Deal me in
By John Deiner, Steve Hendrix, Andrea Sachs and K.C. Summers
Washington Post
LAS VEGAS — It begins with panties on the airport floor. An abandoned pair of ladies' unmentionables are lying like a little silk welcome mat at the door to the terminal train. Right where someone dropped them in the rush for ... what? An urgent flight? A really urgent tryst? Hey, it's Vegas. It could have been either. Or both.
Of our party of four, two relish this bawdy Vegas augury, one is merely curious and one is openly disgusted. And so starts one weekend in Sin City for a quartet of travel writers with four divergent ideas of what constitutes fun.
The siren song of Vegas has a verse for every vice — gamblers, drinkers, voyeurs, karaoke singers and lovers of hokey showbiz all flock to this improbable Gomorrah. But does that explain why the city is lodged, year after year, near the top of America's list of favorite destinations? Is there pleasure here for the nice as well the naughty?
In short, what are the odds that Vegas can simultaneously entertain these four workmates setting out on a hot Saturday morning:
Joe Vegas: A slots-loving, buffet-dwelling, thrice-a-year regular with an all-night appetite for video poker, comp drinks and his fellow low rollers.
The Sophisticate: A cuff-shooting, whiskey-sipping nostalgnik for Old Vegas, when men played cards and gals were only naked from the waist up.
Turbogirl: A low-carb, high-speed party hopper who can dance the clubs till dawn and hike the canyons till noon.
The Curmudgeon: A lover of high art and haute cuisine who disdains all things blinking, winking and odd.
Saturday, 11:15 a.m.
In Vegas, you can start gambling before you even claim your luggage, and the bingbingbing soundtrack of the next 49 hours begins in the airport's arrival hall. The Curmudgeon and the Sophisticate stop at a ticket booth to book table space for Gladys Knight, the Folies Bergere and a Rat Pack tribute. "Buddy Hackett was a good friend of mine," confides Judy, the ticket agent, in a cigarette-seasoned croak. She has the figure — and mascara — of a former showgirl. And a heart of gold, the Curmudgeon suspects, after Judy sprints a hundred yards to give the group a tourist map of the Strip.
Turbogirl rents a car and, creeping through the stop-and-gawk traffic along the Strip, drops the others at their hotels. Everyone is staying in a different place and everyone plans — in the service of maximum research — to upgrade hotels for the second night. (Sunday nights are cheaper.)
First stop, Luxor — a pyramid-shaped behemoth with an enormous lobby-cum-casino dominated by two giant sphinxes. The Curmudgeon is overwhelmed. There are about 10 lines for check-in, each 15 or 20 people deep. After dumping her bags in her room (huge, soulless, with a weird slanted wall — pyramid, remember?) she goes in search of lunch and immediately gets lost. It's impossible to walk in a straight line in this nightmarish maze of slot machines, bells, whistles, music, sirens — like 10,000 car alarms going off at once. It hurts her curmudgeonly head.
Joe Vegas, meanwhile, is happily surprised by Circus Circus, an outlying Strip giant reportedly past its prime. Yes, his view is dominated by the Vegas freight yard and the glass roof of the hotel's Adventuredome, an indoor kiddie theme park. Still, it's clean, fairly spacious and a lot nicer than he expected for $49. Joe Vegas doesn't spend much time in his room anyway.
That kiddie park may be one of the last vestiges of the city's recent effort to promote itself as a "family destination," which finally collapsed under the weight of its own absurdity. All the pirate shows in the world couldn't distract little eyes from the litter of pornography blowing up and down the streets. Squads of immigrant workers line the sidewalks, passing out XXX-rated fliers. The Sophisticate is amazed by the phenomenon of matronly Hispanic women handing dirty pictures to matronly Midwestern women.
The Flamingo, in the heart of the Strip, is a respite from the tawdry sidewalk commerce (only in Vegas can a casino be considered a haven of morality). The Sophisticate, lamenting the demolition of the venerable old Sands Hotel, was hoping for a shot of retro-Vegas from the Flamingo. Alas, not much of the swinging 1960s remains in its generic marbled lobby (although the Art Nouveau flamingo lamps are kind of swell) — but the place was opened in 1946 by Bugsy Siegel himself. That's something. His room is plain and comfortable. Where there is an ice bucket, there is hope.
1:30 p.m.
