3 Days in Sin City with 2 (Seriously) Old Friends
I spent a few days in Las Vegas last week for a many-times-postponed mini get-together with two old (as in aged) friends.
For most of my life, Las Vegas has been known as one of the great gambling capitals of the world. Miles above its poor cousin in Atlantic City, it is now outpacing its more venerable competitors in Monaco and Macau. And although England and France have more total casinos (141 and 189, respectively), no single city comes close to the 122 that Vegas has. Not to mention the total square footage devoted to and money spent on gambling in Vegas as compared to any other city, state, or country in the world.
There is an energy I feel when I’m in The City of Lost Wages that returns every time I’m there. Thinking about it now, it’s hard to say exactly what it is. It’s less refined than the James Bond vibe I enjoyed in Monaco and less claustrophobic than I felt in Macau. It is highly exciting but not frenetic, hopeful but not ebullient, dangerous but not quite frightening. It produces just the number of pheromones and amount of adrenalin that my brain seems to crave.
The Vegas of today is a very different city than it was in 1911, when it was incorporated, or in 1931, the year that gambling was legalized. It’s even different from how it was in 1995, when Martin Scorsese and Nicholas Pileggi made Casino, the epic crime movie starring Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci, and Sharon Stone.
It is a new and improved version of a manufactured city that wears its artificiality like a robe of honor. It’s bigger now. It’s safer. You can bring the kids and have a family vacation without even pulling on the arm of a one-armed bandit.
But if you do wander into its vast, interlocking amusement park of Sin, you may feel as if you’ve entered a beeping, ringing, and blinking dreamland whose décor can only be described in hair-style metaphors: updos, ducktails, megafros, pompadours, and whatever it is that sits on top of our president’s head.
Which is to say: If you open your mind to Las Vegas, it will open its endlessly garish and entertaining experiences to you.
Besides the fun and excitement of bathing in the energy of Las Vegas, my friends and I attended three shows…
The Eagles at The Sphere
My Rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars
We sat very nearly at the top of a steeply descending bleacher, enclosed in a 377-foot, $2.3 billion globe, a massive, 580,000-square-foot bubble in the heart of the casino district, featuring a “wraparound interior LED screen, speakers with beamforming and wave field synthesis technologies, and 4D special effects.”
Counting floor seating (maxed for this show), the venue provides amphitheater seating for 20,000. Based on our “cheap seat” tickets at $400+ each, that brings in more than $10 million per show.
From our aerie perch, the stage was a small rectangle of light upon which the musicians were tiny black objects barely moving. But the rest of the view – the entire interior scope of the globe – was a blaze of hallucinogenic images emerging, metamorphizing, and disappearing in synchronicity with the brain-pounding sound.
“Gee,” I was thinking, “With a rig like this, you don’t even need an actual band down there to make this work. The sound system is killer. The light show is LSD level. They could replace the Eagles themselves with three-dimensional, AI-programmed holograms and the performance would be just as great.”
Which is true. It was nevertheless a great show and a once-in-my-lifetime experience – one that gave me a glimpse into the near future and a new respect for the genius and virtuosity of the Eagles themselves.
A little circus called Absinthe
My Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars
The cast of Absinthe
I had no expectations because I hadn’t booked it and didn’t ask. It was one of those small Cirque du Soleil-styled shows with lots of impressive balancing and gymnastics routines held together by a funny, bawdy script and two very talented lead actors/comedians. From the muscularity and good looks of the performers, I guessed they were Russian. Almost right. They were Ukrainians – from the north.
A disappointing tour of Theatre Arte
My Rating: 0.5 out of 5 stars
Billed as a “must see” in Vegas, and described as “the ultimate immersive experience,” I thought – correctly – that this was going to be an experience similar to a fantastic light museum that K and I visited last summer in Tokyo. I was expecting the sort of music and visuals of The Sphere ribboned into a maze of corridors and rooms.
And it was that. Sort of. But Theatre Arte was much smaller and considerably less spectacular. The good news: By the time I realized it was a bit of a scam (after about 12 minutes), it was over.
And about those hookers…
As you know if you’ve ever been to Vegas, it’s nearly impossible to get from your hotel room to an exit without winding through a jungle of slot machines, blackjack tables, and poker rooms – all designed to keep you from exiting until you’ve laid your money down and lost most of it.
Alcohol is cheap and plentiful. Ladies of the night, too. (Well… plentiful, but probably not cheap.) Although, given the way that so many women dress in the casinos, I found it difficult to know which was which.
My companions, however, found this issue debatable, and spent a good part of the time we were passing through the casinos on the “So, what is she?” question.
