Viva Las Vegas?
Las Vegas is supposed to be the ultimate cowboy Saturday night in town. Going through the McCarran Airport in Las Vegas last week, three old cowboys sat down across from me. They were bizarrely, incredibly handsome in their white shirts and blue jeans and they were there to make money running racehorses. They were having the greatest conversation about stud horses and blood lines and a kid they knew who was making money hand over fist right out of high school buying and selling calves and riding around in trucks. I fell in love right then and there. They were old Las Vegas.
I needed to go to the restroom pretty desperately but I couldn’t bring myself to leave them I was so happy to listen. I had just finished two hours flying from Austin next to this really boring lady with this awful moony-eyed kid and I was crazy-starved for someone with a sense of humor. She shared with me the news of their earlier trip this summer to Cozumel; how her husband worked seven 12-hour shifts as a hospital lab tech and how that meant he could take off whenever he wanted; how they’d forgotten the charger for the video camera.
She sat packed in that little teeny seat and I had to get her daughter to write me a list of everything in her suitcase just so she would quit jumping around. Seven brand new pairs of flip-flops--with matching Capri’s and t-shirts. Seven pairs of pj’s! They had been waiting all day to eat because they were going right to a buffet when they got to the Excalibur, the hotel with the jousting knight show. She told me how great Las Vegas was because they had all these things for kids and how a new hotel went up there every week and an old one came down.
Man, what happened? When did the tough rodeo clowns leave town and get replaced by a bunch of rug-rats.
I remember my dad going to Las Vegas when I was little and at the time I was under the impression they actually had signs at the city limits forbidding children to come in. I have pictures of my parents with lampshades on their heads, which we kids considered to be the top of the drunken wit ladder. I think these photos were from a cruise to Mexico, but at the time I thought they were from Las Vegas and that was how people dressed in that den of sin. We thought he was pretty glamorous; I thought he was pretty brave to go somewhere where they didn’t allow kids.
I must be getting old because I can’t stand the new Las Vegas. It’s like giving your kids little bites of heroin so they’ll be ready to be full-fledged dope dealers when they grow up. It’s cheap and it’s trashy and they keep all those lights on taking people’s money.
In the old days, Las Vegas was a town where you didn’t fool yourself. You took your sin straight up, like a man, and you didn’t take you kids in their matching flip-flops.
I needed to go to the restroom pretty desperately but I couldn’t bring myself to leave them I was so happy to listen. I had just finished two hours flying from Austin next to this really boring lady with this awful moony-eyed kid and I was crazy-starved for someone with a sense of humor. She shared with me the news of their earlier trip this summer to Cozumel; how her husband worked seven 12-hour shifts as a hospital lab tech and how that meant he could take off whenever he wanted; how they’d forgotten the charger for the video camera.
She sat packed in that little teeny seat and I had to get her daughter to write me a list of everything in her suitcase just so she would quit jumping around. Seven brand new pairs of flip-flops--with matching Capri’s and t-shirts. Seven pairs of pj’s! They had been waiting all day to eat because they were going right to a buffet when they got to the Excalibur, the hotel with the jousting knight show. She told me how great Las Vegas was because they had all these things for kids and how a new hotel went up there every week and an old one came down.
Man, what happened? When did the tough rodeo clowns leave town and get replaced by a bunch of rug-rats.
I remember my dad going to Las Vegas when I was little and at the time I was under the impression they actually had signs at the city limits forbidding children to come in. I have pictures of my parents with lampshades on their heads, which we kids considered to be the top of the drunken wit ladder. I think these photos were from a cruise to Mexico, but at the time I thought they were from Las Vegas and that was how people dressed in that den of sin. We thought he was pretty glamorous; I thought he was pretty brave to go somewhere where they didn’t allow kids.
I must be getting old because I can’t stand the new Las Vegas. It’s like giving your kids little bites of heroin so they’ll be ready to be full-fledged dope dealers when they grow up. It’s cheap and it’s trashy and they keep all those lights on taking people’s money.
In the old days, Las Vegas was a town where you didn’t fool yourself. You took your sin straight up, like a man, and you didn’t take you kids in their matching flip-flops.
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