Given the chance, antismoking forces would ensure your inability to smoke. Anywhere.
E. Edward Hoyt III & Mark Bernardo
Despite appearances,
America’s biggest export in recent years isn’t X-rated Super Bowl halftime shows - as entertaining as they are. Nope, it’s a momentous, nearly global effort to eradicate the world of smoking.
The thing about cigars, of course, is they’ve always been a less tolerated public pastime than cigarettes, so cigar smokers have traditionally been thicker-skinned about the whole scene anyway. Even in the old days when smoking was allowed anywhere, cigars enjoyed a special footnote nearly all to themselves:
“Please refrain from cigar or pipe smoking.”
Rats. Then came the great cigar reawakening. Cigar enthusiasts emerged from the dark shadows of society; released from the tyranny of back porches and automobile interiors, they discovered that there were actually others just like them in existence. They all began to congregate openly, in public. Trading stories about cigars, and life in general. Some highly evolved and enlightened taverns, steakhouses, and chichi restaurants even began to welcome them with open arms. Even the folks who make cigars revealed their own faces. It was all quite good.
But, as SMOKE’s own sports columnist Bert Sugar has groused recently, the ability to hoist a mug of beer, fire up a cigar, and watch a game at the bar - or anywhere else - is disappearing fast.
Not everyone likes smoking, granted, and it doesn’t take a sociologist to rationally explain that perhaps some places are less appropriate for smoking than others. But, then, freedom of choice would dictate that there should at least be as many smoking-friendly places as there are smokers who would willingly patronize those establishments. Something for everyone. For a country hell-bent on exporting democracy and freedom of choice throughout the world, how could we have become so intolerant that even the century-old private Players Club in Manhattan has had to sue the city to defend its members’ rights to light up a cigar? Anyone who enjoys cigars - and doesn’t want to be relegated to the backyard - should take note.
In this latest issue of SMOKE, see why life is heating up in the corner smoke shop, one of the last places to smoke cigars in New York City. Travel with midwestern radio talk show host Jeff Bolton to the war in Iraq, where cigars are both tolerated and appreciated by American troops. And, discover why Jimmy Smits relished starring in a new Pulitzer Prize-winning play about a 1930s cigar factory. - E.H., M.B.
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