Vegas Nights

We recently returned from a few days in Las Vegas, where I spoke at a conference and Bev enjoyed a few well-deserved vacation days. Vegas is a great people watching city, but if you don’t gamble or aren’t dazzled by all of the glitz, it’s just a weird, loud place in the middle of the desert. We’d each had our own Vegas experiences but this was our first trip there together.

One of the first times that I went to Las Vegas, in 1981, I got married on Valentines Day. I did this along with hundreds (thousands?) of other adults who met the only requirement to receive a wedding license – be sober enough to sign your own name without assistance. In hindsight, this may have been the one moment when being very drunk would have been a good thing. Regretfully, I was perfectly sober. I’m pretty sure that every mother’s nightmare includes having her oldest child get married in a place called Little Chapel of Hearts on Las Vegas Boulevard. Elvis was not in the building but it was still a traumatic experience. I’m pleased to report that my mother has since forgiven me and is happy that I’m in a loving and healthy relationship. She’s also probably glad that I don’t have the bad 80’s permed hair thing going on. Bev calls it the Chia Pet Hairdo.

Bev’s previous Las Vegas experiences include running the Rock N Roll Las Vegas Half Marathon with a group of girlfriends. The year that she ran it, they closed the Strip, relocated some of the drunks, and began the race on an early morning in December. The temperature never got out of the 30s. Running 13.1 miles is hard enough but doing it in the frozen desert really sucks. Because the Strip isn’t long enough to do a straight “out and back” course, the race diverts into the seedy (one might say ghetto) part of Las Vegas before returning to Las Vegas Blvd. for the last few miles. This race should be called the “Most Unappealing Race in America” (“Run For Your Life” is already taken by the Oakland Marathon). Now they start the Las Vegas race at 5:30pm and promote it as “Strip at Night”. Apparently, frostbitten runners were bad publicity. Bev may have froze, but at least she didn’t get married in a place with neon signage. One of us is smarter than the other.

Fortunately, we didn’t engage in any behavior that had to “stay in Vegas”. In fact, our time in Sin City would be considered boring by most. Sit outside, away from the casinos. Walk around. Shop a little. Lay around in a nice hotel room, reading books and watching the World Series. Order room service.  Nothing to write home about, but for one experience in the Palazzo casino.

We joined a couple of friends for dinner on our second night in town. Afterwards, one of them wanted to play the slots, so three of us sat down to play and all quickly cashed out after just a few minutes. Slot machines quit dispensing coins years ago and now print a voucher that you can redeem for cash or insert into another slot machine. Based on the value of our vouchers, Bev decided to redeem them at the Cashier window instead of using the automated voucher redeem machines. We watched as she walked off in her cute shorts with her blonde hair pulled back in a pony tail tucked through the back of a baseball cap. It took all of ten seconds for a man to approach her in the Cashier line, taking an interest in her and her three cash vouchers. He was all “how YOU doing” and asking her how she got her winnings. Did she play craps? Blackjack? This guy thought that he was going to woo-woo the pretty woman holding THREE vouchers, which were clearly so large that she didn’t want to trust them to a machine. After handling his questions with monosyllabic responses, Bev strode confidently to the window, handed over those three vouchers and watched intensely as the cashier, with a straight face,  counted aloud. 25… 50… 55… cents, sliding two quarters and a nickel across the counter. Mr. “How YOU Doing?” was gone before Bev turned around and strode toward us with our collective “winnings”. All 55 cents of them.