Back in 1999, Heather Donahue starred as “chick with a hat” in The Blair Witch Project, the indie-horror found-footage runaway success with the timeless message that you should never let a chick navigate. Since I’m sure you were all dying to know, since 2007, she’s apparently been growing pot (medicinal, of course), an experience she documents in an upcoming book, “Grow Girl.” I applaud them the restraint it must’ve taken not to call it “You Grow, Girl.” (Though for the record, there are already

Donahue got involved in medical marijuana after getting frustrated with her acting career.
“I took all my stuff into the desert related to my acting career and burned it all,” she said.
Even the blue ski cap from the “Blair Witch Project” poster?
“That’s the only thing I kept. I figured if things got really bad, I could always sell it on eBay,” said Donahue, who recently attended her Upper Darby High School 20-year reunion.
Her new career started after Donahue met a man who had lived in “Nuggettown,” a Northern California community where growing weed was common [redundant. -Ed.] Donahue “was always an avid gardener,” so she took right to it.
“I became a solitary country girl,” said Donahue, who lived in Los Angeles for years after graduating from the University of the Arts in 2005. She gave up cultivating pot once she decided to write about her experiences, which included her doubts about continuing after her friend got busted by the feds on the day of her first pruning.

University of the Arts? Is that like going to med school at the Institute of Science? It’s always a bad sign when your school sounds like it was named by Dr. Nick. (No, you google it).

Donahue, who’ll be 37 next week, documents her year spent cultivating marijuana in “GrowGirl,” out Jan. 5 from Gotham Penguin Publishing.
She received her own prescription for medical marijuana in 2007 to treat PMS. We asked whether that meant she smoked only one week a month, and she replied, “It’s a very flexible medicine.”
And you might be happy to know that her PMS is now under control. [Philly.com]

Yes, indeed, that was the very question on my mind. So, in the public’s perception, she’s gone from a scared chick in a hat with snot trickling out of her nose to a chick who needs drugs to manage her raging, Niagara-like menstrual flow. Shall we call that a step up? …Sure, why not. In related news, I hear Teck from Van Wilder now manages a very successful Chik Fil-a.