Introverting in Vegas

I dislike many things, including: crowds, loud noises, un-leavable situations, and being tired. Las Vegas is full of these things; heck, it is the Platonic Ideal Form of these things. And yet while in Vegas, I found myself strangely and unexpectedly having a blast.

I and a friend (let's call them[1] E– ) poodled our way there a while back, for to see a couple of the permanent Cirque shows, Kà[2] and O. They were amazing, almost rapturous.The music reverberated in your chest, shades of light told evocative stories, the heat of the flames toasted your face, and cool lights with dripping hoses made you feel like a mermaid or a shark. Cirque is everything I love: performance, story, acrobatics, music, near-miraculous technical feats, humor, beauty – soul-immersing and sense-saturating art.  I expected to delight in them.

What I did not expect to delight in was the rest of the Vegas experience.

And sure, maybe had we been there for longer – we stayed only two nights (I’m tellin’ ya straight, the only reason E— and I ever even considered Vegas is because we are both theater tech junkies to the bone, and it’s the only place in the entire world you can see those Cirque shows) – I would have burnt out, freaked out, peaced out. But for two days, Vegas was glorious. Mostly, it was gloriously itself.

Completely unintentional, but isn't it great that the sunlight is only hitting the flames on the torch?
Also, roller coaster in the background, because why not?

To say that Vegas is “itself” might seem weird, at first. After all, it’s the home of many replicated famous things: Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower, Brooklyn Bridge, Elvis, Roman columns, animatronic Neptune, castles: the list is endless. Nevertheless, despite its replications, Las Vegas is its own outrageous whole, greater than the sum of its redundant parts.

It is a brash and over-the-top place, to be sure. There are acres of casinos (not even an exaggeration; the MGM alone has nearly 4 acres), miles of walkways and stairs, buildings that take up whole blocks. The MGM, where E—and I stayed, is the second largest hotel in the world, with more than 6,000 rooms[3]. Is it also lit up bright green at night with a giant gold lion out front, real subtle-like.

Shiny

The Strip is deceptively long; from our 8^th floor room, the sign for the Bellagio looked close. This was false. It was, in fact, almost a half an hour walk, once you included getting out of the MGM (not a calculation that comes up anywhere but Las Vegas, where the hotels are the size of small estates), down the strip, and back to the Bellagio, which is set away from the street by a massive set of stairs and two long moving walkways, and into the O theater.

A very, very long hallway

Which is all to say, Vegas has much much-ness. If you can paint realistic sky inside, do it. If you can put one restaurant in a hotel, why not twenty? If one television is good, a whole wall of them sounds like an excellent idea. Why buy only one “Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas” tchotchke when there are shotglasses, shirts, sunglasses, dice, purses, mirrors, and pens? As an introvert who dislikes too much stimulation, I thought this would horrify me. It didn't.

I like stuff (people, places, books) to be what it is (...er, are?). Facades – watching people or places struggle to be what they’re not – are exhausting and disheartening. Illusions will be shattered quickly enough; there are already enough dreams deferred, parades rained on,  hopes destroyed without adding pitiful self-delusion to the midst. As a person who gets tired of trying to understand what people actually mean instead of what they say, I love that Vegas isn’t putting up a front, shellacking itself with a veneer of cosmopolitanacity[4]. I expected Vegas to be trying for suave and sophisticated and to be failing miserably. 

Instead, Vegas embraces and loves itself, pop-up wedding chapels and all.

Never change

xo, 

Devo

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[1] Yes, yes; I'm using them  in the singular; those who care about such things feel free to have a snit. We all have those little things that annoy us. But I do present the following as evidence, for those who are swayed by things like the Oxford English Dictionary, which I imagine you might be if you’re bothered by singular-them in the first place: “They: In anaphoric reference to a singular noun or pronoun of undetermined gender: he or she.” Note it doesn't say "colloquial" or "slang."

[2] Yes, the one where a performer died. But everything was running smoothly during our stay.

[3] All according to Wikipedia, the source of ultimate truth.

[4] What? The –ness noun-maker gets overused. And besides, -acity is reminiscent of “tenacity,” which is a great word.