Tom Hanks put it best when he said what happens on the Green Mile, stays on the Green Mile. Vegas shares the same attribute: what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas, only difference is there are less electrocutions. However, the Green Mile was a movie where you got to see what goes on behind closed doors, so I see no reason Vegas can’t be documented in LiveJournal.
This week, I took my wife to Vegas for CES, a consumer electronics show. We got more geeks per square foot than anywhere else.
Knowing geeks have girl problems, Las Vegas has solved that. Room strippers. Starting at $35, you can have a stripper come to your room. For $69, she’ll do more than strip. For $99, you get two women.
I also suspect you get Bubba the body guard, but that’s hardly ever mentioned. Veneral diseases, no extra charge.
During the day as one walks the main road, also called The Strip – showing someone in marketing was paying attention, you get handed
coupons for a free pull …on a slot machine.
Typically the approach goes something like this: someone will walk up to you, offer you a coupon for something you won’t use, and makes a promise of a show, dinner, or cash. So, investigating, you quickly find it requires a tour, time share, or joining a club. You bail with 10 minutes of your life depleted.
At night the hotel street workers become replaced by Spanish-speaking men with decks of cards with pictures of strippers and their phone numbers. Unless your fist is closed tight and you pretend they don’t exist, a card will make its way to you. You think it’s a free hotel promotion and are surprised at the photo.
Usually the kibbles’n’bits are “starred” out, blocked over, or have text cleverly placed. But, on rare occasion, not.
It is not uncommon for a female date to berate her escort, resulting in mass quantities of litter, that, like Disney Land, mysteriously vanishes by day light.
Mauzy and I proposed a game. The rules are such:
- If handed a card, you must take it.
- No cards may be picked up, it must be handed.
- You may approach any card dealer for cards.
- The person with the most cards at the end of the evening wins.
The score for Wednesday evening: Whiskey 60, Mauzy 64.
But our little experiment revealed some interesting behind-the-scenes facts.
The main one being, Mauzy is good at bending the rules. As she fell behind by 4 or 5 cards at the initial outset, she started asking for extras. Clever wench! That was dash cunning. I’d get one handful, she’d get several.
Yet, as you may recount, she barely beat me. Why is that? They’d hand me several, and her one or two. Interesting.
Still, what appeared at the time, before we knew the count, to be twisting the spirit of the game led to a new category.
The alternate score would be based on number of unique “trading cards”. But in sorting my pile, a new fact emerged causing a problem. We walked back and forth the same stretch, taking cards from the same men, and Mauzy doing in bulk. You’d think we’d have piles of dup’s to throw out; nope, out of my 60 cards, I had only 6 duplicates.
My guess is the decks contain lots of girls, and you get a fist full to make an informed selection.
On Thursday evening, I got 64, of which 35 came during broad daylight while just walking around the conference. Mauzy got only 24. Funny thing, once they know you’ll take one card, they swarm you. We had people throwing cards and magazines in our conference carrying bags as we walked past the street corners and showed any slight willingness to take a card. We were still digging them out and making final score adjustments.
To be honest, at the convention she stopped trying. Not because she was concerned about people pondering a female looking for room strippers, but because the Spanish-speaking men refused to give her cards. I suspect she surprised them, meaning perhaps this doesn’t happen as often as one suspects. It would seem the direct approach, for women, in broad day light feels more like a sting operation to them.
She even approached one guy, asked for a card, and he backed away like she was the INS on a deport mission. He said he didn’t speak English and made eye contact with me. I nodded it was okay, and he hesitantly handed her a single card.
It was almost unfair, if I do say so myself. Part of me figured it was Karma for finding a loophole in the rules, the other part was concerned about women not having the same opportunity to get strippers as men. Maybe women don’t tip well, pulling out their calculator just like after dinner.
