Posted on: Sunday, March 16, 2008
Maybe we like Vegas because it's like here
By Wanda A. Adams
Advertiser Travel Editor
Las Vegas is a lot like Hawai'i. Think about it:
It's got a complex and layered history that few who go there know, understand or care about. As Joe Moore would say, Did You Know that there actually was a Las Vegas before Bugsy Siegel? That native peoples were, and are, there and had, like Native Hawaiians, a culture and a way of life elegantly adapted to the environment? That the reason the place exists at all is that it was the site of natural springs bubbling up in the desert?
Like the Islands, it's a vacation destination you can go back to dozens of times and never see or do everything — and even if you did do every last thing, there would be new things within minutes. Even the taxi drivers can't keep up (ours swore she'd never heard of the Mexican restaurant my brother-in-law recommended, though it was right on the Strip). Comedian Carrot Top nails it when he talks about trying to check into a Vegas hotel and being told his room wasn't ready. "The maids are still cleaning it?" "No, we're building it right now, but it'll be finished in an hour."
It's a place sliced into distinct pieces, like a pie: gambling, shows, attractions, shopping, natural features. Just as beach lovers who come to Hawai'i may never bother with the Bishop Museum or the Pearl Harbor Memorial, gamblers who go to Vegas may never venture out to the outlet malls, Hoover Dam or a Cirque du Soleil show. People stick with the part of the elephant they prefer.
And, most importantly, Vegas is more of a concept than a place, an idea in people's minds. Years ago, there was a book, "Hawai'i: The Legend that Sells," by Bryan H. Farell (UH Press, 1982). You could plug Las Vegas into that title in place of Hawai'i and be right on.
The words "Las Vegas" (it means "The Meadows," and refers to the water meadows that clustered around the original springs) conjure images — images carefully built up by a world-class PR machine over several generations. The images are of glamorous women, slot machines spilling coins into the laps of shrieking winners, the Rat Pack and Elvis and Celine Dion and now Bette Midler, plush (but no longer cheap) hotel rooms and, in the past few years, in a turn-on-a-dime change, a switch from selling Vegas as a family destination to the tried and true, expressed in the current "what happens here stays here" campaign.
Sound a little like tourist Hawai'i? Maybe that's why so many of us feel at home there and visit so often.
Reach Wanda A. Adams at wadams@honoluluadvertiser.com.
