TriumphAnt

Finally! (You say…) The final chapter of the story of Spring Break 2005!

Back to Las Vegas.

But first, this musical tribute:

“Bright light city gonna set my soul
Gonna set my soul on fire.
Got a whole lot of money that’s ready to burn,
So get those stakes up higher.
There’s a thousand pretty women waitin’ out there
And they’re all livin’ devil may care,
And I’m just the devil with love to spare.
Viva Las Vegas! Viva Las Vegas!

How I wish that there were more
Than the twenty-four hours in the day
’cause even if there were forty more,
I wouldn’t sleep a minute away.
Oh, there’s blackjack and poker and the roulette wheel,
A fortune won and lost on ev’ry deal.
All you need’s a strong heart and a nerve of steel.
Viva Las Vegas! Viva Las Vegas!

Viva Las Vegas with your neon flashin’
And your one-arm bandits crashin’
All those hopes down the drain.
Viva Las Vegas turnin’ day into nighttime
Turnin’ night into daytime.
If you see it once,
You’ll never be the same again.

I’m gonna keep on the run
I’m gonna have me some fun
If it costs me my very last dime.
If I wind up broke up, well
I’ll always remember that I had a swingin’ time!
I’m gonna give it ev’rything I’ve got.
Lady luck please let the dice stay hot.
Let me shout a seven with ev’ry shot.
Viva Las Vegas! Viva Las Vegas,
Viva, Viva Las Vegas!”

-- “Viva Las Vegas”, as sung by Elvis Presley (Words & music by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman)

= = = = = = = = = =

If you should ever happen to be in Springdale with Las Vegas as your next destination, I highly recommend getting there by car. It’s only a couple hours and a bit, and the drive is somewhat akin to taking one of the passes through the Canadian Rockies, not surprising since a quick look at an atlas reveals that we were spilling off the junction of the Wasatch Range and the Colorado Plateau, which – several name changes notwithstanding – you can reach by tracing that part of the continent-long line that flows southward from the Canadian Rockies.

On that road, there are long stretches where it seems your descent just goes on forever. But unlike Canada’s Rockies, where the stones’ tones are cold and imposing shades of gray, in this part of the world the chain’s landforms are still principally rendered in variations of the much warmer colours suggested by sand.

Something I noticed, which made me grateful that there wasn’t even a trace of the previous week’s snowfall on the roadways as we drew closer to Las Vegas, was that a number of the enormous highway truck transports were actually hauling three separate trailers. I wondered what three-trailer equivalent of Ontario’s two-trailer “jackknife” would be used to describe the loss of control of one of these behemoths. (“And here’s a report from the KVEG traffic helicopter: traffic is backed up into the next time zone because of an accordioned transport on the I-40 that has spilled 1900 tons of lumber across all twelve lanes. Commuters are advised to find another job for at least the next month or so that will enable you to walk to work.”)

And a scant two hours after leaving the mountain country behind, we rolled once more onto flat land where the southern part of the Great Basin meets the northern part of the Mojave Desert, and into the urban environment that is Las Vegas, Nevada.

This time we were booked into a hotel called Circus Circus. CC’s gimmick is – what are the odds? – a circus theme that permeates almost everything about it. At random places throughout the hotel, there are permanent installations where actual circus acts perform several times a day, including a place that is the structural equivalent of a Big Top’s centre ring, complete with all the accompanying overhead paraphernalia of trapeze and high-wire equipment.

CC, however, despite a website that lists a “Krispy Kreme” doughnut shop among its “Dining options”, also projects an aura suggesting that she probably is getting a bit tired among her newer, sleeker companions on the Las Vegas Strip. But then, she is almost 40 years old. The hotel opened in 1968 and now counts almost 3,800 bedrooms arrayed among two enormous towers and an adjacent barracks-like line of smaller bedroom blocks. Carpets are worn in some places. Furniture is chipped. Hallways retain faint olfactory reminders that at least two generations of smokers have stayed in this hotel.

But we chose it with an eye to ending our teens’ trip on a high-activity note. Because Circus Circus is also home to a five-and-a-half acre glass-enclosed amusement park called the Adventuredome, which the hotel’s website breathlessly promotes as “filled with action and thrills… for the whole family, young and old.” I’m still wondering who “old” is capable of coping with a roller coaster that whirls you through two complete corkscrew turns and a double loop-the-loop before depositing you, sans whatever was in your stomach, at the end of the ride. Or something called the Slingshot, a “ride” that blasts you up a 100-foot tower at four times the force of gravity. (On that ride, you retain your stomach contents; they’re just compressed to the density of an adobe brick. Actually, come to think of it, I believe that in the reign of Torquemada, a similar experience could be had if you were denounced for heresy.)

