Cheech Marin, a singular Renaissance man, talks about comedy, pottery, pot, art and his new memoir

His second interest was pottery, cultivated in the ceramics lab at Valley State College (now Cal State Northridge). “I just fell in love with it,” he recalls. “The first time you center a piece of clay, you feel this force in the universe. I describe it in the book like this tuning fork went off in my loins. It’s where my recessive Mexican craft gene came out. It was like, ‘Vato!’”