Las Vegas

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Boobs on Parade

Dinner and a show. That’s what I needed last night. A big hunk of meat and some dancing showgirls (not at the same time, of course). Showgirls with sequins and feathers and not much else. So I dined at Bellagio’s Prime where my waiter graciously proffered his opinion on the culinary differences between a porterhouse and a filet, a peppercorn New York and a roasted rib-eye while I quickly sucked down a Manhattan Bella—Knob Creek bourbon, sweet vermouth, Dubonnet, and a brandied cherry—hoping I could order another round before the waiter was done with his spiel.

The steak was huge. The Manhattans wonderfully potent. Thoughts of my gambling debacle started to fade. And just as I was starting to feel better about myself, the fountains in the 8-acre lake fronting the restaurant exploded in a dancing flurry like enchanted straw brooms from Fantasia. A chorus line of frothy water towers, like long lithesome legs, swaying left, right, kicking straight up into the air. Lovely. Erotic. By the time the water show finished, I was ready for the real thing. Time for Jubilee! at Bally’s.

Here’s what I don’t understand about this classic Boobs on Parade revue: Why do they literally flesh out the entire show in the first five minutes? It’s too much. Too many—way too many—boobs. The theatre is just barely dark when wave after wave of spangled and beaded showgirls—those “scintillating beauties,” as my program calls them—assaults the audience from every angle. They crowd the stage, the opera boxes, and even drop down from overhead the audience.

Everywhere you look, topless women. Ten, twenty, a hundred of them! It’s sensory overload. And then poof! They’re gone and the show settles into a mixture of special effects (the Titanic sinks once again), dubious historical vignettes (Look! It’s a newsclip of doughboys shooting Huns in Armentieres and here come some naked showgirls to the rescue!), and crowd-pleasing illusions as a magician makes tigers and cars vanish in thin air.

But here’s the thing that really stumps me: You’ve got something like 50 bare-breasted women strutting back and forth across the stage in these enormously over-produced vignettes and yet every single boob you see looks the same. Even the nipples are the same. Ever woman looks to be about a 32 or 34B with modest nipples the size of raspberries. There’s no real jiggling going on here because there’s nothing to jiggle. And the conformity, in the end, is monotonous. It’s safe to say that once you’ve seen one pair of tits in this show, you’ve seen them all. And what fun is that?

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Lady Luck is a bitch

You’ll notice I haven’t said anything about doing any gambling so far (other than throwing away a few nickels down at Mermaids). The fact of the matter is that the whole idea makes me kind of queasy. Unlike my father, I’m not really a gambler. It makes me nervous. The truth is I’ve forgotten every thing my father ever taught me about blackjack. Do you always double down on eights or do you split them? Stand on 13 if the dealer shows a four, five, or six or take a hit? How could I forget this stuff?

But yesterday after walking past all the $10 minimum tables about a dozen times, I finally picked a table where the lady dealer was smiling (“Always pick a table with a woman dealer,” my dad said) and the players seemed to be winning.

Hands sweating, I put a hundred bucks on the table and Joyce—my dealer—calls out something like “Taking one hundred” to the pit boss so everybody knows I’m in there. I’m a player.

I take it easy, putting up a single chip at a time. Still the hundred is gone in, what, maybe ten minutes. I reach into my pocket and pull out another hundred. I win a couple hands, get cocky, throw up five or six chips at a time to try and get my money back in a hurry and, of course, lose it all. Bamm. Just like that.

I give Joyce a sickly smile and stand up. “Better luck next time,” she says without looking at me, already dealing the next hand.

Well let me just say this Joyce: There will be no next time. I have learned my lesson. I am not my father. I will not be back. I have, at this very moment, sworn off gambling. Forever. Till death do I part. You’ll not get the last of my stash. So forget about it. I mean it. Remember Lesson One: Vegas giveth and taketh—but mostly it taketh.

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Viva Las Vegas

Maybe it was just excess remorse from my hangover but on Sunday morning I was feeling repentant. So I figured it was time for church. One of the most popular—and historic—wedding chapels on The Strip is the cutesy Little Church of the West. Judy Garland, Dudley Moore, and Elvis Presley all tied the knot here (though for The King, it was only a cinematic wedding to Ann-Margaret in “Viva Las Vegas”). So did my mother and father. Not the first time, mind you, but the second time. After a nasty period in the late ‘60s when our family, like a lot of American families, seemed to fall apart all of a sudden.

The details are not important (and, in the end, they divorced again), but after a long separation when my parents lived in separate states (that was fun), they had a temporary rapprochement that coalesced around my mother’s second invite to Las Vegas with my father to renew their vows at what was then the wedding chapel at the Hacienda Hotel. I would have loved to have stayed at the Hacienda, for old time’s sake, except that it was imploded on New Year’s Eve in 1996 to make way for the island-themed Mandalay Bay.

But the Little Church of the West lives on. It was jacked up, loaded on a flatbed, and moved a few blocks down the boulevard. That’s where I decided to spend Sunday afternoon and I was in luck for as I walked into the schoolhouse-sized chapel, a wedding was just beginning. After the ceremony, I gave my heartfelt congratulations to the bride and groom, who were from Japan. They told me they’d picked the chapel from an album of photos in Tokyo and had traveled across the Pacific solely to get married in the same chapel where Elvis wed Ann-Margaret. “Big fans,” they said, grinning and nodding their heads several times. “Big, big fans.” I’m not sure if they meant of the movie or Elvis or even Ann-Margaret. No matter.

