I. Saturday, May 9, 2009—11 a.m. to Noon, and the Three Hours in Between

    A. Usual Plethora of Airport Hassles
        1. The New Baggage Caravan
        2. Jennifer Creams Coffee From Her Chest
        3. Insights into Getting Older
        4. The Free-For-All Seating Frenzy

    B. Welcome to Mars: the Alien Landscape of Nevada 
    C. Shuttlecocked! 
    D. The New York-New York Hotel and Casino
        1. Conveniences
        2. No Coffee Pot? WTF?
    E. Breathing Heavily of Vegas
        1. General Observations of Culture and People
        2. Molar Woe
        3. So, This is Jetlag
        4. The Travelin’ Thornberries Go Stripping
        5. Planet Hollywood and Other Heavenly Bodies

II. Sunday, May 10, 2009—Sunscorched Before Getting Hot

    A. Straining in Bed: Trying to Sleep Late at Nine o’clock Noon 
    B. Good to Be Long: Our Telescopic Cameras Acquit Themselves 
    C. Barrel-Bellies and Broads with Beautiful Boo-, um, --oots! 
    D. Caesar’s Palace of Impulsive Delights
        1. A Roman Concept Applied to American Consumerism
        2. The Kentucky Roman Meets Rome’s First Citizen
    E. Sweaty Pits and Salty Lips: Welcome to the Nevada Desert 
    F. Our Sensual Evening
        1. Jennifer Origamis Her Handkerchief Dress into Strategic Position
        2. Well, at Least One Girl’s Crazy ‘Bout a Sharp Dressed Man
        3. Meet Larry: An Old World Italian in a New World Desert
        4. Zumanity: The World Just Beyond Reality

III. Monday, May 11, 2009—Treading Old Territory, Old Memories

    A. The Ever-Elusive Monorail 
    B. Tomato Salad? WTF? 
    C. Aspiring “Cows” and the Day’s Brandings 
    D. The Long Wait for Water Twirlies 
    E. Pub-Cocked! Or, No Beer For You Here! 
    F. One Hour, Three Beers: You Do the Math 
    G. Meet Kev: Our Hippy-Boy Host 
    H. Fremont Street: Confrontation with Old Las Vegas, Complete with Shambling Corpses

IV. Tuesday, May 12, 2009—Fumbling, Falling and Failing

    A. The Great Wall Over the Chinese Buffet 
    B. The Travelin’ Thornberries Become Peepshow Prostitutes
        1. The Greasy-Handed, Auto-Impaired, Professional Wrestling Sales Rep
        2. Wanna Buy a Timeshare?
        3. Yo, Joe!
    C. Welcome to the Peepshow: A Presentation of Female Confidence and Innocence Lost

V. Wednesday, May 13, 2009—Sucking Our Way Back Home

    A. Please, May We Pay?
    B. Eight Hours To Ears!
    C. You’re Welcome for the Help!
    D. Urinal Mirrors? WTF!?
    E. Cows on a Plane
    F. The Windy City Blows Again

Hello, Our Darlings!

And welcome once again to another exciting narrative of our annual vacation! This year, we decided to travel to a place where we could shed some of our inhibitions and partake of what the human experience could render. The only location where that is possible is the tacky and wild, sensual and suave city of Las Vegas!

Are you ready to see the city through our eyes? Can you contain your glee? Will you allow yourself to glimpse an inner self you may not know and which could even frighten you a little? If so, come with us now! Read on!

If you've been with us before, you know these narratives are part entertainment, part journal.  Ergo, we often include some sections of superfluous detail, which we know our readers might not always find engrossing.  Thus, you will find such sections highlighted with PINK text.  You're certainly free to read as much or as little of the story as you desire, Darlings, but if time and attention are at a premium, the color-coded sections are ones we're confident you can skip without losing the main ideas of the tale.  Whatever your decision, thanks for joining us and enjoy yourself!

Saturday, May 9, 2009—11 a.m. to Noon, and the Three Hours in Between

 

Unlike previous trips, our plane actually departed at a reasonable time: 11 a.m. More, it was a direct flight to Nevada, taking about four hours to complete the entire trip.

 

The Usual Plethora of Airport Hassles

 

Yeah, yeah, this category appears in every one of our narratives, and you know what? The world never exhausts the ways to harry and hassle innocent travelers like us. Ergo, we’re in no danger of running out of grist for this proverbial mill. However, in deference to time and space, here are the hassles we encountered that are pretty much givens for us:

 

• Difficulty finding long-term parking
• Our gate was the last one in the line-up and the most inefficiently administered
  
• The human “cows” around us engaged in industrialized crapping all over us
  

 

These usual, expected conditions aside, we did have a few new crimps in our knickers with which to contend.

 

One of the first was the weight of our check bag. We had packed a slew of supplies to help us offset cost: coffee, filters, corn chips, jerky and cookies. And some wine and spirits, of course. These seem like small indulgences, but at $5+ per drink and $2.75 for snacks, a food budget can get eaten up rather quickly! Alas, when they weighed our bag at the checkpoint, it was over the maximum girth level by a measly 3 pounds, which necessitated we either unload that amount from the bag and carry it with us, or pay an additional $25. Our bottles of booze were probably what pushed the weight up, and we knew we couldn’t remove those supplies and carry them on ourselves, and 3 pounds might not seem like much, but it’s a veritable bale of socks or smallclothes to pack into a carry-on bag! So we ended up paying the extra $25, thus negating a huge part of our savings in taking our own supplies in the first place. [Sigh].

 

Another hassle is that we have expanded our technological repertoire yet again, mostly with the intention of bringing to you, Our Darlings, a more fulfilling, complete sharing of our experiences. You’re quite welcome, by the way.  :) Unfortunately, the result was that we had more electronic items, with their plugs, connection cables and storage bags, all of which we had to juggle, loop, or cram between body crevices. Getting through the security checkpoint changed from a somewhat painless shedding of shoes and wristwatches to now having a caravan of six storage bins for the laptop, two cameras, and the aforementioned shoes. I had one bin that was incredibly heavy, and when I dug down into it, I found a red herring and a kitchen sink. Go figure.

  

So once we foisted our baggage caravan through the scanners, walked through the metal detectors and put our shoes back on, we were finally free to find our gate. On the way, we stopped by at one of our staple requirements on any vacation…the Starbucks! Our server, obviously a poster-boy for ESL, asked us what we wanted, smiled pleasantly, and expressed his understanding in an accent that sounded like synchronized retching. Then he proceeded, in his admittedly good-naturedly way, to botch the order.

  

Now, to his credit, he had to balance two extremes in terms of ordering. I have a Zen preference for simple, iced coffee. Its ingredients are: 1.) ice and 2.) coffee. I usually get creative and add some raw cinnamon to it myself later, but generally, preparing it is about as simple as it gets. By contrast, Jennifer’s coffee often comes with myriad qualifiers. For example:

  

        1. Might be iced or hot, depending on time of year

        2. Requires the flavor syrup be reduced to 65% normal

        3. Can be decaffeinated on occasion

        4. Seasonally switched between peppermint and cinnamon dulce

        5. Must be prepared with a wooden spoon made from an ash tree on the third of

            September  of an oddly numbered year

        6. After pouring at a rate of an ounce per 37-second period, must then have a server of at

            least age 23 to dance in winder shins around it to the tune of The Humpty Dance

  

The short story here, the guy screwed up. And of course, no one ever screws up and charges us less; no, he made sure she got what she ordered, but rang her up for a mocha, a drink almost twice the price! And also of course, it is a universal constant that the person who screws the proverbial pooch in these situations is never the one with any authority to fix the problem. When Jennifer complained and tried to get reimbursed for the extra money the guy charged her, he swore the manager was helping to feed soup to hungry dope-addicted macaws in an Easter Island shelter somewhere, and wasn’t available. Instead, she got a ticket from him for a free drink he could screw up for her next time. *Snort* So she beat him senseless with a chair and left him twitching in a pile of coffee grounds on the floor. Poor bastard.

