After three full days of working at the convention, getting together with Chap and Colin for blackjack, and then later with Cindy joining us at dinnertime (9:30), Wednesday night in Las Vegas felt a lot like vacation. It wasn’t, of course. There was still Thursday - the final day of the show - to suffer through, but for the evening it felt deceptively nice.
As noted before, not once in the prior three years in Las Vegas had I gambled. Last year I had decided to play $0.25 in a slot, but since they only take dollar bills, balked. This year I was determined to do more. So when I found that Colin had played blackjack before in Minneapolis, and Chap had $50 from a coworker to gamble away, I felt myself reaching annoying levels of excitement. I asked Chap and Colin at least a dozen times when they were going to gamble. Business dinners tend to run late, but on Wednesday we had been set free to our own devices, affording us a chance to get a late dinner reservation and play a little beforehand.
Dinner would be at Mesa Girl (Grill), which is located in Caesar’s Palace, a casino that has no $5 tables (at least at night). Realizing this, we headed back across the street to Barbary Coast, a casino that can best be described as relatively unsavory. Certainly an establishment that Ray Smuckles would not describe as “classy.” We walked around the dozen or so tables, surveying the offerings, and finally settled at the open $5 table closest to the door. Colin sat down, and Chap and I, for reasons I can only attribute to being chicken, remained standing behind him. I’ve always perceived there to be a great deal of unspoken protocol at casinos, and it seemed like sitting at a table without playing would be out of step with respectable behavior (in an unsavory casino, no less).
Colin put down $60 and I looked on carefully, building the Protocol in my head. I have seen Swingers, though, so I knew not to hand the money directly to the dealer. I also knew to expect to receive about 4 chips no matter how much money I set down. Colin received an impressive 16 chips - $5’s and a few $1’s - and began to play at an astonishingly swift pace. Astonishing to the beginner, anyway. I add numbers very slowly, and so it took real effort to keep up with the game. Count his cards, count the dealer’s (dang, I forgot that you have to consider the dealer’s cards too!), and then make a decision. Repeat.
After Colin’s $60 dwindled to perhaps two chips, out came another $40. I decided it was probably time to join in and at least slow the losses down. In went my $40, along with Chap’s. 7 red chips and 5 white chips to me. Nice.
It was slow starting, to say the least. I remember asking Colin for tips repeatedly, and feeling lost when he wasn’t giving them, yet somehow I worked my way up about $20. Then our dealer was tapped out, and the new dealer wished us luck. This one actually spoke and provided advice in a cryptic manner (likely due to providing advice repeatedly over five years of dealing. He seemed to have developed a new language for providing blackjack tips comprised of the least amount of words possible). It was at this point that my luck began to change. After 30 minutes of play I was clean, it was dinnertime, and Cindy had arrived. It was around this time that I felt like I was actually on vacation. We were having much too much fun to be working.
On Thursday, while I went to work at the convention center, Cindy wandered Las Vegas. One of the things she’d been looking forward to was playing craps, perhaps the single most confusing gambling game I’ve ever witnessed. She’d attempted to explain it to me twice, and each time comprehension eluded me. I’d spent some time watching games downstairs at the Flamingo, still without understanding.
It was a slow day at the convention center, and so when 4:00 came around we cheered and tore down the booth, piling up our gear and waiting for the union forklifts to deliver our empty boxes. Normally this is an exhausting process. I had my laptop and two books with me in case we were there until 8 or 9, which is what always happens. Last year the forklifts went on dinner break at 8pm. Chap risked life and limb, wandering the hall in search of our boxes. Yet this year, at 5:15 I was shocked to see a forklift arrive and drop off our boxes! Our boxes! And I hadn’t even gotten hungry yet! I said to Glenn (my boss), “Uh, Glenn…” It was as if aliens were asking to see a demo at our booth. We packed swiftly and left. Incredible.
Back in our hotel room and fully off the clock, Cindy was telling me of her adventures for the day when the phone rang - it was none other than my brother Glenn, who was on a two week road trip and headed to Las Vegas from the Grand Canyon. Well, he and three of his closest friends. Naturally, we invited them to crash in our hotel room for the night. Now fully off the clock, Cindy and I joined Glenn and Chap (Colin had flown back that morning) and drove to old downtown Las Vegas — Freemont Street, the set of James Bond car races and the classic neon of yesteryear.
It’s tradition that we have dinner at the Golden Gate Cafe, a shockingly inexpensive cafe in the middle of incredible excess. Spaghetti and meatballs for me (two meatballs) for $4.99 hit the spot.
The big “thing” at Freemont Street is this thing called the Freemont Street Experience. Basically they’ve created an enormous video screen on an awning that runs the length of two blocks, and every hour or so tourists stare up at it and endure the presentation. While waiting for the next show we endured hideously amateur frozen daiquiri advertisements running on video screens (not shown), as well as the amusing videos attempting to draw us into Glitter Gulch. My favorite is shown here at right - “INDEED!” There were others (”ADZOOKS!” [sic], “REALLY!”), but INDEED! really takes the cake for me.