Our schedule was painfully simple, and by the time we completed it, simply painful:
Check in.
Have a meal or two.
See the Cirque de Soleil show, “Ka”.
Stay up for 34 hours non-stop.
Go to bed at home.

(You’re wondering about that 34 hour bit, right? Well, the morning after the Cirque de Soleil show was the day our outbound flight left Vegas at midnight. I can’t sleep on a plane. We arrived back in Ottawa at mid-day. I can only occasionally fall asleep during the day. And sadly, not on this day. But I’m getting just a bit ahead of myself again.)

In the original Star Trek series, in an episode entitled “The Mark of Gideon”, Kirk is kidnapped by aliens, who place him on a down-to-the-last lightbulb replica of the Enterprise with a woman from their race. (Young, blonde, good looking, with a wardrobe that sadly consists only of a diaphanous nightgown – in other words, the typical Star Trek alien that Kirk was so often forced to reluctantly confront.) Gideon is a planet hideously overcrowded and Kirk’s mission is to instill some good old Earth viruses into this woman’s bloodstream (exactly how is never specified – this after all was still the era of “family values” television) so that she can then carry them back to her people. Bereft of antibodies, the hapless alien multitudes will then serve as rich anti-virus-free incubators for a host of fatal Earth diseases, and the consequent series of pandemics would thereby reduce the population to a manageable level, creating at the same time a Darwinian survivalist’s strength among the survivors.

Several times during the course of this episode, the audience is treated to views of a typical Gideon streetscape – a sea of humanity, shuffling vacantly but relentlessly and teemingly forward; their eyes gazing off only “somewhere” into an undefined distance. Occasionally bumping into someone from among the listlessly oncoming crowds, they simply shift to one side or the other and then move on, automaton-like. They look stupefyingly drug-addled and utterly uncaring.

All I can say is that Star Trek producer Gene Roddenberry must have drawn his inspiration for Gideon by wandering through the arcade-level hallway of Circus Circus at about four in the afternoon.

Las Vegas is an entire compact universe created solely for the purpose of parting you from as much of your money as it possibly can. The Greater Las Vegas Committee to Fleece Visitors has obviously done an enormous amount of homework, because clearly they sat down and thought of every last genre of tourist that will ever come to this city – from infant through toddler through teenager through young adult through senior citizen. And they know that there is something to which each and every one of us will succumb – from a simple flash of child-arresting colour and motion all the way up to fulfilling your wildest fantasies under the guise of hiring a private “dancer” to come and entertain you in your hotel room. Plus give you a souvenir to take home in that empty space in your wallet where your money used to be, assuming you’ve still got your wallet, of course. On our flight back, I sat beside a sad-looking individual who told me he'd been relieved of his wallet -- which was full of cash, traveller's cheques and his wife's passport, at 1:30 am in the outdoor parking lot of one of the city's gaudiest hotels -- the Egyptian-themed, Great Pyramid of Giza-shaped Luxor. What he was doing in an outdoor parking lot at that hour with a wallet full of cash and hard-to-replace identification, he didn't say and neither I nor my other appropriately sympathetic ("Why you idiot!", we no doubt simultaneously thought) seatmate asked.

But I was speaking of souvenirs. You can, for example, have your photograph taken with a photoshopped merging that places you on the back of a galloping cheetah. You can have a video made that begins with you sitting on a mock-up of a Harley-Davidson “hawg” (big motorbike) that is then merged with video which makes it look like you’ve joined a biker gang as they race through the streets of Las Vegas, dodging police all the way.

I could spin out the details, but frankly, the Las Vegas story’s already been written countless times in 48-point Kitsch. Even though we were there for only a time measured in hours, we certainly experienced generous measures of it. Here are some tracings from the How We Spent Our Las Vegas Vacation sketchbook:

Circus Circus was conveniently (and this is not said sarcastically) at the opposite end of the Las Vegas Strip from the MGM Grand, where Ka was playing. This was quite a happy discovery on our part because we had deliberately bought tickets to the late performance in order to give ourselves an opportunity to see the lights. Walking the Strip from Circus Circus to the MGM Grand, we saw the lights.

As we strolled along, every 50 feet or so, some Hispanic looking individual, usually sporting a yellow vest emblazoned with a variation of the banner, “Stripper?” would actually thrust a full-colour playing card-sized business card into my hand. (I was the only guy in our group, remember.) At first, this astonished me because I was clearly one quarter of an obvious family group. But that was no deterrence at all to these persistent marketers and within two blocks I had collected a couple dozen of these things before I realized the images on the cards were a tad raunchy for someone in an obvious family group… Oh alright! If truth must be told, I was accumulating pictures of naked women just as fast as I possibly could before my wife finally realized I wasn’t throwing them away! My sheepish “Free souvenirs?” explanation washed about as well as an oil slick, so I was compelled to ditch them in the next available municipal garbage can, and refrain from collecting any more for the balance of our stroll.

