Christ Must Be in Vegas by Nancy Lyon
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Ho ho ho. It’s Christmas in gaudy bawdy Las Vegas. Season’s Greetings from the talking camels at The Hotel Luxor...the sexy pirates at Buccaneer’s Bay... the zany drag queens at La Cage...King Tut’s clone (...or would that be King Clone’s Tit)?
Ho ho, it’s Christmas, and I’ve just had my watch picked right off my wrist. Such a thing to happen in a Roman catacomb. 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 joust, albino tigers and lions pounce just to entertain you.
On the kitschy Vegas Strip, you can go from modern Manhattan to a Gladiator’s heathen Rome, to King Tut’s Egypt, King Arthur’s medieval England, to a 24th century space station, or to M & M’s Chocolate World with the hail of a taxi. In this entertainment Mecca audaciously twinkling 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 a 8,000-pound, gold-plated Thai Buddha for good luck.
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 which is the 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 inside the pyramid can hold nine Boeing 747’s stacked one on top of another.
Only in Las Vegas could I travel back 20 centuries to Caesar’s Rome to have my Timex Indiglo Navigator lifted right off my wrist. That evening began, as all Vegas evenings begin, with a dangerous walk through flashing, ringing, C A S I N O S.
In Las Vegas hotels, casinos are purposely situated between the guest rooms and the lobby. You must pass by rows of flashing, ringing slot machines 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. Years before I'd learned in Reno, which ain’t got the class of Vegas, how addictive the slot machines can be.
In Reno I had been, of all crazy things, busking with my medieval Irish harp, plucking out jigs and reels as astonished gamblers tossed me freshly-won silver dollars from their paper cups. It was ridiculously easy to earn this money - and even easier to lose it, by wearing a path from my sidewalk busking pitch to the casino's one-armed bandits. Ninety seven bucks, earned and lost in a hour.
This night in Vegas, I'd successfully resisted the slot machines in the Bellagio Lobby, and arrived at Caesar’s Magical Empire to join my dinner companions. At the entrance, a toga clad magician led us into the small dark Chamber of Destiny. A statue of Julius Caesar came to life, raised its arm and turned its thumb down, and the elevator disguised as 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 (Were we 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. (The restaurant's 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 two wisecracking skeletons Habeus and Corpus led us into the cavernous Sanctum Secorum. Giant leering gargoyles, leaping fire, forbidden crypts, and bottomless pits--the setting for an Indiana Jones adventure.
Somehow we escaped and found ourselves in the Sultan’s Palace Theatre. One moment I was sitting in the audience, and then next the Sultan was dragging me on stage to participate in what looked like the dumbest magic trick of all. The magician held out a rubber egg for all to see. Then he put the egg inside a little black bag, and asked me to reach inside and pull it out. I felt inside but the egg wasn't there.
The magician was now in the aisles with the spectators. I was on the stage all alone. Then presto! I could feel the egg back in the bag. I was mildly freaked. Had it dropped from the ceiling? Did the magicians at Caesar’s World have supernatural powers? I limped off the stage in disbelief, as the bow-tied prestigitator held out his hand to me, saying casually, “Oh Darling, here’s your wrist watch.”
The thick leather band of my watch had been looped tightly twice around my wrist. And I never felt a thing!
“Darling," he continued, "don’t you know how magic originated - to pick pockets?”
I love Vegas. 31.1 million visitors a year can’t be wrong. 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, The Motel 6, or a $20 motel, or a trailer park. You can take Danny Smith’s Poor Man’s Tour of Las Vegas, then put on some fancy duds and hit the glitz.
Regardless of room rates, nobody sleeps in Vegas. A friend of mine booked a room in the Treasure Island Hotel’s fake pirate village, only to find that right 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 with real fire and smoke, as the frigate and crew “sunk” into the fake Caribbean Sea. She thought the whole thing “a hoot.”
The nightclub shows are amaaaaaazing. I loved seeing Judy Garland, Cher, Dionne Warwick, Bette Midler and other legends brought to life by the drag queens at La Cage, where the silver-cone tits are bigger than 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 surpasses everything that’s ever been done in the world's whole history of 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, and mystical choreography. The mindboggling set shifts like tectonic plates to become water then solid, then water. Special technology allows the pool floor to rise and descend, as well as “breathe” : water vanishes instantly to create a dry stage. But you gasp for the performers, wondering if the water will be there for them by the time they land, leaping from 85 feet.
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 West Texas’ evil tumbleweeds? The shop's glittering fruit-shaped evening bags had caught my eye. I got to talking with the salesperson from Ada, Oklahoma about them. But somehow we veered off to West Texas.
“If you ever go there, don’t ever stop for a tumbleweed,” she said.
“What?”
“If a tumbleweed gets in your way, keep on driving. Never get out of your car to look at a tumbleweed. You can die.”
“Whaaaat???”
“They always travel in groups. If you stop, they’ll attach themselves to your car. Then you can’t open your doors. And you can’t drive because they’ll asphyxiate you. Some are as big as trucks. Nobody can see your car hidden inside. You look like a giant tumbleweed. So then you get hit by a passing truck.”
I'd always thought tumbleweeds were cute lazy things tumbling along in Country and Western songs. Horrified to discover they’re as evil as Roman Centurions with nets and tridents. You learn the darndest things in Las Vegas.