Snoop's Narnia

I'm a day late in getting this posted. GQ published a fantastic piece by Drew Magary, who spent a recent afternoon with Snoop Lion talking music and smoking on that ooh-wee. It's a fascinating and hilarious look into Snoop's world—and oh what a wonderful world it is. If you haven't yet, you should definitely set aside 10 minutes to read the full article. But if you're short on 10 minutes, I'll give you a few of the highlights:

1. Snoop carries a man bag.

He arrives at Baby Blues with just a single bodyguard, whom he sheds before slipping alone into our reserved room at the back of the restaurant. He's wearing a Dallas Mavericks jersey and warm-up pants, and he's carrying a Paris Hilton-designed man purse overflowing with unopened packs of Swisher Sweets.

2. There's a guy somewhere, who worked as a club bouncer in '92, and who now feels like a jackass.

Like the time in 1992 when he was marooned outside a hot downtown L.A. nightclub, trying in vain to get inside. "And motherfucking 'Deep Cover' "—Snoop's first hit—"was playing louder than a motherfucker in there: boom, boom, boom. And there was a nigga in the club, and he told security, 'Nigga, you don't know who that is?' Security said, 'No.' They said, 'Nigga, that's the nigga who's singing on that song right there!' Yeah. And guess what, kid? I didn't get in!"

3. They make children's books about smoking weed. Wait...what?

It doesn't even seem so crazy—or at least not as crazy as it should seem—when Snoop tells me he's thinking of reading a book called It's Just a Plant: A Children's Story of Marijuana, to the 8- and 9-year-olds on the peewee football team he coaches. "Believe it or not," he says, "they need to know." (The book is about a little girl whose parents teach her about the awesomeness of weed. "This is a joint," her father tells her. "It's made of marijuana." It's a surprisingly long book. If you read it in Marijuana Time, it takes eight years.)

4. I miss Cali girls. Oh so much...

Moments later, a baby-faced blonde employee named Rachel, dressed in a teensy orange tank and blue terry-cloth hot pants, walks up to Snoop and stammers out a request: "I wanna get, uh, a picture of me expressing myself in the safe while you're looking at me expressing myself."

The safe that Rachel is referring to is the open, Skee-Lo-sized safe across the room. She hands me her camera and leads Snoop toward it. Then she turns around, does a handstand, spreads her legs, rests her feet on the inside walls of the safe, and begins shaking her booty up and down like it's a can of spray paint.

"She's obsessed with this," Doctor Dina tells me as we watch. "She's been practicing for a week."

I really miss Cali girls.