The Las Vegas Strip—formally known as Las Vegas Boulevard South—is unbelievably hot under the midday sun: 105 degrees, declares one sign. It’s also unbelievably cheesy, even to this Miami- and Los Angeles-loving eye.
“It’s so ugly!” I blurt as the bus wends its way from McCarran International Airport to downtown Las Vegas via the Strip, giving me my first sight of the fabled thoroughfare. I’m shocked—shocked!—at its shoddiness.
Here’s Paris, for instance—the hotel—signified by a 50-foot plastic hot-air balloon and a half-size reproduction of the Eiffel Tower. The real Eiffel Tower, standing 1,063 feet tall on its lonely eminence between the Champs de Mars and the Seine, overwhelms the visitor with its grandeur; this one, at 540 feet about the same height as the towers of the hotel itself, and its neighbors, looks shriveled and pathetic. Once in Paris the city, I bought a ball-point pen as a souvenir for one of my children. A tiny tower floated in the barrel, and when you clicked the pen, it played a digital version of “The Marseillaise.”
This is tackier.
Many people, judging by my above-admitted affection for Miami Beach and Los Angeles, have concluded I have a bottomless toleration for tackiness. I’ve loved the bright lights of Times Square all my life, although I preferred the old mix of vice-and-neon Great White Way to today’s Disneyfied 42nd Street. (I’m not knocking Disney, either, in its place. Taken to Disney World last year for the first and so far only time, I thought it was swell and loved the animatronics.)
The Strip is tackier. It seems to exceed even my acceptance of the tasteless.
Yet within 24 hours, my eye acclimates. I stop judging Las Vegas and start being there. No longer an inaccurate and inexpressibly vulgar rendition of my home town’s skyline, New York, New York becomes just the New York-themed hotel on the Strip. My body is less accommodating, however, and the heat actually makes me a little sick on the second day. But then I learn how to cope with it: Lots of (uncaffienated) fluids, wear a hat, and make up your mind early whether you’re spending the day on the Strip or Downtown.
The first two rules are standard for hot climates worldwide, but the last is just for the carless in Vegas. My traveling companion and I, you see, don’t drive. We’re depending on Las Vegas’ mass transit, such as it is, and, born and bred New Yorkers that we are, we’re in Sin City for a day and a half before we truly get how inadequate that is. We finally understand after we walk a mile under the broiling sun to the nearest bus stop and then wait, under that same sun, for forty minutes for a bus.
So let’s see: It’s really hot. It’s really tacky. I forgot to say, we go to see Elton John, and he’s awful. I’m never coming back, right?
Wrong. I’ll be back. In the end, I liked it. I like parties, and Las Vegas is one, at least for the people who are betting with their heads, not over them.
There’s the rub, of course. Your real hosts in Las Vegas, the folks who are paying for the party, are the ones who are betting way over their heads. They’re the ones who sit for hours at the slot machines, winning two or three or a thousand dollars once every so often, and putting in two or three hundred or five thousand. They’re the ones who generate the profits that put everything but the kitchen sink on the Strip: Paris’ Eiffel Tower, New York New York’s Statue of Liberty, the grand Bellagio fountains and the Venetian’s Grand Canal—everything but the kitchen sink and decent public transportation.
©2008 by Judith Mahoney Pasternak
