Baby Boomers in Las Vegas

(Editor’s Note: The first section of this column contains thoughts about Las Vegas before I was there. The second section was written after a recent visit).

I. Las Vegas (Before)

Never having been there, I still had a lot of ideas of what Las Vegas was like. Culled from watching TV shows and movies – Vega$, Ocean’s 11, I thought that I has a reasonable view of the sheer size and insanity of the town. But those who have spent time there told me I didn’t have a clue.

One friend said it’s as if the whole world were distilled and plopped down in the desert – the Eiffel Tower, Venice’s gondolas, a Pyramid, New York City. Another told me that each casino was as big as our local shopping mall – with a 3,000 room hotel attached. Big. Real Big. And others talked about the absolute weirdness of the place – Elvis weddings, lions on display, and thousands upon thousands of people who no longer can tell day from night as they gamble.

And the heat, that famous “dry” heat we have all heard about. To my way of thinking, heat is hot. (Our pending trip prompted Larry and I to compose a short list of some of the hottest days we have endured – a Pittsburgh Pirate ballgame which included an ode to Willie Stargell; Kiawah Island (107); many, many days at The Beach and a Hoop it Up basketball tournament which forced all of us parents to eat lunch at Hooters just to get out of the heat.

The TV show CSI has added to the infamy that is Las Vegas with so many episodes centering around gruesome death. It’s enough to make you not want to stop off for a visit.

Plans I had read about few years ago to make Vegas more family friendly have been tossed away in favor of the new tourist campaign – “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.”

Not to worry. With a Boom This! (www.boomthis.com) editor on the scene – what happens in Vegas will be reported here.

II. Las Vegas (After)

Suffice it to say that Las Vegas is more than I thought it would be. More kitsch, more slot machines, more walking, more cleavage… Ah, more about that later.

I enjoyed our quick visit to Vegas over a long weekend. It was not as hot as it usually is (thank god), but it was warm enough. And even though people tell you that you don’t have to spend much time outdoors, you still kinda do if you want to see all there is to see instead of perching at a slot machine and pushing buttons. And doesn’t’ it seem like the sun is brighter there?

The gambling tables were not as glamorous-looking as I thought they would be. Guess I was thinking more along the lines of Casino Royale and kept looking for James Bond, but he never appeared.

What did appear, however, were thousands of interesting folks who didn’t seem to be having the time of their life, even though the trips to the gambling tables may have been costing them that. There were a lot of seniors walking around and plenty of twentysomethings, who were dressed down by any sense of the word. I remember hearing that in the city’s early days how men and women wore tuxedoes and ball gowns just to walk onto the floors of the casinos.

Not any longer. Men were wearing shorts, flip flops, t-shirts; pretty much what you would see anywhere else in the summer. The women? Oh, the women. Young, old, thin, not so thin, an outrageous number of them were wearing tops that revealed more than they concealed. You couldn’t walk anywhere (anywhere!) without being assaulted by bare chests coming from you in the opposite direction. Now maybe this is showing my boomer age, but I thought this was over the top. If they had looked like Cameron Diaz or her friends, it might not have been so annoying, but they didn'tt.

We took the Vegas monorail north from our hotel to see as many of the “old” casinos as we could, but after a few visits to casino floors, it didn’t matter if you were in the Mirage, the Sahara or Mandalay Bay, everything looked the same -- the same lights, the same noises, the same people sitting at the slots or so it seemed.

We decided to try our hand at the slots, but were disappointed that you no longer have to pull the handle when you want to spin. (At least that way you built up some biceps.) Thanks to our fascination with electronics, today you slide your bills into the machines and then proceed to push buttons to make your selections. There’s no longer any avalanche of coins when you win, just a slip of paper printed with a bar code to cash in – or use to keep playing. Now this may be old news to many of you but for those of us who will soon be getting our first local slots casino, I offer this information for your education. Who wants to be embarrassed by not knowing how to use a slot machine? We didn’t.

The shows in Vegas are maybe the best reason to go there. Not cheap, they are still enough different from New York and Broadway that they may just be worth it. We saw a Cirque du Soleil production that was awesome, and also Howie Mandel’s stand-up show. Howie was entertaining and just a little more graphic than when he is hosting Deal or No Deal. Well, a lot more graphic actually, but funny. We sat at a micro table with a couple from Oregon who had seen Howie perform there and came to Vegas for more. Hecklers, the kind you read about, interrupted the show so often that we thought they disrupted Howie’s flow. At the end, he stood on stage and said he was waiting for us to leave. Our tablemate yelled a “Good night, Howie” to the performer as we left, and Howie responded.

What I loved best about Vegas was the imagination that goes into recreating a huge Statue of Liberty and the New York skyline and intersecting it with a sleek roller coaster. Or having gondola boys and girls sing to passengers as they weave through the canals of The Venetian, which was very pretty and Italian-like (I suppose). Who needs to go to New York or Paris or Venice when you can visit Las Vegas and see it all? Actually we all should, but this amusement park for adults – no matter your goal – is fun. Expensive, but fun.

Leaving for the airport before 5 a.m. Sunday from the hotel, we saw girls who were dressed up (with cleavage) summoning two security guards to help their friend and also a couple apparently breaking up. The girl was crying and the guy kept trying to shake her hand and go.

In San Diego, when he is up before dawn to drive to work, our son Dan says they play a game to guess whether people walking around the neighborhood are still out from the night before, or just starting the next day’s party -- early.

In Vegas, it’s really hard to tell.

By Teresa K. Flatley

6/2007