the side, she works as a life coach and sells real estate.
As she told the Journal Sentinel, her name comes with certain downsides. There are the constant LinkedIn requests from marijuana growers. A police officer once threatened to arrest her, thinking she was lying about her name. Filling out routine paperwork or placing an order over the phone invariably leads to a prolonged conversation and a battery of questions.
Despite all that, she doesn’t seem to resent her mother for not picking something more conventional.
“I’ve grown into my name because I am a strong woman,” she told NBC’s “Today” show in 2009. “I’ve had to be.”