I just flew back from Vegas and boy is my liver tired.

This is a report of my second annual Vegas Christmas crawl, in which I ditch everyone I know and head for the only town in America where Christmas is the elephant in the room that we’d rather all ignore. Unlike everywhere else, you can walk all day through places with piped in music and maybe, MAYBE hear a Christmas song every couple of hours. It’s paradise for the likes of me. If you are disappointed by the ending of A CHRISTMAS CAROL because Scrooge sees the error of his ways, you belong in Vegas next December.

Plus, it’s not a real popular week, just before Christmas, so everything is half price. It’s true some of the shows are dark and it’s so cold that nature is making a serious effort to kill you. So keep off those 1400 feet elevated roller coasters.

Did I drink? Yes. a little. Did I gamble? Yes, a little. Did I go to strip clubs and bring hookers back to my room? No, I didn’t because I promised my girlfriend; and besides, that kind of thing would cut into my drinking and gambling money.

It’s true though that Vegas is an economy based entirely on addiction, which is why it’s so successful. In addition to your more obvious needs like alcohol, gambling and sex, Vegas also caters to Chocoholics with the big M&M Store on the strip, and Shopaholics with the malls inside the big resorts. I can’t tell you if it’s easy to get illegal drugs in Vegas, but it seems obvious to me. It would be like visiting Popeye at home and discovering that he doesn’t have any spinach on the premises. I mean, come on.

So, having said all this, I should report on what I saw there. The Golden Nugget downtown is very swanky nowadays, surrounded by the crumbling edifices of the other downtown casinos. 4 Queens is looking shabby. Binions, a little tired. Fitzgerald’s is held together by scotch tape. The strip, on the other hand, is bustling. It takes about 45 minutes to drive from one end of it to the other. Seriously. You could jog faster. Everything is either new, refurbished, or being knocked down to make room for more new things.

Downtown, you get the feeling that if you are caught counting cards, someone will take you out back and break your fingers. On the strip, they’ll merely bump down your credit rating.

I have to admit a few hookers approached me on the casino floors, and it was fascinating to watch how they danced around the fact that they were prostitutes. On one hand, they were tall sexy women who seemed surprisingly interested in me, so of course they were hookers; on the other hand they simply couldn’t come out and ask me if I wanted to pay for sex. What’s up with that? I thought it was legal in that town. Is it a casino house rule? Because if security can’t spot these women then they’re not very good at their jobs. You can pick out the Vegas hookers in Google satellite photos.

A little vignette - after fighting off a Hooker on Christmas Eve, I bumped into a convincing Santa Claus passing out candy canes downstairs from the buffet. I quipped “hey, didn’t you use to sell Coca Cola on TV?” and instead of snarling at me for being a snarky twerp, he gamely replied “Nope, I’m a Pepsi drinker.” I tipped him a dollar. Another vignette - walking past a hotel cafe I ran across an entire roomful of Santas. Short ones, tall ones, female ones, black ones, white ones, crazy ones - just chatting and eating hot dogs with relish. I thought, this is the way it should be everywhere - keep these people in one place, out of the way, and feed them so they won’t leave.

Well, I guess if any conclusions are to be reached it’s this: Las Vegas is an acceptable alternative to Christmas. It’s got bright colors, cold weather, vivid emotions, and your money is sucked away so fast you don’t realize it’s happening. What’s not to like?

-Daniel K.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 27th, 2007 at 3:54 pm and is filed under General, Theatre. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.