 

  

Finally free to sit in the Starbuck’s lobby and enjoy our coffees together, I noted, as I have before, that we are not old people yet, but we ­are older. Coffee itself was the inspiration for this line of thought, that our tastes have changed so much over the years. I remember back in my early college days, lamenting the research that showed how our tongues lose taste buds and thus become less sensitive to flavors as we age. That was sad to me then, thinking of how so many good foods would lose their allure. But now that the effect is actually happening, I see the other side of the equation: that there are so many foods out there that are coming down to within my reach. That is, bitterer or stronger flavors are now becoming tolerable. I can eat things now I never would have imagined when my taste buds were more sensitive. Jennifer and I are finding we have more tolerance for olives, bleu cheese, Brussels sprouts, straight whiskey, horseradish, vinegar, and even (in my case) cheesecake. So it isn’t all just loss, this getting older; there are new experiences that only a person moving further across the lifespan can enjoy. No kids allowed.

Isn’t that a nice metaphor for the entire process of aging?

That at each level, we discard some experiences we’ll admittedly miss, but in return, we get some new ones coming to us that we couldn’t have before because we weren’t ready. We lose stamina and vigor, but perhaps we have the energy available to us for the purpose we are given at each door through which we pass. Older people are more focused on subtleties, on simple pleasures, things that don’t require the extensive energies of youth, but the rewards of which also elude younger people. Food for thought, huh?

  

Of course, that’s wa-a-a-ay too deep for a Travelin’ Thornberries narrative, so let us now return to the fun stuff!

  

We found our gate in the Southwest Airlines area of the airport and boarded right on time. It was quite a different experience for us, in that Southwest apparently doesn’t do assigned seating. Instead, when they call, you get on the plane in three broad, stratified blocks. Once your group walks down the ramp, you have to find a seat wherever you may roam. I feared it would be a wholly disorganized affair. When Jennifer and I handed over our boarding passes and climbed aboard, we found it to be a wholly disorganized affair.

  

Man, I ­hate it when I’m right.

  

People were leaping over seats, tackling each other, gouging out each other’s eyes, sucking each other’s elbows, and engaging in collective smothering. Fortunately, we managed to locate two seats together next to the window and settled in for our flight to Sin Capital. Naturally, the aisle seat next to me had to be claimed by a mountain-that-flies, a massive guy who didn’t budge for the entire flight. When we had to get up and use the lavatory at the halfway point, it involved shifting him like an urban renewal project, just to do the deed.

 

Welcome to Mars: the Alien Landscape of Nevada

In my youth, I had parents who saw the benefits of traveling, even if it meant doing so on a shoe-string budget for a family of four. Gad, I can still taste that no-hassle chicken sandwich spread we ate for six straight days while driving across 2,000 miles! Ergo, I have seen the western part of the country twice. In 1985, I saw the Texas flatlands with their oil pumpjacks. In 1987, I stood in Arizona with my family before the Grand Canyon and Barringer Crater. In fact, I’d like to offer special thanks here to my parents, for their recent efforts to digitize and electronically share the family photo albums. Now I can show the following pictures from that era:



 

The fact is, the terrain out west is completely foreign to those of us who are more familiar with green trees and live grass. This was Jennifer’s first experience with that arid geography, which was why we put her in the window seat on the plane. The western territory didn’t disappoint, and she got an eyeful of it. Sorta. We salivated when the pilot announced we’d be going over the Grand Canyon, since she’s never seen it, and I had never seen it from the air. From our position on the left side of the aircraft, we gushed with pleasure when he stated that Flagstaff, Ariz., was on our side, and we waited with eagerness for the upcoming Grand Canyon to accompany it…until he stated it would be on the right side of the aircraft. We couldn’t see it of course. Doh! To our credit, we at least caught 12,637-foot-high Humphrey’s Peak and a part of Lake Mead (sans the more inspiring Hoover Dam, naturally).

Once we got to Nevada, we were in a realm alien even to my experience. From the unprecedented height of 40,000 feet, with our ears popping and sinuses feeling funny, the miles and miles of desert looked like orbital photos I’ve seen of the planet Mars. Austere, strict, totally unforgiving: yet even still, the reds and browns of those rolling mountains and mesas had a severe beauty to them.

 

Shuttlecocked!

 

We arrived at the Las Vegas airport without any mishaps more severe than a little windy turbulence, which our pilot assured us was characteristic of this part of Nevada. Our flight attendant was a highly expressive guy throughout the trip, and when the plane touched down, he came over the intercom, saying simply, “We’re he-e-e-e-ere!” De-planing was surprisingly easy, as was fetching our luggage at Baggage Claim. But when we sought a shuttle to our hotel, it was pandemonium! First of all, no one seemed to know which shuttles were which, so the area outside the door of Baggage Claim was a mix of screaming, lugging, pie-throwing, pogo-balling and distracted “cows” on cell phones. We witnessed one “cow” yakking away on said phone while one of the attendants was trying to advise her on what she needed to do to get where she was going. Rolling her eyes, she looked up from her oh-so-important phone call about Styrofoam or something, and said, “Okay, I’m ­totally listening to you! After she left, we heard one of the guys mutter, “Don’t you love it when they’re too hot for their own good?”

 

Finally, Jennifer purchased us a couple of tickets and got someone to point us toward the probable area where we might actually get what we needed. Once we found a shuttle line in which to stand and verified they would indeed take us to our hotel, the gap-toothed, mustached driver doing the baggage loading promptly took everyone’s things but ours. Then he cut the line off exactly at us and left us standing there alone. Figures. This is as good a time as any to point out to you, Our Darlings, that the weather outside was freakin’ HOT. Unlike the perpetual March-like weather with its chronic rain-soaked hellishness that we’d left back home, this state was running a bone-dry average temperature of 92 degrees daily. We actively percolated while the driver hiss-whistled a promise through his gapped teeth that another shuttle would show up in “a couple of minutes.” Approximately 12 minutes and a punchbowl full of expelled sweat later, one finally did, and a cute little Asian man jumped out to load our luggage. After getting hosed several times in a row, we were lucky this time: our hotel was the first of the shuttle's stops.

  

The New York-New York Hotel and Casino

 

There were innumerable hotel/casino joints where we could have chosen to stay, but we remain somewhat budget conscious, and we already knew which show we wanted to see later. Ergo, we settled on this mid-range place, the New York-New York.  It had everything we needed for a reasonable price, plus our show was located inside (more on it later!). Overall, this hotel turned out to have several benefits in our favor. First of all, we were still operating on our home time, which is three hours later than Vegas time. So we fully expected to have to wait until the equivalent of 6 p.m. just to check in, and we hadn’t gotten there until 4 our time, which meant we’d have to wait another two hours in our fetid clothing and worn-down bones. But to our delight, after a lengthy stand in the registration line, our host informed us that our room was ready several hours early, and we could go ahead and check in! Yay!

We have to give the New York-New York good kudos when taken in totum. They had an excellent elevator system, one in which certain elevators only went to certain floors. We were on the 19th floor, for example, but our elevator pretty much skipped everything between the third floor and the 17th. Ergo, we didn’t get stopped waiting for it to inevitably hit every floor before reaching ours. The room was minimalist in that it didn’t have any extras, like a liquor cabinet, microwave or refrigerator. But we consider those bonuses, anyway, not requirements. And on the other hand, the room offered options like a wall safe (which we didn’t use), a large, flat-screen television (which we also never used), a king-sized bed, an iPod docking station and a good assortment of toiletries. You have to remember too, that Vegas is a city dedicated to the pleasures of the nighttime; it is oriented toward letting one live on whatever schedule they choose. So Jennifer and I were delighted to find the outside windows were tinted. This meant one could sleep until late in the day without being awakened by untimely sunlight.  It was also possible to *theoretically* move around the room completely naked with the drapes open to the outside without worry of feeling truly exposed.