Speaking of dinner, after ours, we went to see David Copperfield. He’s changed, and not for the good. The Copperfield you remember was a humble slight of hand illusionist. This was a balding, egotistical Copperfield who stayed up too late (or had a liquid dinner), and couldn’t connect with the audience. His jokes fell flat, and the illusions looked like they could be accomplished with a modern laptop. Cost of the tickets? $97. About the same as two full-service strippers – and they’re not trying to get ya pregnant.
Copperfield’s opening graphics contained quotes like “Most expensive magician” — while trying to say he’s sold a ton of tickets, it came across as he was over priced. Which he was. Truth in advertising, I guess. Another was “Knighted by the French” — not exactly a resume seller.
I would have liked to have seen “Magician voted most likely to club a baby seal” or “Favorite magician by 4 out of 5 terrorists”. In fact the intermission contained a slide show of highlights that might just have been entitled “The Wonderful, Marvelous, Magical Me” or, perhaps, “My Ego’s Bigger Than Yours.”
David Copperfield totally let me down from a performance and showmanship perspective, and from this point on is no longer on my must see list ever again. And, iI I want to see a receding hairline, a drooping and sagging face with baggy eyes, I’ll look at Billy Joel. At least that guy can sing.
I suspect Copperfield is just getting old, is bored with the routine, and can’t connect with the audience. He relies on videos and sappy stories. While the patter is weak, I still have to say this may not have been all his own fault, as he seemed to be dealing with an audience made up of the lowest common denominator. Maybe he is astute and realized it wasn’t even worth bothering with us, now that he had the money.
Let me show you just how stupid our audience was by paraphrasing a piece of dialog. “Ladies and gentlemen, for my next trick, I’ll be needing a person from the audience. And, to prove it’s a random person, completely chosen at random, I’m going to throw this frisbee, this frisbee, this frisbee into the audience, again, that’s into the audience.” (pointing at the frisbee, then pointing at the audience) “Your job will be to catch it, that’s catch it, and take the frisbee, which I’ll be throwing into the audience, and bring it up on stage. Bring it up on stage. Bring it up on stage. Don’t throw it back. Bring it up to me. Here. On stage. Got it? Here we go.” Copperfield would then throw five frisbees out into the audience, they’d land on the floor, and people just looked at each other. Copperfield was standing there like ‘well?!?’, and after an uncomfortable pause, “Bring those frisbees on up, just pick up a frisbee, any frisbee, and bring it up on stage to me here. If you don’t want to come up, pick up the frisbee and put it into someone else’s hands. If you’re too far from a frisbee, you may use a rock, a set of keys, I really don’t care… a poodle will work. In fact, you just need to stand up and walk this way. The trick kinda needs at least one of you up here.” Crickets.
If I was working under these conditions night after night, I’d be pulling my hair out too.
Copperfield needs to reinvent himself and find a new look, because his ride on his past reputation is decelerating. Don’t get me wrong, I love his old work, but now his work looks old, and sadly, I doubt he sees it. The real talent seems to reside in his crew, and they were on top of their game. At least he hires good staff.
SPOILER: You may have heard that Copperfield impregnates a woman on stage without touching her. This is basically showing a video of a fake sonogram of a 3D modeled baby with a superimposed picture of a card chosen by an audience member, a card that’s easily visible to any stage hand. I found this as impressive as loading a URL with the card you’re thinking of, only I get to choose the URL after you tell me the card. It’s more video trickery than illusion. “Think of a card? What was it? Thanks — Hey, Bob, can you pull up ‘that’ video on the computer and see if we have any footage of the Three of Clubs? Look we do! We must have known your card!” When the heck does a sonogram pick up ink. It’s not only technologically insulting, it’s a stupid gag.
…anyhow, as I write this, I’m waiting on a flight to return to NoVA; more updates on the final scores, pictures of the strippers to come, and oddly enough, an interesting installment of some amazing wins, ending with Tamara on a cop’s motorcycle. Honest.
Perhaps none of this compares to getting a photo published in the Washington Post.
