Stan the Man

I have a thousand memories like this one.  I came across similar figures to the one shown below in a restaurant one night, they were in the lobby, it turned out they were by the same artist so I got my own, identical hippie, to remember that cool conection with her dad.

A woman sat down with us once holding a figure of a hippie.  I made a comment about it, saying I liked it.  She let me hold him to look at and I sat him on top of my stack of cassette tapes.  I guessed it had some significance, but she said nothing about it and I didn't ask.  Some time into the session, as I was speaking with her father, he starting talking about his condition (I believe he had cancer) and how sick he was in hospital and the pain he was in.  Then he thanked her for the marijuana joints that she gave him to smoke, as it helped ease his pain toward the end.
"That's true!  I gave him joints to smoke.  My dad had never smoked pot in his life," she told me.
If I remember right, it was at that point he made me look at the hippie figure and he said the name Steve.
"That's my dad's name!" she exclaimed.
"But he has an S name, too," I said, motioning to the figure.
"Yes he does," she said.
"That's Stan the Man!" I said.  I think she started crying.
"That's EXACTLY what my my father said!"  She went on to say that her father never liked hippies, so she got the figure as a joke and sat it next to his hospital bed.  She told me that after smoking for a bit he leaned over put the joint in the hippie's fingers, and said, "That's Stan the Man!"