Gawdy Bawdy Las Vegas

Las Vegas is built on cliché and hyperbole, incongruity and anachronism. That’s the fun of it. 

Howdy folks, from gaudy bawdy Las Vegas, Nevada. And greetings from the zany drag queens at La Cage...the talking camels at The Luxor...Liberace’s ghost and the sexy pirates at Buccaneer’s Bay, and from the opulent Bellagio Hotel, where I have a $600 room, coffee not included.  Merry merry from Martha Stewart, who decorated the Bellagio’s 32-foot tall Black Hills Spruce tree with 450 hand-crafted ornaments. 

I lovvvvve Vegas. Here every megahotel is a mini-Disneyland.  You can gawk for free.  You can spend a fortune on a room above the Bellagio’s $30 million art collection of Gauguins, Picassos, Cezannes, Matisses and Manets...  or bed down at the Las Vegas Backpacker’s Resort, a budget motel or a even trailer park.   Regardless of room rates, nobody sleeps in Vegas.  My friend had a room in the Treasure Island Hotel’s fake pirate village.  Outside her window, every 90 minutes between 3p.m.-10:30 p.m., the pirate ship in Buccaneer Bay blasted the British frigate Britannia, filling the air above the crowds with real fire and real smoke, as the frigate and crew “sunk” into the fake Caribbean Sea.  She thought the whole thing “a hoot.”

Las Vegas is built on cliché and hyperbole, incongruity and anachronism. That’s the fun of it.  The Las Vegas News Bureau touts the 350-foot high glass pyramid Luxor Hotel : “The world’s most powerful beam of light atop the pyramid is visible to pilots 250 miles away in Los Angeles.  The atrium in the middle of the pyramid can hold nine Boeing 747’s stacked one on top of another.”

The nightclub shows are amaaaaaazing.  I loved seeing Judy Garland, Cher, Dionne Warwick, Bette Midler and other legends brought to life at La Cage, where emcee Frank Marino stars as Joan Rivers, and ample Jimmy Emerson as Madonna’s Bigger Sister-- with silver-cone tits that look like the hat on the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz.  

I was thrilled to see how the Cirque de Soleil was doing.  This hallucinogenic circus started out as a group of stilt-walkers, mimes and buskers in Baie-Saint-Paul, Quebec in 1984, the year before I moved to Montreal.  I saw their first astonishing shows in a small blue-and-yellow tent in Old Montreal.   Their latest $90 million creation  at the Bellagio ($100 a ticket) surpasses everything that’s ever been done in the whole history of world entertainment.  

Director Franco Dragone’s “O” (a play on French “eau” for water) has 1.5 million gallons of water for a stage, 75 scuba-certified performers --Olympian divers, gymnasts, contortionists, acrobats, aerialists...supernatural effects, mystical choreography, and a mindboggling set which shifts like tectonic plates to become water then solid, then water.  The special technology allows the pool floor to rise and descend, aswell as “breathe” : water vanishes instantly to create a dry stage. But you gasp for the performers. Will the water be there for them when they leap from 85 feet?  Mesmerizing.  The Cirque de Soleil’s “O” is the ultimate definition of the word.

In Vegas all centuries, epochs, countries, styles of architecture and decadence happen at once.

Ho ho ho I’ve just had my watch picked right off my wrist.  Such a thing to happen in a Roman catacombs.  In Caesar’s World of 2,000 years ago, there were no wristwatches. But this is Vegas-- where all centuries, epochs, countries, styles of architecture, and styles of decadence happen at once.  Where volcanoes erupt,  knights jousts, albino tigers and lions pounce just to entertain you. On the kitschy Vegas Strip, you can go  from New York City to a Gladiator’s heathen Rome, to King Tut’s Egypt,  King Arthur’s medieval England, to a 24th century space station, all with the hail of a taxi. In this entertainment town twinkling audaciously in the parched Mojave Desert, you can watch dolphins frolicking in salt water pools, pirates fighting in a fake Caribbean Sea. You can watch the sinking of the Titanic, or the sinking of a British frigate after a fully-rigged pirate ship bashes it with cannons, while French Can-Can dancers and Radio City Rockettes kick on and on, and gamblers bow to an 8,000-pound, gold-plated Thai Buddha for good luck.