Turbogirl's spacious corner room at Harrah's is an upgrade she artfully finagled by asking the check-in guy, "So, can I have an upgrade?" (It worked, it really did — unless all the rooms are this size, with a big bouncy bed, casino-top views and a table long enough to stack her future winnings.)
But she has no time to hang in her room; she has to go shopping — for a little something special to wear tonight at Rain, the hot nightclub at the Palms hotel where Britney Spears has been spotted. Bare Essentials, an off-Strip boutique, seems to attract a clientele who wear two sequins as a top and one for the bottom. She tries on a long red dress that would look great at the Oscars, if there was a Best Porn Actress category.
4 p.m.
The Curmudgeon, now officially depressed, wanders past the neon-lit Chapel at Luxor and ducks into the King Tut Tomb and Museum. She's surprised to find an intriguing exhibit featuring life-size reproductions of burial chambers and artifacts, Tut's sarcophagus and assorted statues, pottery and jewelry. Plus, it's quiet.
Refreshed, slightly, the Curmudgeon hops a cab to Caesars Palace and immediately wishes she was staying there. It's so appealingly retro, with genuine cigarette girls, and the guests seem younger and hipper. Svelte teens dressed in the uniform of the moment — short pleated schoolgirl skirts with thigh-high boots — stalk the Forum Shops, a mall with a Piazza-Navona-style fountain and a cool faux-sky ceiling. A fancy clock store has a life-size Elvis statue in the entryway and a silver Porsche in the window. The Curmudgeon isn't sure what the connection is, but she realizes she is smiling.
Joe Vegas, though, isn't smiling. He's paid $9 to ride to the top of the Stratosphere, the hotel-casino marked by a 1,149-foot observation tower. He came for the High Roller, a coaster that wraps around the tower's pinnacle. But it's closed — and no one can tell him why.
Vegas is about all kinds of thrills these days. Before the tower, Joe Vegas spent $29.99 to visit Star Trek: The Experience at the Las Vegas Hilton, though he's no Trekkie. Other than Spock and other original characters, he recognized nothing, even as dozens of nerds took notes and plenty of pictures. Then actors dressed as Klingons (he thinks) guided him from the bridge of the Enterprise to a jarring motion ride. By trip's end, he'd not only saved the universe but developed a whopping headache and queasy stomach.
For her thrill of the day, Turbogirl shoots a semi-automatic rifle at a target of Osama bin Laden. She pays $20 for the privilege at the Gun Store and Indoor Range on Tropicana Avenue. Dave, her instructor, presses his palm into her back — to keep her from being pushed by the recoil — as she aims. BLAM! Even through her ear protectors, Turbogirl is stunned by the shattering blasts from her M16, until Dave tells her they came from the guy two booths over. Her own shots are three times as loud. Take that, Osama.
6:20 p.m.
It's an uncivilized time for dinner, but the Sophisticate's ticket to the Rat Pack tribute at the Greek Isles Hotel includes the obligatory prime rib. He sits down in the plush dinner theater just in time to hear Buddy Hackett's recorded voice call down the spirits of Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and Joey Bishop. And then there they are! A reasonable facsimile of the Rat Pack, swinging in tuxes, crooning the old songs and cracking vintage booze-and-broad jokes.
"This is as close as you can get to what Vegas was like 30 years ago," says maitre d' Pepe Gonzalez, who spent almost three decades at the old Desert Inn. "The small room, the intimacy with the audience. Nowadays everybody's hanging from a trapeze."
Well, not everybody. It may have been a few years since Gladys Knight hopped her midnight train to Georgia, but the lady still knows how to put on a show. Over at the Flamingo, where the Curmudgeon warily joins a front-row table already filled with female R&B fans, the Pipless Knight is looking fabulous in a Japanese silk top, white flowy pants and lots of bling. By the end, the audience is shouting "Tell it, sister!" — it's part concert, part revival meeting. This communal table thing is fun after all, the Curmudgeon realizes, like a girlfriends' night out.
Girlfriends, fiancees — Vegas is just full of love. The Little Church of the West is positively overrun with the recently betrothed. As Turbogirl walks by, a guest named Ron invites her to be his date at the ceremony (Can she be ready in three minutes? Or at least ditch the soda can?) and she gladly accepts. The chapel is tiny, and the ceremony is over almost before it begins. With a click-click of the camera and a clap-clap from the guests, the bride and groom are down the aisle as the next happy couple queues up.
10 p.m.
