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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gauguin who wrote (49549)	4/24/2000 2:10:00 PM
From: Rambi	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

The Spectral Sequence of Stars- if it isn't already the title of something, it should be. If I wrote poetry I would use it for my first volume. I thought of you a lot in Las Vegas because I remember you like it there. ANd now I am wondering why? It was the oddest place, I thought. Easter weekend is a very busy weekend apparently, and perhaps it isn't always that crowded. We ventured out each day, and after an hour Ammo and I were both whining and wanting to go back to the room. It was like New York without the sense of purpose. Sort of an unwashed whore in expensive clothes. WORST SCENE: One of the casinos- three small bored children sitting right on the edge of the casino floor- staying legal, I guess- watching their parents play a slot machine a few feet away. Ammo was incensed. "How can they DO THAT to their children!" He wanted to report them to somebody, anybody. I said they probably had bribed the kids with a trip to the wave pool or a movie. But what were all those people thinking? Why would you bring small children and toddlers in strollers to a place like that? Especially if you wanted to sit in a casino and gamble. Well, maybe they weren't there that long-- although the kids looked sort of glazed. Second worst: the expressions on the faces of the people in the casinos. Robotic. Expressionless. Isolated. Just the automatic feeding a tokens into slots- over and over. EVen when they win, the expression stays the same..they just keep putting the coins in, never missing a beat. Now-- the hotels themselves are a sight! They are definitely worth seeing at least once. We ate at the Luxor for lunch-- it was amazing. I kept expecting Yul Brynner to stride through with a whip. Or maybe Charlton Heston to sweep into the casino and throw the stone tablets into the midst of the crap tables. Eerything is oversized and overdone, and lots of fun. We stayed at the Mandalay Bay, (where the concert was) and it is VERY nice. We were picked up at the airport by a limo, which I always think is a hoot; I had to keep punching AMmo who was all excited about it and reminding him that it was very uncool to act as it he wasn't ALWAYS transported from place to place by an absurdly long car and a driver in a tux. the dinner Saturday night was awesome. I heard that the ambassador to- or maybe from?- China was there, and Julie Margulis and Jenny Jones. And lots of top LV execs, but none of them was at our table. Hmph. My old dress was perfectly fine, as it was black, and almost everyone had on black, so it all blended together. We looked like a giant shroud. I have such a mixed reaciton to this stuff-- there's a part of me that is moved almost to tears by the beauty that someone creates, the details, the perfection, all for a brief and completely transient moment-and then another part of me screaming- THIS IS TERRIBLE! THIS IS DECADENT! I felt like Marie Antoinette saying let them eat cake, even thought she really didn't say it. I'm embarrassed to be a part of it. Except that we're not, really, nor are probably most of the people there. We hardly live like that on a daily basis. So I wish I could relax a little more, and not feel so apologetic for being there. When you entered the huge ballroom, you walked under a sort of white flowing canopy; the path was strewn with thousands of rose petals and at the end of the entrance was a giant cake model of the Mandalay (this was their first anniversary celebration weekend)that I thought was one of those detailed architect's models and was told by someone no it was a cake. The tables were all done in black and white-- absolutely breathtaking-- a skirt of black, overlaid with another of sheer white dotted swiss (the dots were black), the chairs draped in black with white ties, a huge silver urn (about 3 feet tall) centerpiece filled with roses. At each place a menu with one perfect rose petal placed on the napkin. There were small tiered fountains around the room and each pool was filled with the most fragrant gardenias. At the end of the room, was a stage backlit in blue with Grecian columns and a string orchestra playing famous arias from operas. The chardonnay was excellent- definitely not from a box- and the people at our table were delightful and we talked a lot, so by the time we got to the champagne toast (Taittinger)and the dessert, which I vaguely remember being a chocolate lattice thingy filled with moussy stuff, my ability to remember details was slightly impaired. The waiters all wore white gloves, which was just the epitome of elegance to me. We had a lobster salad appeitizer with crab legs. And then a sorbet-- tomato, basil-- served on a block of ice with an eighth note imprinted in it- and in the note was the little blob of sorbet!! We all sat there staring at it and oohing and ahhing. When no one moved, I finally said, "Ok-- but does anyone know how to eat it?" No one did. We figured out you weren't supposed to eat the ice. Then we agreed to use one of the 40 spoons in our placesetting for the sorbet. All these people in black tux and formal long dresses and we didn't know how to eat our food. My mother would have been so mad that I didn't know which spoon to use. She used to make me memorize Amy Vanderbilt's diagrams of table settings. The concert- well- what can you say about hearing Carreras, Domingo and Pavarotti all in one evening. We had wonderful seats, and Pavarotti sang nessun dorma and I cried. It was a wonderful evening.