Really, the hotel only had one strike against it, and it was as unprecedented as it was minor. Remember that $25 of extra cash we had to pay in order to transport our coffee and filters? Well, this room didn’t have a coffeemaker! Hell, even a Motel 6 or Red Roof Inn usually boasts that as a convenience! One would expect something at least equivalent from a Las Vegas hotel and casino! This meant we’d be stuck buying beverages out, and at $5 for even the simplest Starbuck’s coffee, it was sure to sting. In fact, it was a trend during the entire trip that everybody seemed to own the Starbuck’s outlets we visited ­except Starbuck’s. Ergo, no one would honor our Member Discount Card. Grrr! By trip’s end, I had found a way to use the hottest tap water from the sink to infuse our own coffee into a cup. Though weak in flavor, it probably still saved us $20.

  

Breathing Heavily of Vegas

 

We partook of a small whiskey on the rocks, which we had carted with us some 2,000 miles, then Jennifer naturally gravitated to her main priority on any trip: food!

 

And so down the elevator again we went. It was immediately obvious to us as we began interacting with the culture of Vegas that this was a very different environment than home. Sex and sensuality were evident everywhere, from the truck-mounted billboards going up and down the street offering “escorts,” to the foreign illegals peddling cards in the streets offering the same, to the plethora of other tourists we saw walking around, almost wearing outfits that were straining the seams in all the right places. Or sometimes, not wearing outfits at all. For example, when we looked down at the pool from our room, we saw a woman sunbathing topless, albeit facedown and with her back facing upward. We realized pretty quickly that this was a place where one could get “outside” their usual self, shed their inhibitions and be freer for awhile. This lesson would become ever more evident the longer we soaked up the city.

 

For now, however, we sought out dinner at a neat little establishment inside the casino, called simply America. It had a menu of ordinary, but tasty, fare. The  place's biggest claim to fame was the larger-than-life map of the Continental United States mounted on the ceiling. It sprawled at least 100 feet from Maine to California, a Manifest Destiny en micro, purple mountains' majesty, from sea to shining tile. On each of these “lower 48” were small sculptures and items that represented every state. On Nevada, for example, was a teeny model of the Las Vegas Strip, with our hotel most prominent, of course. Missouri had a small model of the St. Louis Arch, Kentucky had a moonshine still and horses, while Wisconsin evidenced cows and cheese sculptures. Neat!

 

I ordered a good ol’ fashioned mushroom Swiss burger, while Jennifer got herself a haunch of moose or something. But for being delicious and obviously of high quality, the burger I ate is notable as a character in this story for only one major reason.

 

Permit me a tangent.

 

        Picture it.

                Summer.

                        1992.

A young man, a college sophomore with bad hair and worse skin, is slaving in his first job in the hothouse kitchen of a small Kentucky Fried Chicken. In that bygone era, the place offered the most delicious big-ass cookies, positively platter-sized confections in peanut butter, chocolate chip and oatmeal. Consuming these massive, moist monstrosities was one of the few rewards in an otherwise grueling job that involved getting second-degree burns and lopping off parts of thumbs (those are tangential stories for another day).

 

Yes, that young man was me. Chicken Boy. Slaw Slayer. And it was eating those great cookies back then that cued me something was amiss with my rear molar. They tended to be sticky, those cookies, particularly the oatmeal-raisin ones, and they stuck to my teeth. I felt pain when those pulpy pieces plugged my pearlies, and it told me I had developed my first cavity. Now, having little experience with dental problems at that time, I labored under the idea that tooth fillings were prohibitively expensive…all the stories I heard growing up in Appalachia always ended with the dentist engaging in torturous acts of gymnastics to extract the tooth in question, horrid pain to follow, and thousands of dollars in cost. Add to this that as of yet, I did not have my driver’s license (that’s yet another story for a different day), making self-sufficient dental care for me difficult. Our family had only one reliable car, and my mother needed it to get to work during the day. So the cavities did not get addressed in a timely manner. By the summer of 1997, when I was involved in my clinical internship in Harlan, Ky., I finally took responsibility for getting the cavity filled. The cavity was, by now, a cavernous hole in my skull. The dentist patched it up for $60, and I hardly thought about it again.

 

Now, indulge me in a theory.

 

Sinus cavities and teeth are intertwined. I’ve noted, for example, that when I have a sinus infection, it can put pressure on my nerve root, simulating tooth pain even though that isn’t the source of the problem. Now, Las Vegas 2009, this trip involved the highest-flying altitudes Jennifer and I had ever experienced. At 40,000 feet, I was very aware of my skull spaces. In fact, I think the altitude acting on my sinuses pushed through to my poor teeth.

 

Now, let’s make this all relevant. Methinks a weakened tooth, combined with the pressure differentials of altitude and a delicious hunk of cow flesh…

 

CRACK!!

 

Yep, my molar exploded out the side of my face.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t that histrionic an occurrence. In fact, I didn’t even notice anything wrong at first. It was only when I ran my tongue over the rear part of my mouth and it felt like a chunk of broken gravel back there, that I got alarmed. I verified later that fully 25 percent of the tooth was missing, leaving behind a remainder that was still laced with the gray filling from nearly 12 years ago. Where did that fragment go? I must have swallowed it. That kind of gives whole new meaning to “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas,” huh?  *Hee.*  Anyway, lucky for me, no nerves were involved, so I didn’t experience any pain. Finding a dentist in an unfamiliar city was a nightmarish consideration, and flying home early would have been horribly expensive, not to mention a real disappointment on our annual vacation. So I made do for the duration of the trip, chewing carefully on the right side of my mouth and trying not to keep touching that Barringer Crater with my tongue.

 

By now, it was probably around 7 p.m. our time, but only 4 p.m. Vegas time. And we were feeling the jetlag. Returning to the room, we decided to take a brief nap before going out to explore the city. Well, the “brief” part got struck off in there somewhere, and we fell asleep for three hours! Even still, we were disjointed, trying to come to grips with the fact that the waning sunlight outside our window was an illusion for our bodies; back home, it was stone-cold dark, and most of you reading this were either in bed or close to it! Even with the nap, we could still feel the difference. I told Jennifer later that I would characterize jetlag as a mild guilt…you feel like you should be able to get up and go, but all you want to do is sit down and stay. Yet you push yourself anyway. And that, my dear readers, is exactly what we did. We got dressed to go Stripping. No, no, not that kind of stripping: we went out to explore the Las Vegas Strip!

 

What we noticed first of all was the heat. We were coming from an uncharacteristically brutal winter back home, one that was still holding temperatures down in the 50s and 60s in early May. Here, summer reigned like brutal Emperor Nero, not mild, philosophical Marcus Aurelius. Unlike the boggish, atmospheric stew we experienced in Biloxi, Miss., or the Mediterranean mildness of the Bahamas, this was most definitely the dry, papery breezes of the desert. It was edging toward total darkness on this particular night, but we would later realize that if we looked carefully, we could see the Nevada mountains bulking off in the distance, beyond the boundaries of the city.

 

So. Saturday on the Las Vegas Strip. Off we went hiking, taking our new cameras and snapping or taping everything in sight.

 

For as long as the view lasted.

 

You see, there is always construction happening on the Strip, and our hotel was right next to a buttload of it. And just our luck, as we were enjoying the nighttime city lights and other beautiful scenery (much of it human!), we ended up having to walk through a protective tunnel, constructed to safeguard against girders, falling construction workers, dancing mortar and leaping British Secret Service agents, struggling to reboot a Cold War-era spy genre. Ergo, the only things to see where ambling “cows” in front of us. All four directions were blocked off. [Sigh].