The ceremony took less than 15 minutes and the beaming couple was whisked away in a rented 60s-era Cadillac to their reception at the all-you-can-eat buffet at Bally’s. Just the thought made me feel a little nostalgic. I’m sure my parents did something similar.

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99 cent fried Twinkies

Saturday afternoon I went looking for Sassy Sally’s, a dive on Freemont Street I’d been to years ago. Back then there was an Elvis impersonator in front of the casino luring passersby with a free picture of yourself standing in Glitter Gulch with Elvis who wore a white jacket and gold framed glasses and looked considerably shorter and thinner than the Elvis I remembered.

But Sassy Sally’s was gone. Not gone, really, just repurposed. Now it’s called Mermaid’s Casino and instead of Elvis, they have a couple of 80s-era showgirls at the entrance handing out Mardi Gras beads and vouchers for a free drawing for $10,000. “Hurry, hurry, hurry!” whispered the showgirl as she strung some beads around my neck. “The drawing is in 15 minutes!”

This was definitely the old Las Vegas. It reminded me of being in the basement of a frat house back in the “Animal House” era. The carpet felt mushy and smelled of stale beer, there was a reek of ancient frying grease and cigarette smoke in the air, and everyone was wearing a funny hat and looked incredibly drunk (the drinks here are strong).

I got a Bloody Mary and was just walking around, admiring the dexterity of extremely large women to sit on tiny little stools in front of the old-fashioned slot machines which still take nickels and quarters and pay back in the same, when I came across the snack shack in the back which was offering up 99 cent deep-fried Twinkies and Oreos. I seriously considered getting one of the greaser Twinkies (what the hell, right?) until I saw the pregnant 16-year-old in front of me take a bite of hers and then spit the dark tan-colored nugget out on the carpet.

“Pokey!” exclaimed her mohawk-coiffed boyfriend who was just about to bite into his fried Oreos. “What the hell are you doing?”

“They’re dis-gusting!” screamed Pokey. “I think I’m going to puke.”

And with that she headed for the ladies’ room while I got out of line.

By now the fifteen minutes had gone by and I was figuring the free drawing for $10,000 was about to commence so I thought while I waited I’d sit down at one of the nickel slot machines and just toy around with it. I got some twenty dollars worth of change and picked out my machine and not two minutes later a cocktail waitress whose name tag said GABBY came by and asked if I’d like another Bloody Mary, even though my first one wasn’t half done. What the heck.

Like I said, I was just waiting for the drawing so I was only playing one nickel at a time.

“Ain’t never gonna win anything that way,” said the large woman perched beside me. “Everyone knows you’ve got to play five to beat the odds. You play just one nickel, you walk away broke.”

I wasn’t quite sure how broke I could get playing just one nickel but the woman was a little intimidating; she kept sneaking sideways glances at me like she thought I might be trying to steal the wallet out of the oversized vinyl purse slung over her shoulder. So I started putting in five nickels a pull. What the heck.

And you know what? She was right. I immediately heard some ding-ding-dings and a flood of nickels came pouring down the chute. This was fun. Gabby came back with my Bloody Mary and I finished off the first one and handed the empty glass to her. “Look at you!” she said, standing like a proud mother with her hand on one hip. “A winner already.”

“I told him how to do it,” said the big woman next to me.

“That’s right, she did,” I said, smiling back at her. We were friends now. Maybe after the drawing I’d see if she wanted to go for a deep-fried Twinkie.

I played for two hours. It’s amazing how the time goes by when these little coins keep rolling down the chute every so often and Gabby keeps freshening up your drink. I think it’s quite possible I was getting a little tight. So I got up a bit wobbly from my stool, hugged the big woman sitting next to me, and took my big bucket of coins over to the cashier who paid me exactly $5.25. In cash.

It was dark when I got outside. And they still hadn’t had that free drawing.

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Why Sinatra matters

As big as a fan as my father was of Ol’ Blue Eyes, he hated the early Sinatra—the skinny one that wore polka dot ties and made young girls swoon. The guy he admired was the reinvented Frank, the man’s man, the one who boozed and womanized and hung out with mobsters.

The evolution of Las Vegas, it seems to me, is the same—only in reverse. Vegas started out as a later day Sinatra. Men loved it—the open sexuality, the hooch, the smoky crap tables, the danger. Back then gourmet meant a 99 cent shrimp cocktail served in a sundae glass at the Golden Gate Casino and shopping meant a stop at the Bonanza Gift and Souvenir Shop, across from the Sahara, for good deals on Jim Beam.

Now you can take your honey to Charlie Palmer’s Aureole at Mandalay Bay and drop a small fortune and then let her try on a $150,000 cocktail ring at Tiffany’s. In other words, they’ve cleaned Vegas up, stuck him in a monkey suit, combed his unruly hair, and asked him to sing an aria in front of the Bellagio fountains. Women may be momentarily dazzled into thinking Vegas is charming these days, but to me it’s really just a grand illusion, for in its heart of hearts, Vegas is still Vegas—a place where a guy like me goes because it’s quarter to three and there’s nobody here but you and me.

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