Cursed Rewrite!

The two things Cursed Tongue hates most are littering and smoking. It's quite unfortunate that many litterbugs also seem to be smokers.

As much as I dislike inhaling second-hand lung tar, even I think it was a little silly to stop an Arthur Miller play on account of scripted, on-stage smoking. There is a story from Reuters entitled To Smoke, or Not to Smoke..., where a theater in Italy put on a production of "A View from the Bridge." One of the characters smokes, and a conscientious, law-abiding, Italian commanded the actor to extinguish his cancer stick. Which brings me to the third misbehavior that really steams my beans, talking in theaters. They actually stopped the play and did a 15-minute rewrite, sans cigarettes.

Why did it not occur to anybody that the character could hold an unlit cigarette and pretend to smoke? It is called "acting," after all.