If Vegas could be summed up in one scene, it was the one in the airport terminal while I was waiting for my flight back to Reality.  I was facing the window, looking out at the planes and mountains.  On the floor to my immediate right was a guy napping.  On the floor to my immediate left was a guy sprawled out and also sleeping away the debauchery.  One of the guys had a wife with an annoying Fran Drescher-like voice who was commiserating to her mom on her cellphone how many thousands they lost. 

There is such a difference in the faces of the incoming versus outgoing crowds.  You come into town yelling “Vegas, baby, Vegas!” and slink out of town hungover, battered, bruised, tainted, and morally compromised.  And those are the lucky ones.

And if you ask those who were put their minds and bodies through the meatgrinder if they would do it again, 90 percent of those people would say “hell yes!”  We’re an odd group of people – the human race, that is.

**********

It’s amazing to see “old versus new” in that town.  Casinos that are barely a decade old are almost entirely outdated now.  Some that are tenacious and refuse to update themselves after decades on the strip have a curious charm in and of themselves.  They’re casinos that belong in the old downtown area but are smack dab in the middle of the glitzy strip where the big money resides on either side of them (not like they’re hurting for money either though).

One of these places was a casino I didn’t go to my on my first trip 2 years ago – the Imperial Palace.  It’s got the old Vegas sleaze to it.  Their “hook” is they have Dealertainers who are dressed up as celebrities.  Joan Jett and the Blues Brothers and Marilyn Monroe were some of the dealers working the shift at the time we walked through.  But most shocking was the Little Richard impersonator.  It wasn’t shocking to see the skinny version of him or even the fact he was yawning every minute.  It was the fact that HE WAS IN BLACKFACE!!!!  Even for a place like Vegas where everything goes, I was slackjawed that they even attempted to pull that off.  You could see the black people in the casino just staring with a “You have got to be goddamned kidding me!” look on their face.  What made it even “better” was that this impersonator didn’t paint his hands so it was simply a blackface head with whitey’s hands.

Even for Las Vegas, this one was a headshaker.