Mary Jane’s Medicinals: Our Origin Story—Part One

How I Ended Up in a Beautiful, Remote Corner of Colorado
The history of Mary Jane’s Medicinals begins with my falling in love with Colorado, and then with Telluride.

I’m originally from Chappaqua, a town about 30 miles north of New York City. I went to college in Boulder, and that’s how I was introduced to the Colorado lifestyle. Initially, my East Coast self was a little unnerved by how friendly people were. I would think strangers who were being friendly to me probably had an ulterior motive, wondering: “Why did that bus driver just say hello and goodbye to me—what does he want?”

Then I realized people were just more friendly in Colorado. Maybe because they were happier, or perhaps because they were not as stressed out as their East Coast counterparts.

The first time I visited Telluride, spring break of my freshman year, I knew I wanted to be surrounded by the beauty of the area someday. I continued to visit whenever I could, and I hoped someday to make it permanent.

But after graduation, I moved back to New York to pursue my acting career. I spent two years on film and television sets, and then one winter I agreed to spend a ski season in Telluride with my college sweetheart, as long as he promised we’d return to New York in a few months for my career.

We packed up the dog and the car and drove west with about $1,500 between us. When we arrived in town, we realized it was going to cost a lot more to move into a place, and on the third day we almost turned around to head back east, since our money was dwindling and we weren’t sure if we could make it back.

But remarkably we found a basement studio apartment we could afford. We slept on a blowup mattress for the first three months, but more important than the slow leak that required us to take turns throughout the night pumping it back up again was our happy, almost stress-free lifestyle.

We were each working three jobs, yet we were living the dream life, ski-bum style! To nobody’s surprise, our dog much preferred living in the mountains to Manhattan. We loved it, too!

It helped when I got involved with a theater in Telluride, and I was actually securing more on-stage gigs than in New York because I wasn’t competing against thousands and thousands of professional actors.

So I was satisfied creatively, but I couldn’t make a living of it. And that’s when I started studying at a local massage school in Telluride. I’d always had an interest in a more natural approach to health and well-being, so I felt massage school might be a good step toward a new career path. I didn’t think I’d do body work forever, but I had an intuition that it would lead somewhere.

And as you’ve likely guessed by now, it did!