Only in Las Vegas, could I travel back 20 centuries to Caesar’s Rome to have my Timex Indiglo Navigator lifted off my wrist.  It happened in the Sultan’s Palace Theatre of Caesar’s Magical Empire...after the magician dragged me on stage to be part of his act.  That evening began, as all Vegas evenings begin, with a walk through a few flashing, binging,  C A S I N O S.... In Las Vegas hotels, casinos are purposefully situated between the guest rooms and the lobby.  You must pass by rows of unarmed bandits to get to your room.  My first night at the Bellagio, I’d gambled - or “gamed” as they prefer to say now--my wad to get it out of my system.  In Las Vegas the average gaming budget per trip is $500.  Mine was 5 cents. I gambled one nickle and won five.  Then quit while I was ahead. 

My ears ringing with Bellagio and Caesar’s Palace slot music, I finally arrived at Caesar’s Magical Empire to greet my dinner companions.  A card-shuffling magician led us into the small, dark Chamber of Destiny.  After a statue of Caesar perked to life, raised his arm and turned his thumb down, the Chamber suddenly dropped a few stories.  We stumbled into a dank, misty catacombs, where a Roman centurion and the smell of meat awaited us. But was it to eat...or to be eaten?

Ceronomus the Sorcerer lead us into a flickering dining chamber.  We were instructed to tear our pentagrams to signify beef, pork, chicken or veggies and drop them into a gunny sack.  (Obviously, the soothsayer would divine which order was whose.) Goblets of wine and our wizard’s dry British wit kept us in stitches, until we were rushed through dessert and led into the cavernous Sanctum Secorum.  Giant leering gargoyles, leaping fire, forbidden crypts, and bottomless pits--the setting for an Indiana Jones adventure, but for the wisecracking skeletons named Habeus and Corpus.

Magic originated to pick pockets

A few magic shows later, I was called from the audience to become a stooge in a magic trick. There I was, alone on the stage of the Sultan’s Palace Theatre, feeling around in a little black bag for a rubber egg.  It seemed like the dumbest magic trick of all.  The egg which had been inside the bag a second ago had vanished. Then presto!  The egg was back in the bag. Had it dropped from the ceiling?   I limped off the stage in disbelief, when the bow-tied prestigitator said to me, “Oh Darling, here’s your wrist watch.” My wrist watch? Its thick leather band had been looped tightly twice around my wrist.  And I never felt a thing!  “Darling, don’t you know how magic originated  --to pick pockets !”

Incongruities.  Vegas is lousy with them.  Where else can you be browsing in a ritzy hotel shop selling $10,000 writing instruments and $4,000 crystal-encrusted Judith Leiber handbags - and learn all about the evil tumbleweeds in West Texas?  The glittering fruit-shaped evening bags had caught my eye, and so I got to talking with the salesperson from Ada, Oklahoma about them.  But we quickly veered off to West Texas.

Wicked Tumbleweeds

“If you ever go there, don’t ever stop for a tumbleweed,” she warned me. “What?” “If a tumbleweed gets in your way, keep on driving, honey.  Never get out of your car to look at a tumbleweed.  You can die.”  “Die???” “Tumble weeds always travel in groups.  If you stop, they’ll collect around your car. Then you can’t open your doors or windows.  And you're stuck inside, and you can't see to drive. And nobody can see your car. So if you don't get hit by a truck first, you'll get asphyxiated. "

I always thought tumbleweeds were cute lazy things in Country and Western songs.  Horrified to know they’re as evil as Roman Centurions with nets and tridents. You learn the darndest things in Las Vegas.