Viva Las Vegas
So, we spent the weekend in Vegas.
Friday, we drove up to State Line — I’m clearly not yet a California boy, because “State Line” still sounds like where the crooks run in 1970s country-western songs. But, in this case, it’s the location of the Primm Valley, a very inexpensive (albeit not particularly cheap) way to visit Vegas while having a substantially better place to crash at night than the Budget Inn at a Budget Inn sort of price. Any hotel/casino with its own movie theater and log flume ride inside is all right by me.
We drove into Vegas to see the biggest, glitziest show in town, by any yardstick: Celine Dion’s “A Brand New Day.” While her core audiences were represented — gays, Canadians and gay Canadians — the audience was packed in general. Word had gotten out that this was a show to see.
There’s a giant (I think someone said five stories high) LCD video monitor comprising the back of the stage. Combined with good old fashioned stagecraft — clever tricks of the light, smoke machines, set pieces rising and falling into the stage floor — the screen served to create probably a dozen different sets. Then, on top of this, add in the Cirque du Soleil‘s former director creating a show full of surreal images — flying piano movers with a floating piano, for instance — and a modern dance choreographer packing the stage with all the hopping, twirling, flipping dancers millions and millons of Caesar’s Palace dollars can buy.
The net effect was of cranking up the sound and fury of a big rock concert to 11, and then adding the baffling nature of modern dance atop it. There were two dancers always on stage: A yellow bellhop who sometimes apparently tried to interfere with the other dancers, and a guy in a white skullcap up stage left, who sometimes seemed to be an idealized romantic figure, although both of them, frankly, were pretty creepy. (My in-laws loved them both. Apparently there’s a modern dance appreciation gene I do not possess.) It was all very French (Canadian).
As my sister-in-law pointed out, though, you don’t have to be a fan of Celine’s songs to appreciate that she puts on a hell of a show, and surprisingly little of it involving a full-force blast from her mighty Québécois lungs. She had a lot of covers in the show, for one thing. If you don’t enjoy a smoky version of “Fever,” you should be in jail.
Saturday, Jenn and I bummed around Vegas, riding the new monorail (two thumbs up here) and staying out of the cold wind.
It says something about Vegas that you have to specify which roller coaster in/around/above a hotel you rode. In our case, it was Speed at the Sahara and it was all it was cracked up to be. One of the most fun rides I’ve ever been on, without question. It’s also one of the last vestiges of the family friendly experiment Vegas has abandoned since the last time Jenn and I were there: Everywhere, Vegas had gone back to sexing it up, with giant billboards of womens’ thong-clad (well, as much as thongs clad anything) buttocks everywhere, advertising sexy new shows at seemingly every hotel. Vegas is once again an all-smoking, all-drinking, all-horny, all-gambling city of sin. One of these days, I expect a Nevada/Utah border war to break out.
We also had so-so Italian for lunch at Caesars, saw the lion habitat at the MGM Grand, checked out the flamingos at the Flamingo and basically just wandered around until we hooked back up with the in-laws for dinner at Margaritaville.
Now, I will confess to being one of those parrotheads — and after a dozen or so Jimmy Buffett concerts, I think there’s probably no escaping that label — who felt uncomfortable with Jimmy’s slide (well, drop off a cliff is more accurate) into hardcore commercialism, but that said, Margaritaville rocked. The restaurant design was a hoot — the deep sea fishing boat booths were an especially great touch — the food was a solid mix of island cuisine and New Orleans-inspired dishes and the booze was really, really good.
After that, we capped off our weekend in Vegas with that most seminal of Vegas entertainment — no, not boobies, the in-laws were along — celebrity impersonations. In a weekend full of surrealism, this was probably its peak. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a Jackie Wilson impersonator, but I’m glad to learn there’s a place where someone who looks like Prince can find something other than fear and suspicion. Jackie, Prince, Celine Dion, Whitney Houston and, of course, the King of Rock and Roll, were all excellent. (The Blues Brothers seemed like they found a chubby guy and a tall guy who could, in theory, play the harmonica. They sounded, looked and danced nothing like the actual McCoys, who I think are probably below the level to qualify for even this sort of variety act.)
You’ll notice the one thing I haven’t mentioned is gambling. We did play a little video poker while at Buffalo Bill’s at State Line, but it was mostly to kill a little time and to see if I could get more Southern Comfort and Coke than I would be paying for normally, if I wasn’t sticking my bills into the poker machine and slowly playing a quarter a hand games. (Naturally, this screws up my odds-estimating ability, which is the whole point of the exercise from the point of view of the casino.) But I don’t get the visceral thrill that actual gamblers get from the moment of risk. I find slot machines especially baffling, as they eliminate all pretense that the gambler has any control over their fate: You could pay a monkey to play the slots for you, or indeed, just to take your money from you to start with and blow it all on booze and monkey floozies.
Bottom line: We had a lot of fun, drank a moderate amount of booze, gambled a little bit, saw two great shows, saw other things both cool and surreal and will definitely be coming back soon. The only Vegas thing I really want to do that I haven’t done yet is stay in a hotel actually on The Strip. I’m thinking The Flamingo might be the way to go when that happens. I actually liked The Rio better, but it’s too far off the beaten path (and monorail track).