 

Of course, this was our first introduction to those previously mentioned illegals from down south, who stood alongside all the pathways, snapping cards covered with naked women that visitors could call up for “a good time.” We realized later that most of these people probably didn’t speak English, so snapping the cards was their way of getting the attention of tourists, the better to pass on their seductive surprises. Being seasoned travelers, Jennifer and I were adept at fielding off such Business People of Booty, mostly by keeping our eyes forward or maintaining ongoing conversation that we never broke even when they bobbed their boobalicious bubblegum cards at us. Jennifer did mention, however, the definite inequality of the situation. After all, no one was hawking phone numbers for men­. What if a busy lady with cash to burn in Vegas wanted a hunka-hunka burnin’ love for the night, huh? Where’s the beef?

 

Our first real destination on this night was the casino called Planet Hollywood. Mainly, it was because we have a friend who became a Las Vegas local in 1998. Named Kevin, or simply “Kev,” he manages an establishment inside the mall complex of Planet Hollywood. Since we had visited with him only one time when he was back in our home state 10 years ago, we wanted to see if he was working that night. It turns out he wasn’t, but good ol’ Kevin will have a place in this story yet to come!

So we hung around the mall area and entertained ourselves. Proving yet again what a different culture they have in Las Vegas, we found a restaurant inside called Hawaiian Tropic Zone, where we could get a beer or two – from waitresses who wore nothing but bikinis. They were good eye candy, of course, and generally polite, but little beyond that. As usual, we found such women remote, even somewhat icy in their interaction style. In fact, I had to practically intrude on a conversation one of them was having just to get noticed at the bar. All I wanted was a couple of beers, dammit! We figured that when you dress like that and serve alcohol, you probably get accustomed to being harassed by boorish young men with diminished inhibition and compromised judgement. The secret is probably to cultivate an aloof forcefield, something to deter and push those types of people away. Then again, they might also be so accustomed to blatant displays of panting, “Hello, nurse!” reactions, that those of us who don’t do it…well, we just don’t even show up on their radars.

 

After being largely ignored for several minutes, Jennifer noticed she was hungry yet again, and we finally decided we might have more overall luck if we indulged in a small appetizer. So we went back out to the entrance, where the supermodel ice sculpture doing the hosting huffed out a frosted breath of acknowledgement and assigned us a waitress named Adriana.  She was generally friendly, though busy and necessarily terse. Plus, when she spoke, both of our beer mugs shattered and a pack of Alaskan sled dogs came running through the mall. Yes, Adriana had the cutest little shrill voice, like one of those doggy squeezy toys, or as I noted at the time, like Brittany, the leader of the Chipettes. [For those of you who aren’t old enough or geeky enough, by the way, the Chipettes were female versions of Alvin and the Chipmunks, who were introduced on that Saturday morning cartoon in 1983. It’s a GenX thing.]

 

As we were packing up to leave the mall, Jennifer was struck by the need to find something new and unique to wear the next night; we had a show scheduled, and she wanted to tap into the Las Vegas energy by being uninhibited! Her answer came at a kiosk that sold single-piece body wraps that could theoretically be worked and fastened into many different styles. For an example, check out www.irisimpressions.com. They were ridiculously expensive, but the girl from Israel who was running it gave Jennifer a discount, and I agreed to pay $20 on it to help her. How could she refuse!?

 

By this point, we were dog-tired. The trip was still catching up to us. So we returned to the New York-New York and went to bed.

Sunday, May 10, 2009—Sunscorched Before Getting Hot

 

It was impossible to say when first my eyelids opened, since our tinted, shaded room evidenced the perpetual atmosphere of 10 p.m.

 

Straining in Bed: Trying to Sleep Late at Nine o’clock Noon

 

Try as we might, we never did really get our bodies adjusted to Las Vegas time. So it came as a bit of a surprise when we slept as late as we could and actually got up at 9 a.m. What a weird experience, to be getting out and about at approximately my usual lunch time, only to find that most places were only just setting out the breakfast buffets!

 

Since it was functionally lunchtime for me, I did something I only do on vacation. I fixed myself a drink! Yes, there I was, at close to 10 a.m., drinking an iced glass of tequila. At first, I had a little guilt, as it seemed so…decadent, maybe even a bit clinically concerning in a "we're-your-friends-and-this-is-an-intervention" sort of way. But then I happened to think to myself: Why the hell do I work so hard the other 50-odd weeks of the year, if not to stand in my tinted hotel room, sipping a glass of tequila and gazing out over the Las Vegas Strip? Hrumph! Bottoms up! Then it was on for…breakfast.

 

A funny factor about food on this trip: For some reason, I found myself lacking an appetite, while it seemed like every three hours, Jennifer was chewing hunks of honey-covered hog’s ass, bites of jumbo sloth-loaf, armadillo gelatin or charcoal-smoked Popple. Looking back, we suspect now it could have been jetlag, my tooth issues, or sickness (since I fell ill upon our return home). We found ourselves a quick breakfast of ham and cheese croissants, then hit the Strip again for another tour!

 

We have used our previous camera for almost five years. In fact, it has reliably carried us through more than 10 travel narratives, 5,000 pictures and two memory cards. We call it our “Little Workhorse.” Unfortunately, over the last six months, the Workhorse has become a little sway-backed and pigeon-breasted. Generally, it works alright in the end, but it has also developed a tendency to artifact: to create spontaneous, disruptive behaviors of its own without appreciable warning or explanation. Sometimes, it won’t active correctly, or if it does, it then immediately shuts itself off. We really didn’t want to travel so many miles across the country, only to be bucked and thrown by our Little Workhorse. So we put it out to pasture and procured a couple of fine new fillies.

 

Jennifer brought the video camera I got her for Christmas this past year, while I carried our freshly purchased digital camera with 15X telephoto lens; a longview. And both worked beautifully! As we walked the Strip, catching glances at all the sites around the casinos, I found I was able to pull extreme close-up images into pictures, without the blurring problems of the past. It became a treat to get back to the room, where we could immediately load them onto the laptop and review them. Why? Because the pictures were often closer and more detailed than what we had seen with our naked eyes! These were some of the most crisp photos in our repertoire, and when combined with Jennifer’s video files, I’m sure you, Our Darlings, can certainly appreciate the upgrade. Look at these examples!

 

All right, I admit it. I was there to catch the human scenery, too. Kev had told us years ago, “Everybody’s beautiful in Vegas.” I wanted to check out the veracity of that claim. And I had to admit, there certainly was many an attractive young woman to draw the eye. Maybe there were men, too. I dunno. Can't remember.  Ask Jennifer. :)  I even tried to surreptitiously catch a few on the camera, but alas, even a classier digital camera doesn’t like performing in secret; most of the images blurred hopelessly, and I terminated them later.

 

To be fair, we’ve discovered that regardless of where we go, there will always be a share of unattractive or downright homely people, too. And Las Vegas was no exception. We saw many turkey necks, pachyderm ears, barrel-bellies, nicotine-yellowed corneas, asymmetrical humps and overly-sun-baked leatherbodies. The most significant one I can remember was this three-foot tall, rotund teenage boy who stumped along like he had no shins and his feet were affixed directly to his knees. He had a walking gait like those old wobbly, stumbling Bumblin’ Boxers windup toys from yesteryear.




Hopefully, we fall somewhere in the middle of the two physically aesthetic extremes!

 

Caesar’s Palace of Impulsive Delights

 

Of course, with my fierce fascination with the Latin language, and by extension, Roman history, you know I had to check out this classical location! Yes, after hours of picture taking, we finally reached this simulacrum of ancient Mediterranean architecture. Overall, it basically fielded the trappings of Rome, but it was only an historic veneer used to push what was otherwise blatant American consumerism. They had many architectural columns and even a huge model of the Trojan horse for children to climb around inside. Of course, I had to point out to Jennifer, these two particular elements were Greek­, and not Roman. But to give the creators of Caesar’s Palace some credit, the Romans were very much in awe of the older, more established Greek culture, and their own world would have evidenced a blending of the Greeks with their own distinctively Roman cultural masterpieces. So I suppose, in a warped sort of way, the blending of American culture with Roman and Greek ancestry is in keeping with the Roman way of doing things.

