I am SLAPPING MYSELF regarding the fact that I overlooked that date. Seriously.

And okay, that makes sense. So the narrator is a character, Mary Jane from Indiana is a character, but Mary Jane as a personified drug reference is not a character. Gotcha.

I really love your concept here. There's a book - I can't remember the name at the moment - in which famous authors took their favorite songs and created stories based around them. Nick Hornby essentially did the same thing, too. So your concept reminds me of that, which is awesome.