No Smoking On Stage in Colorado

Colorado has concluded that its ban on smoking in public areas extends to its theaters and the people acting in them. Link from Extra Criticum.

This is highly annoying to me. I don't smoke myself, though I have smoked onstage (back when I was acting, in a college production of Harold Pinter's One for the Road, where I tortured someone with a cigarette). A number of my characters in the plays I write smoke. I hate seeing fake smoking.

Tom Robbins has a wonderful section in Still Life With Woodpecker about smoking:

Three of the four elements are shared by all creatures, but fire was a gift to humans alone. Smoking cigarettes is as intimate as we can become with fire without immediate excruciation. Every smoker is an embodiment of Prometheus, stealing fire from the gods and bringing it on back home. We smoke to capture the power of the sun, to pacify Hell, to identify with the primordial spark, to feed on the marrow of the volcano. It's not the tobacco we're after but the fire. When we smoke, we are performing a version of the fire dance, a ritual as ancient as lightning.

You just can't get that with fake cigarettes.

I have for some time wanted to have an evening of short plays where smoking is the point: get a fire marshall to stand by with an extinguisher for the night. Just need to find a theater where that could happen. Maybe just do it outdoors next Summer.