They had an impressive replica statue of Augustus of Prima Porta; the original was unearthed on April 20, 1863, and now resides in the Braccio Nuovo of the Vatican Museums. Although it was only a copy, the statue still made me feel I had to greet Rome’s First Citizen, the Princeps, the pater patriae et Pontifex Maximus. Hail Caesar.

Before we left the shopping area of Caesar’s Palace, Jennifer suggested we look for a sharper outfit for me­ to wear to the night’s show. We managed to locate a nice white shirt and a leather-like black vest. It was the first new shirt I had purchased in three or four years, and I think it cost about as much as all the rest of them I had combined. Eh. Given the amount of time I waited, it still averages to the cost of one shirt per year, LOL. Even in this establishment, we had to beat off the salespeople with a rake. The guy who let me into the dressing room kept trying to get me to sign up for one of their company credit cards. He didn’t want to hear that I was unlikely to be in town again in the near future, and I only buy shirts a few times per decade. I thought it would make me the talk of the town among the ladies. It didn't, but I guess only one lady really matters, huh? And she assures me she was crazy about this "sharp dressed man!"

 

Sweaty Pits and Salty Lips: Welcome to the Nevada Desert

 

Nevada continued to cook us.

 

We’d long heard about the dangers of dehydration in dry western climates, and now we observed the effects for ourselves. True, some of our body geographies sweated as much as they would back home. But it was still strange as we hoofed it back to the room to find ourselves burning up, yet with dry foreheads. The desert was evaporating the moisture from us as fast as we could generate it! At one point, I licked my chapped lips in a futile effort to moisten them, and tasted…salt! In fact, we’d later find a gritty layer of saline particles littering our faces. We learned from our friend Kev later that the summer temperatures in the city could spike up to 120 degrees. GAK!! Jennifer and I agreed that Las Vegas and Nevada as a whole were nice to visit, but we don’t want to live in such an austere and severe climate.

 

Tired and salty, we stopped quickly by the ticket counter outside the theater for our show and picked up our pre-purchased tickets. The girl at the counter whuffed and wheezed answers to our questions, sounding like someone who had forgotten her iron lung before coming to work. Her breathy speaking style made us think she must suffer from asthma or COPD, as even short sentences seemed to cause her grief. 

 

Both of us desperately wanted to get back to our room, where we immediately drank two glasses of water to rehydrate.

 

Our Sensual Evening

 

Now came the highlight of our trip to Las Vegas: our chosen show!

 

In order to prepare for it, Jennifer had to learn the fine art of origami, as well as how to do sailor’s knots, just to put on her dress. What’s more, the thing was too low-cut wear without showing undergarments…so she had to leave them out of the equation. Ergo, it was pretty essential she have everything knotted and looped just right, or body parts could go springing and sproinging in all the wrong directions if she bent over too quickly; we didn’t want any other tourists killed by flying buttocks!

 

Meantime, I put on my new ensemble of white shirt, black slacks and black vest. Overall, it made for quite a new look for both of us! Jennifer would ultimately catch a couple of guys eyeballing her. I really didn’t notice any of the ladies scoping me out…I guess some things are universal, LOL. At any rate, Las Vegas had allowed us to get outside ourselves. Now we were ready for a nice dinner, and then the show!



We chose a nice Italian restaurant inside the casino, one by the name of Il Fornaio. There, we were served by one of the most polished waiters of our experience. Named Larry, he appeared to be in his mid-50s, was quite genteel and did definitely look to be of Italian descent, though he himself was clearly reared in the U.S. This was a modern-day Roman patrician. He knew the wine lists thoroughly and recommended an excellent-tasting Zinfandel for Jennifer’s food. The guy didn’t spend any more time with us than Adriana or the other snow babes from the night before, but in the brief occasions when he was at our table, he easily made us feel noticed, like we mattered. This waiter made service to others an art form, not just a roll-your-eyes summer job. So here’s to you, Larry! You made a good evening even better.

 

We took our tickets and entered the theater, where we would see Zumanity. One of Las Vegas’ shows in the Cirque du Soleil series, it bills itself as both the “sensual” side of said series, and as “The World Just Beyond Reality.” The show was “adult-themed,” but we didn’t select it just for the reasons you're thinking (alright, the parts you're thinking were a pretty big part of it); we were also trying to weed out the options where children are allowed. Neither of us wanted to get dressed up in our best, only to have someone’s sticky-fingered hooligan grab onto us, or scream in our ears when we were trying to concentrate. Parents might become acclimated to such chaos, but it still gives the Travelin' Thornberries neurological tics.

Jennifer and I had reserved ourselves a front-row couch, right next to the stage. As a result, I got to shake hands with one of the earliest actors who came out to engage the audience.  This first round of four performers were there basically to liven up the crowd. The first two, a man in a suit and a woman in a gaudy, frilly pink skirt, were burlesque-style actors who used “naughty,” innuendo and sometimes outright sexually explicit dialogue to get laughs. Fortunately, we weren’t called upon to answer any of their questions!  The other couple were really fat “French maids” who made comments and bounced replies off of each other. These particular four actors would return between the other acts of the show, again usually for comic relief, and probably to occupy the audience while the next sets were arranged. And I also suspect it was just so the performers could rest.

 

Because they were beyond human!!

 

We knew with the first performances that we were going to witness something grand. I theorized that the cast had to have backgrounds in ballet and/or gymnastics, for these people were the pinnacle of human physical perfection, both in beauty and grace. Clothes were few: topless women, men in g-strings. But they were capable of feats of coordination, balance, stamina and agility that were enough to bring tears to one’s eyes. Jennifer and I work out at the gym frequently, and it has never stopped being taxing and outright hard. So when we saw lithe young women handstand on one arm, point their legs toward the ceiling and do flawless leg-splits, or balance on the head and shoulders of a bulldozer-like man and do the same, we applauded loud and long. One of the acts, the innocent-but-sensual schoolgirl, involved the performer gyrating in such perfect time that she kept at least six hula-hoops going simultaneously up and down her body and onto a long cord she held that raised her up to the ceiling.

 

Our only complaint on this score was with the audience. Perhaps most of those people don’t exercise at all, because they gave only feeble responses to the most excellent acts of balance and strength. It was like they had no appreciation for the effort involved and the hard work it takes to keep those abilities. Jennifer and I tried to make up for their lack by clapping ever more vigorously. Sometimes, I managed to start a few other people on our side clapping as well, but more often, they sat there like chunks of old cheese on a refrigerator shelf - cold and unappealing. Wake up America! If you won’t keep your own gelatinous ass in shape, at least show some appreciation for those who dedicate their lives to it! *Snort*

 

As an exploration of sexuality, the show was all-inclusive. Beginning with the fact that the acts were introduced by the Mistress of Seduction, who was basically a “drag” performer; for you naïve folks, that’s a man dressed in a woman’s clothing for performance purposes. ;) “She” must have been convincing, since Jennifer didn’t know the reality of “her” until after the show, when I told her! The Mistress made sure to ask which sexual orientations were represented in the audience. Of course, most were heterosexual, but a couple of homosexual people responded. And ultimately, the show itself showed all forms of expression. Not just bare women, but also a male strip tease, and two positively huge, muscular gladiatorial men who did a simulated cage fight…then kissed each other at the end. Well, to clumsily paraphrase 18th century philosopher Voltaire here: I do not wish to share in what you do, but I will defend to the death your right to do it! We’ve all got boundaries, LOL.

 

Stunned by the performance, Jennifer and I returned to the room, brought out some whiskey and basically called it the end of a very long and fulfilling day.

 

Monday, May 11, 2009—Treading Old Territory, Old Memories

 

The next morning, we decadently slept in to around 8:30 a.m. Las Vegas time, of course. :)

 

Tomato Salad? WTF?

