Five Years a Writer

I blame Katharine Hepburn . Maybe Lauren Bacall . Possibly Audrey Hepburn . But mostly Katharine Hepburn. With her glamorous looks, chic sense of style (those flowing, high-waisted trousers!), and her fierce independent spirit, I loved her on screen. I wanted what she had. Phooey — I wanted to be her. The closest I came was to smoke. Back in the 1960s, when I was not yet 10 years old, a woman smoking represented a woman independent, a woman of her own mind, a woman doing her own thing. That was the woman I wanted to be. So I smoked. To be sure, not real actual cigarettes. I ‘smoked’ short pencils or tightly rolled up paper, glued together and coloured at one end to represent the burning part. As you can see in the top photo, my siblings got in on the act and I was my most suave and sophisticated 8- or 9-year-old self lighting my sister’s ‘cigarette’. In high school, my best friend taught me how to inhale. Menthol cigarettes, pilfered from her mother’s supply as I recall. No wonder th...