Finally 11:00 rolled around and we looked up to endure a “Patriotic” presentation. Huge animated flags, squaking eagles, interracial groupings of children smiling together, a baseball game, etc. I think Cindy summed it up when she said: “Lame.” She’s right, though. I’d even avoided commenting on it myself, so as not to cloud her evaluation, and still she thought it sucked. Right on.
We bought some earplugs on the way back (some of Glenn’s friends snore) and headed back to the room just about as they arrived. After chatting a bit about their trip thus far (up north Subway offers “vegetables” on their subs, not toppings), they split to take in the town. At 3:00am one of them returned, and at 7:00am the rest of them appeared and disappeared into sleeping bags. During their romp they had won a combined $400 - not bad for a bunch of kids that didn’t seem all that interested in gambling.
On Friday Cindy and I left them in the room and headed out for a day on the strip. I finally learned how craps works, well enough to predict when the dealers will award chips and when they’ll take them away, and Cindy won a bit, too, unfortunately losing it before too long. For a while I remember thinking, “Hey, it’s pretty easy to win a little money here!” We bought a “Basic Blackjack Strategy” card (similar item here) and reviewed it over lunch, but unfortunately I never felt like playing for the rest of the trip. I’d get this feeling that I’d want to play the next day sometime, but that feeling would never materialize the next day. Probably a good thing.
That night we had dinner at Piero’s, a very swanky Italian restaurant not far from the convention center. Dinner was excellent, and the celebrity list accompanying the wine list was equally impressive. From there we taxi’d over to the Stratosphere, to ride the attractions glued to the top of this gaudy monstrosity. The taxi driver, however, informed us that one of the rides was closed - some girls had gotten stuck on it the other night, called the cops, etc. It all seemed a little larger than life, though, and by the time I bought the tickets (ride to the top: $9.50. Rides at the top: free. Hmm. I would swear they charged for them last time…) I was developing a theory that it was just a story cab drivers tell to liven up the ride a bit.
At the top we rode the roller coaster (boring, nice view) and then got in line for Insanity. After an hour and fifteen minutes, we were finally seated and rotated out over the edge of the top, then spun. It was all very surreal, and I’m not sure if it was a defense mechanism kicking in, or if I just don’t find spinning around 900 feet above the ground all that thrilling. It turns out this was the ride the girls were stuck on, and the taxi driver story wasn’t just a story. Oops.
From there it was off to Tangerine, a club that overlooks the “bay” in front of Treasure Island. Thankfully it was quite late, and they weren’t running the awful Sirens show. We had numerous Long Island ice teas. Numerous. The room spun when I closed my eyes. You know what I mean.
In the morning, feeling pretty near awful, we hopped in a rental car and drove out to Red Rock Canyon, which may have been a better move than it seemed at first. Red Rock Canyon is a large box canyon with a scenic driving loop and parking lots here and there that afford visitors an opportunity to climb all over these big red rocks. A very beautiful place, obviously, just the thing for a hangover, and it reminds you how much fun scrambling around on rocks can be.
On Saturday night we reported to New York New York to see Zumanity, the “other side” of Cirque du Soleil. I’m pleased to report that it’s really quite enjoyable — both of us liked it. Zumanity is different from any Cirque production I’ve seen, but in a way that’s non-obvious and perhaps best expressed as what it’s not: abstract. It’s a pretty straight-forward, “Ok, we’re going to show you some cool folks doing stuff with their bodies here, and we’ll actually speak English during the performance. Regularly.” It fit - the whole show worked together, blending lots of comedy and the incredible feats that are to be expected of Cirque performers - but it was very straightforward. (One of the things I had liked about previous shows was the sense of mystery — What’s going on here?) Obviously you do not bring children to it, but there’s nothing in it that’s particularly raunchy or objectionable. Quite tastefully done, really.
After Zumanity we went to see the Fountains at Bellagio, my favorite Las Vegas attraction of all. Cindy had not yet seen it and so it was a must-see stop as our vacation wound to a close. Initially I had thought she wasn’t all that enthralled by it, but we stuck around and saw four shows, so I guess she liked it alright after all. Highlights for me were “Luck be a Lady” and Elvis’ silly “Viva Las Vegas”; the highlight for her was Sarah Brightman’s “Time to Say Goodbye”, an opera piece. Also cool is this article about the technical aspects of the show. Neato.
And so it was that Saturday came to a close and on Sunday we arose and made our way to the airport by means of a particularly creative cabbie. It was undoubtedly a very memorable trip. After 9 nights I was surprised to feel vaguely comfortable with the city. Perhaps extended exposure does that to you. I still have the blackjack strategy card, and there’s always next year.