It’s only fitting that any great sightings day at the fair has a worthy grand finale. My Saturday at the 2010 Iowa State Fair was by all metrics a great day, and this final sighting of the night was by all metrics a grand finale….
It was about 11:15 when I returned to the main concourse and I was planning to leave for the day. But the girls of the Iowa State Fair weren’t ready to let me go just yet. I made a final pass near the cluster of benches in the middle of the grounds that’s crowded with teens after dark. On the west side, I stumbled upon a cluster of six teenage girls, all around 16 and all very wholesome-looking from afar, so I was flabbergasted to see a freshly lit cigarette between the fingers of this cutiepie light brunette with shoulder-length hair who was wearing a pink top and brown shorts. All of these girls were the definition of the girls next door, and as I scanned the crowd and didn’t see any other cigarettes, I found it amusing that one of the girls somehow found herself in a situation where she became a smoker. There was a mostly open bench only a few feet away, so I sat there for my front-row seat for a pretty solid smoking show as this girl was no amateur, smoking right there in her tight cluster and not making any serious effort to direct her stinky fumes away from the crowd. This clearly drunken redneck sitting next to me briefly engaged me in conversation, and I was distraught at the idea that my show would be sidelined by this clown, but thankfully he only exchanged a couple of comments with me before leaving me alone…
Suddenly, the tall brunette in the cluster whose back and cute jean-shorted ass was towards me surprised me as she turned her head and exhaled a plume of cigarette smoke. Now there was a second player to this sighting with the revelation of this girl, and a beautiful and equally wholesome one at that. But I was looking at this girl from behind and both of her hands were in clear view, and neither one of them was holding a cigarette. Where did it come from? In just a few seconds, the tall brunette moved over a bit and created an opening from which I could finally tell where the source of the cigarette was….another blond girl in the cluster who was the most innocent and adorable girl of the entire group of six, a cluster in which at this point, at least three of these uber-wholesome girls were confirmed smokers. She stood there in her tanktop and khaki shorts with an outrageously adorable and clearly underage face, with just a hint of an evil smirk that helped realize how this girl was a smoker. She was the primary holder of the cigarette, and the tall brunette got her table scraps. And again, all this was going on with a flurry of cops only a few feet away….
And right when I thought the sighting had hit its peak, another player entered in the form of a middle-aged man who sneaked up behind one of the equally adorable nonsmokers in the cluster, a girl who was primarily chatting with the original light brunette smoker. I’m not sure if it was her father or what, but I was at first expecting he was giving her or her friends hell for smoking. But nope, he was just razzing them and inserting himself in their foul-smelling cluster. Before long, he was conversing with the really cute newcomer of the cluster who was grinning ear to ear as the middle-aged guy was razzing her about something. He then did something that would raise the sighting to the stratosphere. He reached out to hand and requested a drag from this cute teenage girl’s cigarette. He took a single puff and handed it back to her. For the next couple of moments, the cute girl and the tall brunette finished off the cigarette, with the brunette closest to me taking the final drag without bothering to crush it out on the pavement right in front of me.
As this was going on, the original light brunette I first spotted in the sighting was walking off with a couple of the other girls. Since she had her cigarette all to herself, she still had a couple of puffs to go. She literally walked right by a cop with a cigarette in her hand. She came to a stop not far from there and I watched from behind as she took her last couple of drags before crushing out the cigarette underneath her feet. It was time to head back to the original cluster, where the girls who shared the cigarette had drifted a ways and left me an easy opening to identify the still-smoldering butt….a Camel Pink, one of my favorite cigarettes to see teen girls in possession of. There was no way I was gonna top this and it was way past time to head home after a dream day at the Iowa State Fair.
Mark's Smoke Blog 