Here’s another epic sighting from the early evening of the 2001 Minnesota State Fair, only about 15 minutes after I scored my #18 sighting from this list. I was walking past this radio station broadcasting live and interacting with people on the sidewalk hovering in front of their booth. This radio station booth has produced a number of great sightings in the years since, but nothing even in the same ballpark as this one….
The deejay on the stage broadcasting live was talking to two extremely attractive 16-17 girls with long dark brown hair who were both smoking cigarettes like seasoned pros. These girls were kind of in the “in-between” territory as whether they looked like smokers or not. I wasn’t necessarily surprised to see them smoking, but I was surprised that they were copiously dragging from their cigarettes while talking to an adult male deejay ON LIVE RADIO….with a cluster of people behind them listening to their banter with the deejay!
And like I said, these girls were no amateurs. Their inhales were deep and intense. Their exhales were thick, extremely cloudy, and came in tight synchronized streams. I watched in awe for several minutes, not necessarily hearing what they were talking about with the deejay but being too mesmerized by their smoking show to care.
After the girls finished their cigarettes, I decided to take off, naturally expecting the show was over, but still making a mental note that this best sighting of the day just might not be finished yet. I walked a quick loop around the block and returned to the radio station booth no more than 10 minutes later….and girls (maybe sisters, maybe just friends, I’m not sure…but they looked quite a bit alike) were still there….smoking ANOTHER round of cigarettes with the same amount of gusto they put into their first round of cigs, and still flirting with the deejay on the air.
I kind of wish I could have heard the discussion to catch if the deejay was flirtatiously scolding the clearly underage cuties for their heavy smoking. You gotta wonder if that deejay had the fetish himself. Why else would he indulge these smoker girls into such a long discussion as they spewed their carcinogens in his direct path? And I also wondered what some of the people in the crowd were thinking watching this illegal display of tobacco consumption by beautiful underage dark brunettes with zero inhibition. I would soon meet up with my parents en route to an evening concert, but my evening had more than been made after this epic.
Mark's Smoke Blog 
This may not sound like much, but in the late 60s, for a smoking fetishist, it was a little bit of a big deal: A local channel used to run a concert show called “Groovy”–whose title was pretty much a tipoff that teens wouldn’t consider it as such–and the DJ host’s sidekick was an uber-cute 18-year-old blonde surfer-girl type named Kam Nelson (who later went on to marry Olympic athlete Bob Seagren). I can’t find a picture of her from that period, but here’s one of her a little older:
One episode of the program taped at a beach near me, and of course with the crew and the crowd and the delays in shooting it was impossible to get anywhere near the stage and the experience was nothing like the wild, fun concert it appeared to be on tv…but as I watched it I saw what I hadn’t on scene, which was that in one shot of the hosts Kam was very clearly clutching a soft Marlboro pack in one hand. The pack was somewhat crumpled, so that it must have been empty or nearly empty. I don’t know if she’d had to run on camera unexpectedly and hadn’t had time to lay it down, or what; she was only wearing a bikini, and had nowhere to tuck it, if her purse wasn’t within her reach. As I say, it may not sound like much now, but in the day it was a bit of an eye-opener.
Thanks for contributing. I had never heard of Kam Nelson but clicked the link and was impressed with the pic. Seeing her in a bikini and nowhere to put her pack of Marlboros would have gotten me excited too. How old were you at the time?
Here’s a picture of Kam from her Groovy period. Her date looks kind of like Denver Pyle:
At the time I would probably have been 17. When Nelson came on I remember guys talking about her–we all thought she was sexy, but stupid–so I was probably still in high school or recently out of it. I’ve just been reading online (what I must have known at the time) that Groovy was originally shot on Santa Monica beach and hosted by Michael Blodgett, a sort of male Kam Nelson. He was later replaced by DJ Sam Riddle, an L.A. Dick Clark–all these 15 minutes of fame celebrities!–with Nelson as his sidekick. The show then moved indoors, so it may be that every so often it went back out on location and shot at different beaches and it was one of those shoots I saw (in Hermosa Beach).
P.S. Apropos of celebrity, I just remembered that I once saw Claire Danes smoking (and seemingly trying to hide her face) at age 15, when she hadn’t yet come out as a smoker. She had come with her older sister and got the cigarette from her.
Hey Mark–
I used to browse the site http://forums.lel-hosting.com/ quite a bit before it was shutdown. Has there been a spinoff of that yet?
As far as I know there hasn’t been a spinoff, I regret to say, but I keep waiting for one to surface. Not only was that a site I loved reading and following, I also got a tremendous amount of traffic from the Dark Side Forum to my own blog.