 

At this point, Jennifer was hungry again (and I was not), so we stopped at a place called ’Wichcraft, which was short for “Sandwichcraft,” since that was their main specialty. Jennifer had been craving a salad for the past two days, and she got one at last, with some whale-blubber dressing, I think. Unfortunately, it was mostly fescue, cud, four cucumber slices and what appeared to be a whole tomato. In fact, it was a virtual tomato salad, if the proliferation of it over the other ingredients was any indication. She pushed those hunks aside and ate the three lettuce leaves and other greenery. I had a few kettle chips, while waiting for my full appetite to return.

 

 

For the record, we did finally find the monorail system, though right before our eyes, it fell into a chasm next to a sign that literally stated, “The End of the Earth.” Eh. Good thing. It turns out they wanted three toes off our right foots to ride the damn thing. We decided explore another option.


 

The Long Wait for Water Twirlies

 

The other option failed, too.

 

We stopped at a Las Vegas City Information Booth to ask about a bus system Jennifer had researched. Discontinued. Figures. So we clopped past the construction yet again, finally arriving at the vantage point for the Fountains of Bellagio. By this point, it was 2:05 p.m. local time, and we figured it would only be a few minutes before the show started. Twenty-five minutes of evaporated sweat later, the intercom crackled for a second, and Jennifer eagerly fondled her video camera. Then a dispassionate voice belted out from the speaker, “The show will begin in 30 minutes.” Arrrgh!! I didn’t think the prospect of sitting around trying to sweat some more was the answer. Jennifer suggested we go inside the casino itself and grab a few pictures, which we did.

A few minutes in the air conditioning revitalized us a bit, and when we returned to the edge of the Fountain, we were ready. And the show was excellent! I’d try to describe it here, but I don’t think I could do it justice. It was like fireworks in water. Fortunately, we now have the option of letting you watch it for yourselves! Check it out, Our Darlings:

 

 

 

 

 

Neat huh?

Then it was back to the room, with a quick stop for an alcoholic refreshment and another snack of gerbil fritters to fill Jennifer's ever-empty stomach before meeting our friend Kev for the evening.

 

Pub-Cocked! Or, No Beer For You Here!

 

Small story here. Jennifer had researched a brewery pub in the Monte Carlo casino next to our hotel, and the thought of a frosty cool beer after being in the scorching heat was irresistible. On our way back to the room, we tracked the place down and stared with waning enthusiasm at the darkened interior and chairs on the tables. Crickets belted out their intermidable dirge, indicating innumerable intervals of obvious abandonment.  At last, we found the huge iron door barricaded over the entrance. Checking their schedule, we found they were only closed on one full day of the week. Guess which one? :-/ DOH!!

 

One Hour, Three Beers: You Do the Math

 

Determined now to get that beer or die trying, we melted our feet rushing through the “cows” and back to the New York-New York. There, we stopped by America again and ordered a couple of large Blue Moon beers on tap. Of course, little did we realize the large was, in fact, 2½ times as much volume as the small! They brought them in giant plastic Statue of Liberty cups, and we consumed them in an hour. And then we ­felt like we’d consumed almost three beers in an hour. Wow. *Hic*

 

Meet Kev: Our Hippy-Boy Host

This part remains in pink text, because we suspect it will only be of interest to those of you who already know Kevin or who have an interest in people from our college past. Those who want to move on to the next chapter of the story, go ahead and skip on down to the section labled “Fremont Street.” Trust me, you won’t regret what you find there.   :)

 

Alright, a quick explanation of Kev. Basically, I first met him in 1992, though he does not remember the encounter as well as I do. Jennifer met him in 1993, when he nicknamed her "Jenniferk," because her first name and last initial ran together on her name tag. A man with a strong radio/television background, Kev is dedicated to rock and roll music as it was up until about 1970. Thus, he earned the nickname “Hippy Boy” during our college years.


Were I to assign him a Myers-Briggs Type, I’d say he’s ENFP, but for those (including Kev himself, most likely) who eschew Typing as rigid “labeling,” I’ll move away from it to a more idiographic description.

 

Basically, I see Kev’s Unifying Philosophy of Life as being characterized by materialism, Epicureanism and dynamism.

 

  

  

  

One can see why Kev would feel ill-at-ease in his home state, which is on the conservative eastern side of the country, near Appalachia. That’s why he moved to Las Vegas in 1998. With the exception of a short span he spent in California, it has been his home ever since. We hadn’t seen him since a wedding in 1998 (hey, Mitch, hey Shannon!). Now that we were finally in his home city, we were intent on hooking up with him and seeing what kind of life he’d made for himself.

 

After resting up in the room and making a coordinating phone call, we rendezvoused with Kev in the lobby downstairs. He quickly made good on his promise, by taking us off the Strip to show us “how the rest of the city lives,” to quote him. Good ol’ Kev was still our lovable Hippy Boy, but he had also matured. Now, he carefully felt out our boundaries, noting which ways he could push and entertain without making us uncomfortable or upset. He was an excellent host and guide. Our conversation with him was necessarily hurried and flighty…after all, we were cramming nearly a decade of changes back home into only a few hours of opportunity, alongside delicious food and sightseeing. Kev showed us homes and properties, both humble and grand, throughout the Nevada desert landscape. One example was the sprawling, walled fortress of one Wayne Newton.  He also showed us the window to his own soul, his apartment that houses Milton, his delightful kitty. Milton is a little opportunistic tumbleweed of a black long-hair, who saw our visit as an excuse to break the rules and run outside on the balcony!

Fremont Street: Confrontation with Old Las Vegas, Complete with Shambling Corpses

 

Jennifer had one other tourist attraction she really wanted to see, and Kev (he's in the pink area above, for those of you skipping around) very generously made it happen for her. Taking us out to the original downtown region of Fremont Street, Kev exposed us to Las Vegas as it was in its early days, before the Strip was constructed. Here, we found architecture with more history, much of it original or rebuilt. It was quieter on the street, though the gambling inside the smaller casinos was more like what you see of Las Vegas of the movies, rather than the surprisingly subdued gambling of the casinos back on the Strip. Jennifer noted it sported an older population demographic, many of them looking like genteel ladies who were wearing excessive amounts of make-up; it made them appear more like freshly embalmed corpses than young maidens.

But Jennifer wanted to see Fremont Street for one [literally] overarching reason: the Fremont Street Experience. What is this? It’s a big-ass canopy that stands 90 feet high and four blocks long over a permanently blocked-off street. Upon the canopy several times each night is projected a kaleidoscopic lightshow of images, pop cultural icons and whirling designs, all to an immersing (id est, loud) musical score.  On this particular night, all the casino lights shut down, then Don McClean appeared on the screen in larger-than-life black-and-white grandeur and sang his entire song - guess…no, really, guess…GUESS DAMMIT! Alright - American Pie! Jennifer grabbed the whole thing on her video camera, and it was…well, hell, why don’t I just let you take a look for yourself:

 

 

   

 

 

Neat, huh? Ain’t technology great on occasion?

 

But all good things must come to an end. The screen went dark, the casino lights came back on, and the Travelin’ Thornberries continued their guided tour. As Kev drove us circuitously back to the hotel, he narrated many of the architectural developments on the Strip, pointing out projects that had run out of money before opening. Great walls, barricading equipment and piles of crap still covered such areas. Kev also talked of the city’s politics, citing why the attempted smoking ban of recent years was doomed to dismal failure in a place renowned for the satisfaction of bodily appetites.

 

By this point, the evening had progressed to after midnight by our body clocks, and Kev himself was winding down, too. He dropped us off at the New York-New York, and we said our goodbyes. There was no substitute for seeing the city through the eyes of a local, especially when we knew the sacrifice he was making for us:  locals, so Kev informed us, hate the Strip! So to you, Kev “Hippy Boy,” the Travelin’ Thornberries would like to offer their gratitude, encouragement and promises that this will not be our last trip to visit your adopted city! Thanks a mamba line of fluffy Miltons a mile long!

