No Glasses

My daughter and I were just talking about how she hasn't noticed that I'm not smoking.

How can she not notice???

I guess it's a bit like having a friend who wears glasses, and one day she shows up without them, and you spend the whole day looking at her curiously and wondering, "What's different? I know something is changed -- is it her hair? Her lipstick? Her heel height?" And you feel just awful that you can't figure it out, but you're terribly surprised when you find out after 8 hours that she's just gotten contacts.

No glasses. How can I not notice???

Oh, well, as I was saying to a friend of mine the other day, "If you don't tell you you're fabulous, who's going to tell you the stuff you need to hear?"

I spend -- well, maybe an inordinate amount of time telling me I'm fabulous because I'm not smoking. I walk around telling people, "I smell good. I quit smoking." Sure, they look at me like I'm not right in the head, but they did that when I smoked, anyway, so I'm kind of accustomed to it.

But aside from announcing my fabulosity to perfect strangers, I also tell myself how cool I am. I wash dishes, apply lotion to my detergent-abused hands, and then smell them so I can tell myself, "The way these hands smell now is the way they'll smell in half an hour." And sure enough, they DO! How cool is that?

My hair? Oh, my goodness gracious, sakes alive. My hair smells *so* delicious. I can't help but remember those commercials from the 70's, "Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific!" Of course, the person telling me this is not the cute quarterback from 1970's high school heaven, but me. That's OK. I don't need a teenaged football player complicating my life. There are other Tennesseans who went that route recently and infamously, and that sort of thing tends to end in tragedy, and darn it, I am trying to AVOID tragedy, which is why I gave up my beloved Capri Menthol 120's, anyway.

OH! That reminds me. There was a huuuuuuuuuge piece on tonight's evening news about Neyland Stadium. For those of you who don't live in this glorious state of gentle, green, rolling Smoky Mountain foothills, that's the place where the University of Tennessee Volunteers play football every fall. I've been to exactly one home game. Eleven years ago. But it was still a very nice experience.

Anyway, Neyland Stadium is going non-smoking. (I think they have to -- I think Tennessee passed some sort of really stringent anti-smoking law that goes into effect soon.) Neyland Stadium has always been a mecca for smokers -- you could smoke in your seat for years and years, and then there were all kinds of designated smoking areas.

As of today, there were only designated smoking areas outside the arena.

As of next week, if you leave the stadium, you won't be allowed back in.

So if you're a smoker, you are going to have to sit through an entire football game without a cigarette at all.

Oh, my goodness, the WBIR crew interviewed a dozen people or more for this piece. Many smokers were completely blindsided by this decision and were quite distraught. They love their football, and they love their cigarettes, and how can they possibly give up one for the other?

One young, young couple of smokers were sanguine about the development. "There are more non-smokers than smokers," said the young man. "Majority rules."

This is a fellow who obviously never lived as a smoker before the advent of non-smoking areas in restaurants, office buildings, and football stadiums.

But one woman -- honestly, I felt as if I knew her -- one woman said, "I never thought the Tobacco State would go this far. Never!"

I know what she means.

On the other hand -- and honestly, this was what I was going to blog about if I had only blogged earlier today --

-- I find myself... becoming ... slightly ... *repulsed* by smoking.

Not real smoking -- If I run into a cloud of real smoke outside the grocery store, I don't fall apart or retch or attack some unsuspecting smoker and snarl, as so many nonsmokers did at me over the years, "Smoking's bad for you!"

No, I find myself emotionally involved whenever I see someone smoking in a movie or a TV show. I'm torn. I'm fascinated by the mechanics of it. Light the cigarette, hold the cigarette, inhale the smoke, wave the cigarette away, exhale the smoke. As an actor, I am fascinated by the choices they make, whether to just exhale all the smoke out and then speak the dialogue, or to exhale the smoke with each word, which, to me, is the mark of a serious smoker and a much more serious character as a direct result of such an action. It *has* to be a conscious decision, acting-wise. It cannot be that the actors said, "Yes, I'll smoke for this movie, but I won't inhale. I'll just hold the cigarette."

They *do* just hold the cigarettes on the AMC channel's original series "Mad Men." A very few of the actors are actually seen inhaling and exhaling smoke, but they're all standing around holding lit cigarettes.

I was therefore fascinated Friday night, when I saw the 1940 movie "Rebecca." Sir Lawrence Olivier's character Maxim seemed to be bothered by smoke. Repeatedly, characters would ask about smoking, or put out their cigarettes in his presence. This was just fascinating to watch. (Especially juxtaposed against the eventually outcome for Manderley, but I shan't spoil the ending of the movie for any of you who many not have seen it before.) I have no idea whether Olivier himself were a smoker or not, but the sheer volume of etiquette surrounding smoking -- almost 70 years ago --

Aw, now, see? I've gone off on too many tangents. I'll never untangle this snarled mess! Just suffice it to say that I wonder if -- after 22 years of smoking -- I'll ever be "quit" enough not to think about it.

Say, I just remembered. I quit biting my nails for my 23rd birthday. I obsessed about them for an entire year -- oh, my manicure kit was sublime! -- and then I was able to just stop. Both the biting and the obsessing. I hope, I hope that I'll be able to stop obsessing about the quitting smoking thing someday, too.