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Pamela Beckman, Lydia Black and Fran Fenning at Vybe. -COURTESY PHOTO<\/p>\n
I hate to sound like your grandma here, but honestly, what is this world coming to, and when did smoking cigarettes make a comeback?\n<\/p>\n
Up until Jan. 27, 2013, I was probably the heaviest smoker you know. The norm was a pack and a half of Marlboro Ultra Lights a day (word to the wise: there\u2019s no such thing as an \u201cultra\u201d light cigarette; it\u2019s just a way to make yourself feel better when you plunk down between $9 and $16 for a pack). If I were out for the evening and enjoying cocktails, it was more like two \u2013 three packs a day.\n<\/p>\n
Back when smoking was \u201cgood\u201d for you\n<\/p>\n
Y\u2019all, I grew up in the 70s and 80s when smoking was chic. Both of my parents smoked. When I was around eight years old, I asked my very slim mom why she smoked, and she told me that it eased her nerves and helped her stay \u201cskinny\u201d. These were the days when folks smoked in airplanes, restaurants, and even the waiting room at the doctor\u2019s office. There were cigarette ads on TV and in magazines. Before my mom passed away of emphysema at age 70 (she quit smoking at 60, but as her pulmonologist told us, \u201cThe horse was already out of the barn.\u201d), she told me that doctors in the 70s would tell her that smoking was healthy if it eased her stress and made her thin.\n<\/p>\n
Trading cigarettes for oxygen tanks\n<\/p>\n
We\u2019ve come a long way, baby (to borrow an old phrase from Virginia Slims), and now too many of our boomer parents and grandparents are suffering from the results of their \u201chealthy\u201d past time. I get sad when I\u2019m at the grocery store, and I see more and more older folks with portable oxygen tanks that they carry like purses. The cigarette commercials are gone and today it\u2019s all advertisements for COPD medications and inhalers.\n<\/p>\n
Going forward, not backward\n<\/p>\n
But here\u2019s where I\u2019m confused. I feel like we went through a period where we weren\u2019t seeing a lot of smokers \u2014 maybe the occasional old, grizzled dude with a Marlboro Red butt hanging between his teeth \u2014 but for years, I never saw young people smoking. Makes sense though, in the early 2000s it became unlawful to advertise tobacco products, warnings were put on labels, and smoking was banned pretty much everywhere including some outdoor spaces. Yet, in the past few months or so, I\u2019m seeing so much more smoking \u2014 and it\u2019s young, healthy, attractive people. I see it in magazines, movies, on social media \u2014 everywhere. It seems the \u201clooking cool\u201d chapter of smoking is trying to puff it\u2019s way into the millennium \u2014 and I hate to see it. I remember smoking in public places in my 30s, and inevitably, some \u201cold\u201d person would walk by and say with a frown, \u201cYou know that\u2019s going to kill you don\u2019t you?\u201d \u2014 it was all I could do not to blow smoke in their face. So I certainly don\u2019t comment when I see young smokers. Well\u2026 I sort of don\u2019t. The other day, I was walking down Bay Street in downtown Fort Myers just in front of the beautiful 120-year old Florida Repertory Theatre when a hipster kid, probably around 18 or 19 with skinny jeans walked by smoking. He took one last drag and then flicked his butt onto the sidewalk in front of theatre. I said nothing, but I bent down and picked up the still burning butt and walked to two steps over to an ashtray (they\u2019re all over downtown \u2014 you can\u2019t miss them) and I smooshed the cig into it.\n<\/p>\n
\u201cBro, what are you doing?\u201d said the boy.\n<\/p>\n
\u201cBro,\u201d I answered, \u201cI\u2019m putting your cigarette in an ashtray \u2014look how nice our historic district is \u2014 let\u2019s keep it that way.\u201d\n<\/p>\n
I\u2019m surprised he didn\u2019t light yet another American Spirit and blow it in my face \u2014 but he just shrugged and walked away from the lady that probably looked to him like his nagging meemaw.\n<\/p>\n
I\u2019ll never live to see hipster boy with an oxygen tank in Publix \u2014 truth be told, even though I quit almost 14 years ago, I\u2019m guessing my horse got out of the barn before I bolted the gate, too. But, hopefully this smoking thing will be a very fast trend that fizzles quickly and that young man will not only stop smoking, maybe he\u2019ll start telling others how ashtrays work. That\u2019s a start anyway.\n<\/p>\n
Vybe \u2014 where mahjong is a vibe\n<\/p>\n
The only thing that was smoking last Sunday were mahjong tiles at Chef Harold Balink\u2019s new hot spot, Vybe, in the Bell Tower. It was a mahjong fundraiser for the nonprofit, Our Mother\u2019s Home, which helps teen moms in foster care. Lots of fabulous ladies (and guys, too) came out for the cause, including Azil Melton-Malan, Marin Asher, Sandra Stilwell-Youngquist, Liz Abbott, Lydia Black, Fran Fenning, Gina Birch, Lynn Schneider,\u00a0 Pamela Beckman, Jenn Robinson, and so many more!\n<\/p>\n
Stephanie Davis is a recovering girl-about-town formerly known as the Downtown Diva. A nearly native Southwest Floridian, when she\u2019s not photographing events for Florida Weekly, she\u2019s perfectly content to stay at home binging Netflix with husband, Todd, and four cats Tennessee, Lilibet, Jack, and Baby.\n\t\t<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pamela Beckman, Lydia Black and Fran Fenning at Vybe. -COURTESY PHOTO I hate to sound like your grandma…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":353007,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[209,211,210],"class_list":["post-353014","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral","tag-cape-coral-headlines","tag-cape-coral-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353014","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353014"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353014\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/353007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353014"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353014"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353014"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}