Today’s P I has an article about bars where smokers can still go to smoke [# ^[1]]. They’re calling them smoke-easies. Smoke-easies. For chrissakes.

I don’t know if you spend as much time in bars as I do–for your liver’s sake, I hope you don’t–but it shouldn’t come as any surprise to you that a whole lot of people have become really grumpy about the smoking ban. Smokers are a testy lot. Even I, a nonsmoker, feel that some bars are better when they’re smoky. (Have you been to the 5 Point in recent months? The Buckaroo? Hell, Linda’s? Certain bars are best seen through a haze.)

So it should come as no surprise that a few spots have become secret havens for smokers. Some of them have signals or secret rooms, but no special knocks yet. One bar I hang out in is small enough that the regulars are a known quantity, so some nights the ashtrays come out. If it bothered me, well, I guess I’d stop hanging out in dives and go down the street to the Frontier Room. But all that chrome and all those halter tops are scary, so for me an occasional little bit of smoke is an ok trade-off.

The P I was also nice enough to include a list of places that have been cited for smoking [# ^[2]], so some amount of killjoys are out there reporting people to the board of health. (No more sneaking cigarettes at the Downtown Emergency Service Center, kids.) Seriously, they cited the Hookah Lounge? Are they joking? Who goes to a Hookah Lounge and is upset that there is smoke there?

There has got to be some sort of compromise possible that doesn’t involve using the word smoke-easy.