Snoop & Martha: Best Buds

How an unlikely friendship budded into TV magic. “Martha & Snoop’s Potluck Dinner Party” VH1 Here’s a promising candidate for understatement of the year: Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg were both a pretty big deal in the ’90s. The decade witnessed the launch of the now-famous Martha Stewart Living magazine and television program, which catapulted Stewart’s already-rising profile to full celebrity status. By 1995, her picture graced the cover of New York Magazine, which declared her “the definitive American woman of our time.” The era of inline skates and Starter jackets also saw the raw content and smooth flow of Calvin “Snoop Dogg” Broadus Jr. usher in the dawn of hip hop’s G-Funk Era on seminal West Coast classics like “The Chronic” and “Doggystyle.” In 1993, Snoop was “on the cover of the Rolling Stone” — the first of many high profile magazine covers — and making headlines with his combative appearance at the now-infamous 1995 Source Hip Hop Awards. So if you turned on your TV set in the ’90s, odds are you’d see one or both of them before too long. What you would never, ever see was the two of them together. Back then, they inhabited completely different cultural universes. Gangsta rap wasn’t just a way to sell expensive headphones to white kids from the suburbs, it was a raw expression of social unrest that was seen as a serious threat by (and to) the cultural and political establishment. Meanwhile, Martha was seen as a tastemaker for middle…

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