One long weekend when I was in third grade, on our way to a picnic, our car was rear-ended. Hard. Of course, nobody wore seatbelts back then. My sister was badly hurt and I had a concussion.
By Tuesday, I was deemed recovered enough to go to school even though, along with being confused and traumatized, I had classic black eye and was miserable and self-conscious about it.
At the time, Tareyton Cigarettes had a wildly popular ad campaign featuring people with black eyes proudly holding up cigarettes and vowing they’d rather “fight than switch” to another brand. As soon as I walked onto the property of Our Lady of Lourdes Grammar, a boy about my age saw me, stopped, goggled and then ran around a corner yelling to a playmate, “Hey, come look at this girl! She’s a Tareyton smoker!” — which made me laugh.
Instead of staring, pointing, and mocking me, he’d offered a funny explanation for the way I looked in the context of something every kid on the playground loved — television. I enjoyed the bonus of being a “Tareyton smoker” for the rest of the week.
Pam Troy 