(The truth will set you free!)

I was in Las Vegas once before, in 1976. At that time, the flashiest sign on The Strip was the multiply-changing large neon oval outside the Stardust Hotel. I remember that I thought it was mesmerizing and I shot the whole sequence of changes on Super-8 movie film. In March 2005, it was old hat (although I did notice it still exists) as entire massive hotel fronts 20 and 30 storeys tall, full city blocks in length and width, are now awash in computer-controlled jaw-droppingly complex light shows.

We passed an artificial volcano that spouted flame and smoke and was bathed in the glow of powerful accent lights of orange and yellow. We were told that the part of the outdoor “Krakatoa” show that featured scantily clad showgirls draping themselves from the rigging and the spars of a lagoon-docked pirate ship had been cancelled because it was too windy this evening to be slinging young ladies from masts several dozen feet tall. (Dang!)

When we reached the MGM Grand, we had no trouble finding the restaurant where we had booked a dinner reservation, because it was something called The Rainforest Café, which the hotel promotes as having: “a lush jungle canopy; a spectacular fiber-optic starscape; the rumble of tropical thunderstorms; animated wildlife”. Oh, and almost incidentally: “creative cuisine. Inspired by the flavours of Mexico, the Caribbean, and Asia.” (If you haven’t figured it out, we chose it because we strongly – and correctly – suspected that offspring and friend would love it.) Needless to say, an indoor jungle from which emanates the occasional eruption of a synthetic thunderstorm made it an easy place to find.

After dinner, we walked through the MGM Grand to see the most recent Cirque de Soleil’s addition to the Las Vegas theatrical entertainment scene, Ka. At one point on our way to the theatre, we paused in a glass-enclosed tunnel as we looked up to see a pair of full-grown real live lionesses dozing on the glass plate directly over our heads. (There’s something less than majestic about seeing one of these magnificent animals with the fur along one entire side of her body pressed flat against what is to her a floor, but is to you a skylight.)

Why lions here at the MGM Grand and not at Circus Circus, you ask? Well, how has every MGM movie you’ve ever seen opened? http://petcaretips.net/famous_lions_tv.html

Ka, for the record, as an example of “an evening at the theatre” is what the Grand Canyon is as an example of “erosion”. In a word, it’s transcendent. It takes the experience of watching a stage performance and turns it – quite literally – on its end. The entire Ka stage is fully capable of being raised, lowered, rotated 360 degrees and, even though it looks to be roughly half the size of an aircraft carrier’s flight deck, pivoted from horizontal to vertical. In that astonishing configuration, it places you, in the audience, in the simulated position of being overhead looking down on the actors. The show is a breathtaking combination of mythology, fantasy, quest, adventure and seemingly impossible performers’ gymnastics all the while accompanied by an eerie musical score that seems rooted somewhere in Asia. Somewhere in Asia, that is, where Alph the Sacred River still runs.

“Cirque” is, of course, French for “circus” but Ka is a distant cousin many times removed from what Ringling Brothers, Barnum and Bailey put on the road. There’s a ton of stuff online about Ka. So I won’t repeat the glowing reviews here. But if you’re going to Vegas, pick any of the Cirque’s shows. (I have since heard that “O”, a water-based spectacular – “eau”, get it? – is to some people equally if not more memorable than Ka.) And do feel free to gasp at the ticket price. It’s certainly gasp-inducing. But pay it; you won’t regret it.

Next day, we turned our teens loose in The Adventuredome for about five hours, while my wife and I sat in The Adventuredome for what seemed like ten hours, trying unsuccessfully to find a place where the overhead thunder of the roller coaster passing every ten minutes could not be heard.

Well after dark, we drove our rented car back to the airport, gassed it up a block shy of the rental car return (thus avoiding their refill bill, which for car agencies usually begins at about triple the pump price) and boarded our flight out of Sin City.

Home was two flights, a random luggage drug search and a disheartening but bulky 5:30 am breakfast at the Chicago O’Hare Airport Chili’s restaurant later. And bedtime was several hours after that, because having arrived home early Sunday afternoon, I was being governed by a brain that only finally acceded to my body’s demand for sleep well after it got to be dark -- some 34 – 35 hours after we last woke up.

- - -

Up next: back to whining, wailing and gnashing of teeth. It’s starting to look like election time again! Time to dig out a Steve Earle CD:

“Yeah, the revolution starts now
In your own backyard,
In your own hometown.
So what you doin’ standin’ ‘round?
Just follow your heart;
The revolution starts now.”

Well… one can always dream.