 

Tuesday, May 12, 2009—Fumbling, Falling and Failing

 

The next day, we awoke in the early hours again, refreshed and ready to continue our adventures. How could we top two days of such good experiences? Well, it seemed we couldn’t….

 

The Great Wall Over the Chinese Buffet

 

There was a Chinese Buffet in the New York-New York that we’d tried once to frequent, without much luck. Today, we checked out their sign, and they were closed, of course. But then the hostess came out, turned the sign around to what looked like “open,” moved a few things about…then walked off without saying a word to us. Um…hello? Are you open now? Should we have a seat? Are you coming back? How about some _ _ _ _ing information!? But she never returned, and we weren’t going to wait on her miming, slothy backside. Instead, we trundled down the street and found a tasty Indian buffet. An irony exists in there somewhere, going from Chinese to Indian.

 

The Travelin’ Thornberries Become Peepshow Prostitutes

 

We had talked about possibly seeing a second show while in Las Vegas. The day before, we’d done some research on Peepshow, which was nearby and seemed like it might fit our interests. But alas, it seemed a lack of resources would hold us back. Jennifer had pointed out several days earlier that the shows are expensive, plus we just didn’t have enough evenings available before flying home. Fortunately, Kev helped us get the Fremont Street Experience a night early, so that freed up an evening. The financial obstacle was removed when we were investigating the show at Planet Hollywood, and a solicitor suavely oozed into our path. I was content to hold some garlic out and watch him melt into goo. But he said the magic words and caught Jennifer’s attention; were we interested in tickets to Peepshow? And for only $20 each? Well hell, that was 80% off, at least! So we decided to follow him and see what was up.

 

He led us to a desk where an equally suave 25-year-old African-American man informed us that all we had to do to get the tickets was listen to a 90-minute presentation, during which we would take a tour of some new casino properties, and then tell other people about them. It seemed simple enough.

 

Not!

 

First of all, we had other plans for the daytime; Jennifer had promised to go with me to see the new Star Trek movie (2009) that was showing in the cinema. A 90-minute presentation should have still left us plenty of time to get there. But they took our cash in advance, offered us free coffee, then parked us for 20 minutes. We sat. We shuddered. We wailed. But we were trapped by that point and couldn’t reconsider. Then we met our presenter, “Robert.” A self-reported ex-wrestler, he was built like a steam shovel with hair. Gone now was the suaveness of our earlier human fish hooks; this guy reminded us of those sculptures people hew with chainsaws: roughly cut and blocky. After he shook my hand, for example, he showed me how that hand had grease all over it from where he had car trouble that morning. He led us to a table, then he gave us the truth…this wasn’t a presentation, so much as a face-to-face, high-pressure sales pitch for timeshare properties. The guy was really trying to work a “yes” out of us, showing us in crude drawings and interspersed documents from his big binder just how we really waste our money by “renting your vacation” instead of “owning it.” He asked us Barney-the-Dinosaur obvious questions, designed to get an affirmative response, such as, “Do you like free money?” To give the guy credit as a salesman, he did strive to build a rapport with us, learning where we were from, what our interests are and our occupations. This was all in the service of getting us to buy a timeshare in a building that hasn’t even been constructed yet.

I smiled and activated the “on” face I use for dealing with difficult patients. Inside, I screamed until my mind’s throat was raw. Jennifer’s eyes rolled backward in her skull and fell down against the back of her epiglottis. Empty, bloody sockets met Robert’s sales pitch. I tried to keep cheap Peepshow in sight through the fog of my desolate frustration, while watching the starship Enterprise jumping to warp speed and leaving me stranded under Robert’s oily thumbs.

 

Okay, first strike, remember we’d had that tour of the Strip from Kev the previous night. [If you skipped that section, just trust me, he did!] He had showed us all the failed building projects around the city, places in which people had invested small fortunes, only to have the matching funding from other sources dry up too much to complete them. Do you think all those investors got their money back? Hmm…

 

Ultimately, good ol’ Bob was braying out the right tune, but to the wrong audience. Jennifer and I are not owners. Of course, we want to be wise with our money so we’ll have enough for our freedoms (exempli gratia, trips to Las Vegas!) and for a secure future. That aside, however, money is not what motivates us. We prefer minimum hassle, minimum attachment, low commitment. If we have to spend a little more money for those “soft benefits,” so be it. He accuses us of “renting” our vacation experience? Isn’t life itself an exercise in renting? Isn’t it temporary, and ultimately everything we have of it leaves us if we don’t leave it first? To go through the motions to own something is to be attached to it, to have it own you. And in the end, you end up with as much as if you had rented. No, he’d have to sing a different tune to win us.

 

He crooned loud and long, though. The essence of persistence with all the musical resonance of a trash compactor. He kept asking us what places we’d like to visit in the next five years, and was quite frustrated that we haven’t formulated those goals yet. Poor Robert didn’t understand that we didn’t want the bigger and better room he let us tour…we travel expecting some level of hardship on our vacations, and we barely use all of our simpler rooms as it is…hell, this trip, we hadn’t even turned the television on! It doesn’t mean we enjoy inconvenience, but it comes with the territory. Perhaps when we’re older, we’ll want to go away from home while having every comfort of home meet us at our destination. But for now, if it will fit in a suitcase, we’ll make do. Remember, we’ve filled a bathroom sink with ice for beer before, and I had just recently infused coffee with hot tap water and a makeshift bowl! If we accepted the total luxury he promised, where would these stories come from? Pain is plot!

 

Robert was observably annoyed that we didn’t have more energy, that we didn’t respond to his questions in expected ways. At one point, he mentioned needing a defibrillator for us. We were also tired, and trying to impress upon him that our body clocks were much later in the day than his was. Plus he had turned that 90-minute presentation into 150 minutes of soul-rotting torture. As we’d feared, we had already missed the show time on my movie. Jennifer noted later that the guy seemed a little disjointed and disorganized, and he had weird priorities. He told us that these high-pressure talks only yield a 25% success rate. It should have been obvious from the first 45 minutes that we weren’t interested. So why hold out almost twice as long as we were promised, browbeating people who were obviously not going to be moved? Wouldn’t it be a better use of his time to sweep us out of there and find another, more promising, prospect?

 

Finally, he called over his boss, “Joe,” an obese slab of a man shaped like a six-foot jumbo pencil eraser. He had less of a neck than Robert; his head was mounted somewhere in between his pectoralis muscles!  The guy used the same types of tactics, except in a Jersey accent. He even gave us a price: $169 per month for a smaller timeshare property, if that was what we really thought we wanted. Nope. Thanks. I again smiled diplomatically, preparing for a nice, soft refusal—but then Jennifer gave a Janet Jackson “Black Cat” yowl, leaped across the table, lifted Robert off his feet with one hand, bulky Joe off his with the other, and shook them over her head until timeshares fell out of their pockets. They took the hint that we just wanted our tickets for Peepshow. Reluctantly and with obvious irritation, Robert tightened the bolts in his neck back down, gave in and pointed us the right direction. We had to complete a face-to-face survey with yet another person afterward, with questions about Robert’s sales style. I gave the guy high marks based on quantity of performance (150 minutes!?), but then the interviewer slammed me with, “So what did you like specifically about him?” Uh…erm…hummina—hummina—hummina… I settled on saying Robert really seemed to believe in what he told us. The lady’s pupils drifted a different direction from each other for a second, as she seemed confused by that response. But she didn’t press us on it.

 

Ultimately, I suspect we left poor Robert with the impression that we’re essentially dumb bumpkins with no goals, who don’t know what it is to travel in style, and who can’t see the value of saving money. I resent the implication that we would be such base, uncultured people...the truth is that we’re just whores for cheap show tickets. :)  Perhaps he wondered that if we were people who expect so little material indulgence from our trips, why do we travel at all? You know the reason, though, don’t you, Darlings? For the story!! 

