Leaving Las Vegas
In 1995, Nicholas Cage portrayed an alcoholic suicidal screenwriter who chooses to drink himself to death in the city where secrets go to die. I like Nicholas Cage as an actor, but I really like Elisabeth Shue as an actress and found her portrayal of Cage’s prostitute girlfriend to be riveting. I’ve been a fan of Shue since her role as the Valley Girl girlfriend in Karate Kid. And then, between Adventures in Babysitting, Cocktail, Back to the Future and The Marrying Man, she solidified her position as my top choice sexy actress. She then went into a 1990’s slide to her role in Leaving Las Vegas and went from the wholesome girlfriend to the too hot hooker. I’ve never felt that she has gotten her due, but now that she has lapsed into the various Mom roles she seems to now favor, I’m back to being OK with her career path.
Las Vegas itself has gone through the same sort of ups and downs in its career as Elisabeth Shue. What started as a toed dedicated to pure fun during WWII, a place where people could get away to from L.A. and let it all hang out with a few highballs and The Rat Pack. It’s combination of gambling (somewhat unique at the time), booze and the sexual revolution, Las Vegas blossomed as the Sodom & Gomorrah of the western world. People came from all around the world to pursue their vices of choice and the town boomed. My sister, Barb, and her family moved here in 1978 and by then it was still mostly a bachelor party place and a convention hub. That’s when the term “What happens in Las Vegas, stays in Las Vegas”, except that no one was making any secret about all of what was going on in Vegas. It became the ultimate transient community and as always seems to happen with some transients, some people decided that they liked the desert climate enough or they were subject to inertia enough that they decided to stay and raise their families there. That was the case with my sister, who had transitioned in her life from the wild and crazy of youth to the workaday reality of living her life, mowing her lawn and raising her kids. Husband Dave worked on the Strip at the classic Las Vegas hotel, the Flamingo Hilton, set right at the epicenter of the new part of the town that the likes of Bugsy Siegel helped developed to get away from the seedy downtown to the north. But other than the daily commute, the rest of Barb and Dave’s life was centered around the suburban community to the east of the Strip.
In the mid-80’s, my mother moved to Las Vegas and found it to be a perfect retirement community since there was lots of sunshine, relatively reasonable housing costs and occasional fun at the local casinos. Las Vegas is nothing if not adaptable and they had already adapted to accommodate retirees by that time, You could collect more bargains and freebies at the outlying “locals’” casinos than you could shake a stick at. I can still remember getting called in the middle of the night by my mother and being told that she had just gotten a Royal Flush on video poker and received a free long distance call (back when that was the perfect prize for a retiree wanting to keep in touch with the distant kids). Mom remarried her college friend, Irving, and they lived out their days in a modest but pleasant condo in those Las Vegas suburbs, and I visited regularly, getting an example exposure to all that Las Vegas had to offer.
Then when the Great Recession hit in 2008, Las Vegas went sideways. They had been trying to reinvent themselves as both a wild and crazy place for bachelor parties and a family-friendly destination with lots of rides and fun venues for the kids. Disney was about the only major family entertainment company that did not buy into that dream and whatever it might have become, faded all too quickly when real estate prices plummeted. At that moment, there were more empty houses in Las Vegas than in any city in America. These ghost town suburban neighborhoods slowly but surely got snapped up by investors and people looking for cheap accommodations and by now things have normalized and home prices have started reviving. The vestiges of the kid’s rides can still be seen at places like Excalibur, New York New York, MGM and Stratosphere, but in general, Las Vegas has gone back to its roots as a fun getaway place with a big convention center. It vies with Orlando for the really BIG conventions like CES (the Consumer Electronics Show) and is trying to bring other attractions like the Formula 1 races planned for this weekend. This town will do anything, say anything and reinvent itself into any shape to draw a crowd that might drop more money into its slot machines.
Now that America has rid itself of its Puritanical thinking about gambling, sex, alcohol and even low-impact drugs of choice, most of what you can get in Las Vegas you can get much closer to home from either legalized gambling or Indian casinos. In San Diego we have a choice of nine first-class casinos, all managed under the aegis of one local Native American tribe or another. You can buy all the marijuana for recreational use easily enough. And sex, well that’s always available somewhere at the local level. But every attempt to unseat Las Vegas from its throne as the king of gaming and free-wheeling has failed. Atlantic City worked for a hot minute and then crashed and burned. There’s Macau, but that’s too far and in China and for one reason or another, going crazy in an authoritarian state seems too risky, even for Crazy Rich Asians. So, Las Vegas continues to thrive in its grand glory.
Kim and I have come here enough to know that we can deal with Las Vegas for a day or two, which was the plan for this trip. We have to admit that the attraction of the place tends to be more for the shows and special events than for any of the standard vices that attract the younger crowd that wants to let their freak flag fly, but wants to do it far away from the home front. This time, our big shows were to see Darren Aronofsky’s Postcard From Earth at The Sphere (which, as already written about, was amazing and worth seeing) and then, last night, David Copperfield. Las Vegas has always been the illusionists main stage from Siegfried & Roy to Penn & Teller, but David Copperfield has been at it out here for 27 years and to do that and have a theater with your name on it, as he does at the MGM Grand, you have to know how to do more than pull a rabbit out of your hat. In fact, Copperfield does a fine job of keeping his show fresh with both the latest in technology and an amazing set of illusions that really do leave you wondering how the hell he did that.
He did the usual appear and disappear program, but he did it with great wow factor by making an antique car and a very large spacecraft appear out of thin air over our heads with little of no tells. Jumping up directly in front of Kim was also a great reappearance trick that felt very personalized for us. He also personalized the show by invoking the memories of his youth and the love of his passed on father, something everyone can relate to in one way or another. Copperfield is two years younger than me and i was generally impressed by his mobility and stage presence. I’m not sure he will outlast Wayne Newton, but I would say he is still going strong and still bringing his best to his show.
This morning we are leaving Las Vegas after about 36 hours here. Funny thing is that we probably think that may be 12 hours longer than ideal, so while we will probably come back, I would say we are more about leaving Las Vegas than coming to Las Vegas.