Friends and relatives who blow into town are surprised that Paulita and I haven't seen many of the shows in Vegas that people from all over the world fly into McCarran airport to see. I tell them that we Vegans are usually not in a vacation mindset when we are in Vegas. The dry cleaning, the kid to be picked up from school, the grocery shopping, the trips to Blockbuster - all these are the more pressing business that we have to do. Seeing shows like Love, The Jersey Boys, Celine Dion, etc. have not been our priorities.
For me and Paulita, however, the biggest reason probably has been that we spent many years in New York and were spoiled by Broadway. We came to Vegas in 2007 thinking that the Vegas shows were somehow inferior to the Broadway originals. It was only recently that we realized that Vegas shows are on par with Broadway's and that Vegas entertainment offers greater variety.
The last Broadway show I've seen was the Phantom of the Opera. I saw it with my wife and my mom, who was visiting New York at the time, at the Paramount Theater. My sister-in-law, Imelda, who had bought the tickets for us, said that they were good tickets, but when we three got to the theater, we found ourselves sitting at the second-to-the last row in nosebleed section.
I remember my knees going marshmallow soft just from my looking down at the stage. If the Paramount theater had not been carved out of the interior of the high-rise office building in New York, our seats would have been on the sixth floor. That was how high our seats were.
I always carried xanax in those days because I had some medical issues and panicked whenever I felt an onset of the symptoms. So I took one xanax pill which managed to calm me down but it made me a little woozy.
At the intermission, my mom asked: "Where's the hunchback?" I burst out laughing and immediately forgot about my vertigo.
"Mom," I said, "this is Phantom of the Opera, not the Hunchback of Notre Dame."
My mom was very appreciative of her Broadway treat, of course, because she had seen so few Broadway shows in her life. But being so far away from the stage, maybe Mom could not hear much of the dialogue. It was clear to me, however, that she was having a hard time fitting the action and the setting into what she thought she was watching. She obviously thought that the heroine in Phantom, Christine, was actually La Esmeralda in Hunchback.
A relative of ours, whom I would not name to protect her mother's reputation, took her mother to a Miss Saigon Broadway performance when the star of the show was still Lea Salonga. As we all know, Miss Saigon is about a prostitute in Vietnam who falls in love with an American serviceman. Many of the characters in the play are scantily-clad Vietnamese prostitutes and the full regalia of their wares are on display onstage.
Seeing the scantily-clad women on stage, our relative's mother - who was sitting in the third row and had a close-up view of the actors - kept uttering in obvious disapproval, Hmmm! Hmmm! (pronounced Hoom, Hoom). The actors - mostly Filipinas - were looking at the woman and were clearly wondering, what's wrong with that old woman.
The relative of ours said she swore that she would never take her mother to a Broadway show again. And if anybody paid her to bring her mother to the show, she would put her in the nosebleed section.
Last Father's Day, Paulita and I took our son Paul to the Barnum and Bailey Circus show in the Orleans Arena in Vegas. I had no idea that circus shows had evolved. Barnum and Bailey is not your traditional circus show. It is now a spectacular that even adults find entertaining.
A man goes into a cage, the crew puts a blanket over the cage, the cage is spun around, and when the blanket over the cage is removed, the man is gone and there is a Siberian Tiger in it. Where did the guy go and where did the Tiger come from?
They can make people disappear and reappear in the rafters within seconds.
My wife and I bought a sword for Paul that Paul asked one of the clowns, Surly Muscles (Sean Davis), to autograph. Later Paul asked us if Surly Muscles was famous.
"Yes, Surly Muscles is famous," I assured Paul.
"As famous as Tiger Woods?" he asked.
