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by gilster
on Mon Sep 10, 2007 3:26 pm |
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A room with a phew!
(Illustration by Gabriel Polonsky)
By Edith Pearlman | September 10, 2007
I KEEP a handful of gold-tipped mauve cigarettes on my coffee table. They fan out from a fluted glass like exotic reeds. There's an ashtray too, and a box of matches. I don't offer the cigarettes to anyone; but the display itself tells visitors that they are welcome to indulge.
Not long ago my husband and I gave a party for about 90 people. There was a buffet in the dining room. Pony-tailed helpers twirled with trays of canapes. A pianist played jazz in the living room. A bartender dispensed hard drinks and soft ones in the sunroom.
Beyond this sunroom is a little office with a table and three chairs. I had moved the cigarettes and their works there, out of concern for guests who might be bothered by other people's exhalations. As my smoking friends arrived - they number eight women and two men - I advised each in turn that the weeds were in the office.
This had two unexpected results. One: A few guests objected to the advertised presence of the Smoking Room. These were people who, however offended, would have held their tongues if I'd hired a belly dancer to supplement the pianist; they would have managed to overlook target practice in the backyard. Yet they were outspokenly horrified at my small courtesy.
Two: the Smoking Room - unventilated, awkward to reach - was inordinately popular. The grateful smokers used it from time to time, often accompanied by the nonsmoker they were talking to when they felt the familiar yearning. Other guests ventured in unescorted, and stayed.
One man, a nonsmoker, spent most of the party in one of the chairs, the conversation swirling around him. I made sure that the ponytails kept him supplied with wine. Whenever I poked my head into the Smoking Room I noted that the guests there were animated, just as they were in the rest of the house; that laughter joyously rose, though no more ringingly than elsewhere; and that the air was aromatic, if cloudy.
In the Smoking Rooms of great 19th-century houses, men in velvet jackets talked about politics and horses and women. By the middle of the 20th century, though, "Smoking Room" referred to the section of a public facility where smoking was expressly allowed. In a library it was the vaulted reading room. In train stations it was the waiting area. In hotels it was the lobby: Beside every chair stood a metal ashtray whose thick stem rose from a weighted bulb.
My cramped Smoking Room is what those grand halls have come down to. And at other parties, smokers usually have to step outside. My friends have become familiar with back stoops and driveways. They are mostly light users. One smokes five cigarettes a week. Another smokes four a day (the late pope, it was rumored, smoked only three). They know the danger of tobacco, which can cause cancer; they know as well the sweet usefulness of the nicotine residing in the tobacco: a habit-forming alkaloid that clarifies, soothes, and heightens, all at the same time.
Smokers are the first to say that smoking in excess is not good for you. Anything in excess is not good for you, righteous indignation included.
Every one of us can figure out what the smokers in my Smoking Room were getting, though we might describe it diversely - they were getting a chance to enjoy their recreation, gratify their habit, surrender to their addiction, indulge their vice, and practice their perversion. But what were the nonsmokers getting, to make them linger in that blue haze? Perhaps, in a passive way, they too found clarity and elevation. Or perhaps they were sniffing a particular blend of wariness and tolerance: wariness that raises an eyebrow at conventional wisdom, tolerance that gives people with unpopular pleasures a little room.
Edith Pearlman is a short story writer who lives in Brookline.
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2007/09/10/a_room_with_a_phew/ |
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gilster
Smokers Rights Activist
Joined: Apr 19, 2006
Posts: 771
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by twillercat
on Mon Sep 10, 2007 5:35 pm |
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Oh, please.
At MY parties there's a NON-smoking room...outside. Invitees who don't like it don't have to show up...but somehow they do and they stay. |
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twillercat
Puffer
Joined: Jul 15, 2007
Posts: 71
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by gilster
on Mon Sep 10, 2007 5:55 pm |
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| Some background - this was printed in the Boston Globe - the bastion of liberal media in New England....it's a great article for where it's printed - in two years, it'll be a great article all over the world - I fear |
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gilster
Smokers Rights Activist
Joined: Apr 19, 2006
Posts: 771
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by smokem
on Tue Sep 11, 2007 9:48 am |
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| Yes Gilster the publication in the Boston Globe is the most interesting part. I recall another lukewarm-smoker-friendly article in the Globe about two years ago (about disastrous effects on VFW clubs in Massachusetts towns where private-club smoking was banned.) The paper also published one desperate letter from a (public) bar owner facing bankruptcy around that time. Along the same lines, there was a tepid smoker-friendly-ish article in the equally smoker-hating Washington Post carrying the byline of Dr. Gio Gori a few months ago. Gori worked for the US government years ago in research on improving cigarette filtration. His funding got cut off when smoker eradication became official policy. So he went into academia and did some research for tobacco companies after that. As a result he's always called a Big Tobacco Stooge these days in mainstream media, except, amazingly, when the Post published that recent article. If they published his article at all I'd have thought they'd at least simultaneously disclaim him as an evil crooked gibbering idiot but they didn't. These are small cracks in the general "bring on Kristallnacht" editorial policies at the two papers but they are surprising and interesting to see. For those who don't know, the Boston Globe is owned by the New York Times, which itself practically never deviates from advocacy of beating smokers with baseball bats. |
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smokem
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Posts: 135
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