For the record, we made a futile stop by the movie theater to see if any showings of Star Trek were still available. Unfortunately, we never learned the answer, because this was the first theater we ever had seen with a marquis out front, but no door into the damn building! So we called it a loss, clutched our tickets for the show tightly, and scurried back to the room to maximize the rest of the afternoon we’d otherwise wasted.

Welcome to the Peepshow: A Presentation of Female Confidence and Innocence Lost

 

Jennifer ate some monkey brains or something in there again somewhere, and we spent the evening preparing for the show. She draped her kerchief over her body again, and I modified my own previous show outfit by wearing a black “wife beater” shirt with my new black vest. I don't want to be a “tough guy” to be sure, but I was interested in at least looking like a different person in Las Vegas, and this simpler ensemble showed my tattoo.

We had to walk yet again back to Planet Hollywood, but once there, we saw the benefit of attending shows on Tuesday nights; we were allowed to move from the balcony to floor seats because they didn’t have a packed house. Somehow, that made our sacrifice with Robert and Joe worth more…or cheaper, however one wants to look at it.

 

Again, the show was highly impressive. Whereas Zumanity had been small of scale, intimate and emphasizing sensuality, Peepshow was larger, more bombastic, and it emphasized innocence. Here we had beautiful women, led by an ex-Spice Girl, dancing to various songs from the 1970s and 1980s. Some of the dancers were topless; others were in garish costumes or wearing glittering nipple “pasties."  Under lightshows and excellent choreography, they emphasized “tease” more than “tah-dah.” We had watched an interview with the writer online the night before, and he stated that the ladies might “bare all,” but they do so in full confidence and totally in control of their destinies. Our main character moved from innocent virgin to worldly gyrating dancer by the end. Oh, and Jennifer got her fill too: a very buff, wet guy wearing denim jeans in a bathtub dance performance made sure of that! Alas, we can’t show any pictures, because they regulate cameras pretty closely. The ex-Spice Girl even introduced the show by saying, “If I see any of this on Youtube, I will hunt down your ass!” Well, they work hard, and we certainly can’t blame them for wanting to safeguard their Art. Great show, everyone!

 

Not much else to tell on this night. Back to have a few drinks and hit the proverbial hay.

 

Wednesday, May 13, 2009—Sucking Our Way Back Home

 

Please, May We Pay?

 

Finally, we got into that damn Chinese breakfast buffet, and the meal was delicious. Of course, the problem was getting out again. Our waiter was busy and kept disappearing for long periods of time. We finally caught his attention and offered to pay the check.

 

Eight Hours To Ears!

 

Even though our little furballs are always in good hands (thanks again, Dan!) we always start missing our kitties by the waning hours of our trips, and we were looking forward now to getting home and putting all of our experiences…well, HERE! So Jennifer noted we had about eight hours until we saw our kitties and their adorable, fuzzy little ears again. Of course, even for an almost-direct flight, we had many, many logistical hurdles to overcome before we pulled into our own driveway and chased the kitties off the kitchen table.

 

You’re Welcome for the Help!

 

Once we checked out of the room, we managed to find our way to the door where the cabs drive by. When I wheeled our now much-leavened suitcase out to the curb, one of the hotel employees waved a cab forward, then took it upon himself to stow our luggage in it. He had opened the door for us, and the cabbie looked impatient, so I hurriedly climbed into the back seat. As I pulled the door shut, I heard the guy outside shouting, “Hey, you’re welcome for the help with that suitcase!” Oops. I guess I was supposed to tip him. At that point, the cab was preparing to move on, and it would have been awkward to get back out, even if we had had change for tipping. And anyway, I would have been happy to load my own suitcase if I’d known he was foisting a service on me I hadn’t expressed a need for him to offer! Sorry, buddy. Next time, I’ll know to specify that I’ll take care of the luggage myself!

 

Urinal Mirrors? WTF!?

 

We got to the airport, handled getting our boarding passes and made it to our gate. The only thing of note when we got there was that the restrooms were 1.) conveniently located near us for a change, and 2.) the men’s room had mirrors over the urinals. I found myself wondering what context the architects thought would require me to look at my own reflection during that particular activity? Do they think we men want to observe a sense of relief in ourselves? :-/ Did they put mirrors on the toilet seats for the women?

 

 

I knew it was going to be a loooooong flight when the bald, pot-bellied man and his wife were tittering over the Asian newspaper left behind by the previous customers, and he was relaying out loud the contents of the text messages he was sending on his palm device. That was only his first intrusion on my time and space. During the course of the three-hour flight, this man:

• displaced me so he could give the Asian newspaper to his friend - whom I figured out was the recipient of those text messages - at the front of the plane as a joke.
• continued to send text messages after the flight attendants had told passengers to turn off their devices, even hiding the palm device against his thigh when a flight attendant passed by our row.
• tapped me on the arm and asked, "Are you gonna throw that at me?" as I was gathering my snack trash, to which his tittering wife looked at me and said, "He's kidding." The precursor to this was that the cap off my water bottle had accidently flown off and hit him (which I had apologized for, but was not really sorry for in the least).
• left his half-drank Coke in the seat pocket, telling his wife, "Maybe the next customer will be thirsty. I'm doing a good deed."

I think this is a good time to invent a new Thornberries term, for the man went beyond "cow-ness." "Cows" are usually simply clueless about the ways in which they intrude on other people. This man was well aware that he was not only intruding on me, breaking federal regulations and leaving behind his trash. He was not clueless; he knew exactly what he was doing, and he didn't care about the black mark he left on the world.

So, to you, the bald, pot-bellied man who flew from Las Vegas to Chicago Midway on Wednesday, May 13, 2009, congratulations! You have been branded, not just a cow, but a cow-hole. You are a category unto yourself: the perfect combination of cow and a$$hole.

And to your wife: Madam, you have my sympathies. You could do better.

NOW BACK TO THOMAS' VOICE:

 

The Windy City Blows Again

 

Strictly speaking, our flight home wasn’t a true direct flight. It actually needed to make a stop. We wouldn’t need to de-plane, because the same aircraft would eventually push on to our destination, but it would still have to make a landing. Up until we got to the Vegas airport, we didn’t know for sure where we’d be putting down. When we learned the answer, our hearts sank: Chicago Midway.

 

Why do they call Chicago the “Windy City?” Because it freakin’ blows!!

 

Alright, not the entire city, just our airplane experiences with the region. They’re always painful, and this one would be no exception. No sooner were we strapped in and ready for take-off when the pilot came onto the intercom, telling us there was some “rough weather” over Chicago and to expect delays. Well, there weren’t any delays, but by the end of the flight, we were wishing there had been. It topped all of our previous retching, wheezing, juddering, pray-to-die-quickly encounters with turbulence. The plane rattled and shook so much that the flight attendants prevented people from using the lavatory at the end of a three-hour flight. I swore I saw a gremlin on the wing...but no one would believe me.

 

I finally placed myself into a deep, hypnotic trance using a breathing technique of letting my exhalations last one second longer than my inhalations, and it worked to keep me depersonalized from the worries. My stomach stayed steady. I didn’t try to look back at Jennifer, figuring she was having her own battles and wouldn’t feel like talking. When we came in for a landing in the tempestuous storm, the pilot was yanking the aircraft to and fro, wrestling the bucking wings like he was breaking a mustang. Well, he must have been a Robert Redford-esque “air-whisperer,” because we finally got down to the ground safely, with a round of applause going up from all of us passengers!

 

The second leg of the flight home had no incidences to tell, thankfully. We landed in our home state, drove 1.5 hours home and beheld…six little EARS!

 

Thanks for staying with us until the end folks. You’ve been patient, and we’re grateful for your support!

 

                                            Ye Ende