The Curmudgeon and Joe Vegas meet at Luxor, where they've snagged second-row seats to see the Blue Man Group. They're told to put on plastic rain ponchos — not a good sign. But the Blue Men, a trio of cobalt-hued, kettle-drum-beating, paint-spattering, Twinkie-slinging performance artists, turn out to be smart and subversive — and very, very funny. The finale is an avalanche of paper that rolls from the back of the audience to the front, leaving them momentarily buried above their heads.
Just across the Strip, the Sophisticate maintains his good-old-days buzz at the Tropicana's Folies Bergere, an R-rated feathers-and-flesh revue that has been keeping showgirls fully employed and semi-dressed since 1959. The show is an extravagant appreciation of women through the decades. (It turns out that whatever the era, American women were at their best in towering feather headdresses with bare breasts.) The Sophisticate toasts every leggy doll and even finds himself cheering and hooting for Wally Eastwood, a juggling comedian. He recovers some of his Dino cool in time to settle in for a long and losing run of blackjack at the Flamingo. "Hit me, baby," he says to the startled croupier.
10:45 p.m.
Even at this "early" hour, a long line has formed to get into Rain. But Turbogirl — and now Turboboy, a friend who has joined her from L.A. — are VIPs tonight, having bought passes online that let them cut to the front. She gets the nod from the black-clad bouncer and enters, ready to be bowled over by this temple of hipness and finds ... guys in Gap attire? Squealing girls fresh from pledging? Turbogirl and friend are deeply unimpressed. They leave, wondering even more about Britney's taste in music.
After the Rain letdown, they find the nearby outdoor lounge by the pool quite chill — in that Next Generation Sinatra kind of way. The music is cool-cat mellow and the Pee Wee Playhouse furniture fashionably uncomfortable.
SUNDAY, 3:20 a.m.
Joe Vegas has been working the Strip. One by one, he hits the big ones. At the MGM Grand, the party is going strong at Studio 54 (maybe the Beautiful People waiting in line to get in were more Beautiful earlier in the evening). At Paris, he watches a bachelorette party slowly disintegrate around the penny slots. When one of the bridesmaids accidentally knocks over the bride's beer, screaming ensues, then claws. After the slapping begins, guards escort the group to the street, where they belong.
He returns to Circus Circus, finding it freakishly active. There are still kids trolling the aisles. He stops for dinner — at the Krispy Kreme in the casino, where he buys two pumpkin spice doughnuts and takes them to his room.
11 a.m.
The Curmudgeon's mood improves immediately upon checking into the Bellagio, a Strip hotel set on a "lake" meant to evoke the Italian countryside. Funny thing, it sort of does. Inside, it's everything the Luxor isn't — bright, classy, with a stunning Dale Chihuly glass sculpture dominating the lobby ceiling. A conservatory featuring elegant topiaries is dotted with little pools and cypress trees. Her room is one of the nicest she's ever stayed in, anywhere. It's tasteful as hell, the bed sumptuous and the bathroom a marble temple of luxe.
The others move as well. The Sophisticate decamps to the Venetian, another high-end patch of preciously realized European excess. Its Grand Canal is an indoor re-creation of a Venice waterway, complete with gondola rides, fancy shops and "outdoor" cafes. Joe Vegas bags a Strip-facing room at the Mirage, so he'll be able to watch the hotel's signature volcano erupt constantly that evening.
Turbogirl, meanwhile, will join the navel-baring brigade that "sleeps" at the Palms hotel. But not before she and Turboboy detox with a drive out to the desert and some time in Red Rock Canyon. It's just 17 miles from the Strip, but it might as well be another planet. The only bright colors here come from nature. The Turbos stop at every scenic vista along the canyon's 13-mile drive to hike among the cacti and boulders.
The Sophisticate's recovery program, meanwhile, starts with a one-hour massage at the Venetian's Canyon Ranch Spa. Sure, it would have been more Rat Packy to get worked over by a beefy back-pounder with a cigar in his mouth. Instead, it's aromatherapy oils and tinkly New Age "music." The therapist explains that frankincense is a pure essential oil that opens up and balances your crown chakra. "It's also the lucky oil," she whispers. "We use it a lot in Vegas."
1:30 p.m.
Joe Vegas believes you never need recovery if you never stop partying. Soon after he checks into the Mirage, he's playing video poker at its sports bar, intent on accumulating full houses and gratis gin and tonics. At least he gets the free G&T's.
