#35 Branding, You’re Fine Girl

I don’t smoke, although I must admit that for many years I did. And my lovely bride has never smoked. Yet we both remember very clearly that amazing oral-fixation training device we all imprinted on in our youth. No, not pacifiers, though, truth be told, I sometimes have a hankering for a well-chewed binky. I’m talking about candy cigarettes. Wrap your mind around this concept for a while. There once was a time in this country when you could go to any store that sold treats and pick up a pack of candy cigarettes.
I mean, it’s bad enough these days. I see young parents driving down the road; apparently caring parents because they have their kids strapped in FDA-approved child restraint devices in the back seats of their cars, yet apparently not caring enough because they are smoking in those same cars while their kids are in ‘em. Oh sure, they crack the window. But it’s been my experience with aerodynamics that cracking the window actually lets more air in than out. And if anything, the smoking added to the smog can’t be doing anybody, much less a small-lunged toddler, any good.
But candy cigarettes? Funny thing is, I have old home movies from that time and there’s my mom, cigarette dangling from her lips, helping my sister take her first steps out on the lawn. My older brother and I are in the background, candy cigarettes dangling from our lips too, mimicking the whole process like choking chimpanzees. We’d take the cigs out of our mouths and blow imaginary smoke, flick an imaginary ash or two with arched fingers and then go back to imaginary sucking. I remember having a problem doing that for long, though. My tastebuds got the better of me and I had to crunch the whole thing down. My brother would keep sucking on his until it was whittled down to a fine point and then he’d pin me down with his legs and torment me by scratching me with his new mildly-gooey imitation ice pick. Sometimes he’d play the master spy trying to torture information out of me. Then he’d take a new candy cigarette with it’s simulated glowing red tip and pretend to brand me with it unless I gave up state secrets. Man, do I have some baggage.
I don’t remember who made the candy cigarettes. The names on the packs were always like bad Asian counterfeits; Merlboro and Bunson and Hodges. But you gotta wonder. They already had our parents blowing nicotine in our faces at a tender age. Teaching us the mannerisms, and ingraining in us the habits of the accomplished smoker “through play” had to be one of the greatest marketing coups of all time. What does Madison Avenue call that these days? Oh yeah, “branding.” Ssh. It’s a state secret.
America, ya gotta love it.