Here’s the sentimental favorite that started it all….the first Minnesota State Fair smoker sighting I remember. It was 1993 and I had just turned 16 years old. There I sat on a bench taking a break in the late morning or early afternoon with my parents seated to my right. I was upset with my dad and really wasn’t feeling the allure of the Minnesota State Fair that year. The venue needed some sort of new attraction to keep me interested as I felt at that point as though I had experienced everything there was to experience there. But my Minnesota State Fair world was about to be shaken to its core.
All of the sudden, I heard feminine voices to my left and felt pressure on the bench as someone sat down. I looked over my left shoulder to discover it was a girl about 13-14 years old. As I subtly looked a little closer, imagine my shock and saw she was smoking a cigarette. Even though all my sexual fantasies were filled with girls smoking at this time, it hadn’t even occurred to me at this point in life to actively seek sightings of smokers. Only in situations like that where the sightings fell into my lap was I able to indulge my simmering fetish. I then took yet another look to find she had a friend standing next to her who was also smoking. I wasn’t in much of a position to watch them being seated right next to them, but loved the odor of their secondhand smoke drifting my way…and I found it fairly daring that such young girls would sidle right up to a family sitting on a bench and puff away on their stinky cigarettes, even back in 1993 when the stigma wasn’t as extreme as it is today.
At that point, the girls stood up to look at this “How Good of a Lover Are You?” machine, giggling as they listened to the voicebox on the machine, and both still holding cigarettes in their hands. They looked very working-class wearing utilitarian T-shirts and jean shorts. The one who sat next to me was the better looking of the two, while the other, while still attractive, looked very hard-core…and had very unattractive scabs on her legs as if she slept on a mattress infested with bedbugs. I got the feeling they were very naughty girls, probably poised to make a flurry of bad choices in life. Nonetheless, what a memory…and they did wonders for my crotch in a way that no other girls at the Minnesota State Fair had done thus far. Now if I were to see these girls today, they’d be a pretty good score, but probably wouldn’t rank as high as they do on my list simply based on the transformational aspect of the sighting and a forerunner for the years of greatness the state fair would later bring.
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