3 p.m.
The Curmudgeon has found her niche: Vegas has art! At the Bellagio Gallery of Fine Art (which is classy and — surprise — crowded), she lingers over paintings and artifacts from England's Chatsworth Estate, owned by the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire. Down the Strip, at the Venetian's Guggenheim Hermitage Museum, she finds "A Century of Painting: From Renoir to Rothko." The three dozen works by such luminaries as Cezanne, van Gogh, Gauguin, Picasso and Pollock, handsomely presented in an intimate setting, make her muse, "I can't believe I'm seeing all this in Vegas."
She doesn't have that thought a little later at the Elvis-A-Rama museum in a shopping center off the Strip. But after hours of varnished masterpieces, she has a darn good time in front of the King's black 1955 Cadillac limo, Sun Records jacket, and blue suede shoes. Sadly, the resident Elvis impersonator is sick.
4:45 p.m.
Joe Vegas jumps into a cab and heads downtown — the older, dingier and, in his opinion, liveliest part of Vegas. Fremont Street, which runs through the district center, is a pedestrian mall topped by a giant canopy. At night, light shows play every hour. Dinner is at the Paradise Buffet in the Fremont Hotel. Joe is an aficionado of the groaning, gluttonous Vegas buffet, and he's been to this one before — but never alone. A genial server shows him to a table and says, "What, you couldn't get anyone to eat with you?"
6:06 p.m.
How to follow up shooting an M16 on Saturday? Why, visit a brothel on Sunday! On the drive back from the canyon, a detour to Pahrump brings Turbogirl and her guy to the Chicken Ranch. The Turbos have come only for the gift shop — "Where the West Is More Wild" T-shirts and coffee mugs. They never see what's behind Door No. 1, but Turbogirl chats with a bubbly Texas, um, technician about Nine Inch Nails and the weather in D.C.
7:30 p.m.
The Sophisticate walks from the Venetian, past Caesars Palace, to the Bellagio, where he meets the Curmudgeon for the weekend's one blowout dining experience. They settle on Le Cirque, a small, jacket-required enclave of subtle panache amid the neon fireworks outside. Beneath a circus-tent ceiling and colorful china that recalls Curious George (in a good way), scallops and truffles, excellent wine and dreamy cremes brulee deliver smiles to their faces and hernias to their credit cards.
8:15 p.m.
Everyone loves a parade. And anyone with $9.95 can be in one — the Rio casino's frequent aerial processions of garish suspended floats filled with dancers and drunk civilians moving above the casino floor. Turbogirl gets to be a hippie chick in the Village Street Party. Her colorful, bulbous contraption starts moving and creaking on its track. Turbohippie shakes her tambourine and waves. No throwing beads! The float moves through its second loop and, frankly, the thrill is gone.
10:30 p.m.
In Vegas, everyone is a sucker at some point during the day. Cancellations are common. At the Stardust, Turbogirl learns that Anthony Cools has canceled his racy hypnotist show. Earlier, Joe Vegas was crushed to discover that the Strip's reigning diva, Celine Dion, was pulling the plug on her act that night. The Curmudgeon was even thwarted from seeing the Bellagio's fountain spectacle because high winds shut it down time after time.
What to do but drink heavily? Turbogirl and Turboguy retreat to the Ghostbar at the Palms, where the swanky rooftop lounge has a neo-industrial look, and its denizens luminate in a silver and blue glow.
Over at the Flamingo, the Sophisticate, Joe Vegas and the Curmudgeon start with margaritas, which they spew across the table more than once during a hilarious improv show by an outpost of Chicago's Second City troupe. Then it's on to the swank Baccarat Bar at the Bellagio — home to beguiling Eastern European waitresses slinging trendy yesteryear cocktails such as cosmos and Manhattans.
MONDAY, 12:40 a.m.
The Curmudgeon, wisely, has retired to her room. Joe Vegas takes the Sophisticate on a Strip crawl that includes at least four casinos, hundreds of hands of barstool video poker and an indeterminate number of freebie drinks. The crowd never seems to fade, but the Sophisticate does, sometime after 3 a.m., leaving a solo Joe to work his way back to the Mirage. But not before — why not? — one more stop at Treasure Island.
9:20 a.m.
Joe Vegas orders eggs in the Mirage coffee shop. Still an hour or so before the foursome heads to the airport. Time enough for ...
