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April 25, 2005
Smoke gets in your eyes
I'm totally for a smoking ban in Chicago bars. The positives far outweigh the negatives in my mind. Yes, I am being selfish - I don't want to smell like smoke and have my eyes water so much that my contacts fall out. But I think people who do smoke in the bar are being selfish, too: they're spewing toxins into our air and lungs.
This Sun-Times column about Cherry Red's smoke-free Thursday made me chuckle:
No smoking in a Chicago bar? How about no snow in a Chicago winter?
"You have a beer, you have a cigarette," Charlie says to me, like I'm an appellate court. "Beer. Cigarette."
If Kim and Charlie had known about the ban, they tell me, they wouldn't be here.
I walk around the bar. It's classy and clean, and the music is loud. But something about the place seems unfinished -- no smoke, no ashtrays, no burning tobacco smell, no showy cigarette gestures.
And something else seems missing -- that general disregard for clean living that's half the fun of a bar. The whole point is to drink and smoke and stay out too late and say something stupid.
This reminds me of one of my favorite rock performances of all time. There's a British band called The Libertines, and one day they came to the Tower Records by my house to play an acoustic instore performance. First, they showed up exactly an hour late, looking like a total mess. The hard-living Pete Doherty, who was thrown out of the band a few weeks later, shows up and immediately drops an f-bomb despite the fact that there are scads of children around.
After a few minutes of fiddling around, the band asks, in the heaviest British accent ever, what song the crowd wants to hear. Somebody requests a song, and Pete says, "except that one." This is repeated a few times, and finally they play a song. After the song ends, two members of the band whip out a box of Camels and light up their cigarettes, right in the middle of the store. It was so obviously against the rules, I had to chuckle. Nobody said anything about it, and away they puffed. If they weren't rock stars, they would've been tossed.
Now, maybe we can repeat that scene in smoke-free bars!
Posted by oz115 at April 25, 2005 10:42 AM