Day 2 of the 2018 Iowa State Fair, the Wednesday night with the sold-out Thomas Rhett concert, was very streaky sightings wise and the first two hours of the night had not gone well. I was demoralized leading up to the concert’s start with this huge crowd but so few smokers, but right when I was almost at my lowest a sensory overload period was about to hit. And following one sighting to its end led me directly to it….
As the previous girl was in the final throes of her cigarette, I looked up to discover a duo of nicely dressed 20-somethings standing on the curb of the concourse smoking, very clearly getting their last fix of nicotine before the concert. The girl on the right was a dark blond in a green tanktop and jean shorts. She was sexy, if a tick chubby, and would have been a decent find if she was the only one smoking. But that blond on the left was the one who made this sighting golden, a long-haired blond beauty with telltale heavy smoker features, wearing badass sunglasses along with a shoulder-baring pale pink tube top and a tiny denim miniskirt. The image was the perfect contrast of innocent country cutie and badass heavy-smoking sexpot, and the sexpot portion won out whenever she took one of her intense drags, holding that cigarette to her lips like so many before it and pumping nicotine and tar into her bloodstream for an extended period. She really made elevator music out of the friend whose smoking style was more average. I was snapping pics relentlessly, hoping something would turn out this close to dusk and having to maneuver around a garbage can in front of them to boot. Surprisingly, a few of the pics aren’t bad. In front of the two girls wandered this mid-20s long-haired brunette in a black flower-print top and dark jeans. She was looking my direction and my first instinct was that she busted me taking pics of the smoker girls. But moments later, she opened her purse and extracted a cork-filter cigarette and it hit me that she wasn’t looking at me taking pics of the smoker girls, she was looking at the smoker girls! I’d get some fantastic additional context as the new addition to the encounter initiated a conversation with the existing duo….
The brunette lit her cigarette and leaned towards the two blonds. I couldn’t hear every word of the exchange but she perfectly expressed my feelings when she said, “I can’t believe how few smokers are here! I didn’t even know it was allowed until I saw you and figured this must be the ‘smoking section’!” At least for now, it was the smoking section…and as the casual conversation played out among the three of them, I was walking on the clouds watching all three attractive 20-somethings with cigarettes in hand. I thought I nailed a pic with the three of them all in the same shot, with my favorite blond in mid-drag, but unfortunately much of the blond’s face is cut off in it. You can still see the drag but not much else. I was only on top of the world for about a minute though as the blonds crushed out their cigarettes below their feet and began to head towards the grandstand for the concert. I could tell from atop the curb that my favorite blond’s discarded butt was a Marlboro Light…
The brunette was smoking alone now and I stuck around to enjoy her solo show. Her head was oddly small proportionate to the rest of her body but she was still cute and put on a decent smoking show….although it wouldn’t be a solo show for long as I looked over my left shoulder to see another group of young women hovering in the other direction. Capturing my attention immediately was this adorable mid-20s blond in a shoulderless, yellow bare-midriff tube top with black shorts on the bottom….smoking a cigarette. The sensory overload continued and I was able to look to my left and see her and then look to my right and see the brunette in the final throes of her cigarette. The blond addition was amidst a group of five women and there was only one other smoker, who was too husky and unattractive to count. I could tell from the blond filter on her cigarette that she was smoking a Camel Turkish Royal, and the drags I saw were quite nice with the exhales always sent skyward. They were in a tight huddle so photo-taking was no easy task, but I managed one close-up holding shot and one frontal shot where you can see her face and the cigarette in her hand. The brunette had finished her cigarette and walked away so the blond was the final player in this curbside surge for the last minute or so until she took her final drag and crushed it out below her feet. It had taken nearly three hours at the fair for the Thomas Rhett crowd to deliver any memorable sightings, and when they did, four impressive girls did so all at once!
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