A 700 lb Elvis, John Waters, and the amusement of the Gods.

[Zeno]

I saw a 700 lb Elvis at the Barbary Coast Casino. He sings mid-afternoon on weekdays. He sits most often and leans way back in his concrete reinforced chair with the entire microphone stand leaning against his immense belly and wails out Elvis standards. His singing voice is actually quite good and the imitations of the songs are fairly decent. But the largeness of his frame and the super tackiness of his overblown Elvis costume, strips the performance down to a tawdry farce. Not without humor though. He announced that his next song would be “a whole lot of shaking goin on”. I thought to myself, I hope he stays in that chair to sing it, but no; I was not so lucky. He stood up (I did not think he could really manage it) and I was almost paralyzed with “shock and awe” as he tried to move and shake while he sang.

It would have been a perfect scene for a John Waters film. Maybe it was a John Waters film or maybe it was all a dream. I wish it were. But maybe that is all Las Vegas really is: A tawdry farce of a John Waters film, played out for the amusement of the Gods.

The above little blurb is just one of the many souvenirs from my recent Las Vegas excursion. I have a heap of them in my memory, and 15 bottles of tequila could not purge them out. I leave it to my reader to decide the significance of that last statement.


-Zeno

[John Cole]

Zeno,

Sixteen may be just the ticket, though.

John

[Ray Zee]

theres proof you need to get a life. you go to vegas and watch that. and how do you know he isnt the real elvis.
he would be that weight by now and have lost his voice. maybe you saw the real thing.

[Zeno]

Ray, People watching is half the fun of going to Vegas. This was a free show of course, and I saw it by happenstance after a 3-hour session of wang-dang-doodle poker at the Mirage (I won, of course /images/graemlins/grin.gif). I was scooting back to my room for a late afternoon nap. /images/graemlins/smirk.gif

As a add-on bonus story- My friends and I were at Caesar’s Place on Saturday afternoon tossing large sums of money down the toilet betting on horses and dogs. We were drinking margaritas and smoking large cigars. We must have looked impressive because a ticket scalper came up and asked if we wanted to see the fight (Mosley/Hoya). Seems like those $800 tickets we could have purchased months ago were now worth in the thousands. Indeed, $5,000 for two tickets if I heard the man right. Or maybe that was for one ticket, but it did not matter, as we were not interested. Apparently some Casino bigwigs had promised high rollers tickets and came out short and were buying up from the scalpers thus driving up the price. Or maybe it was all just a dream. Anyway, we could have got in early and made a killing, or seen the damn fight.

The scalper ambled away and I got down to the important task of whether to do a $2 box quinella on greyhounds #1, 2, 3, or a $2 win bet on greyhound #1. I made the wrong bet; the quinella bet would have netted me about $50. I got another margarita to lube up my betting skills and ended up losing only $10. We are quite the high rollers you know.

By the way, Caesar’s Place sports book has been whittled down to about half its original size and is just a shadow of what it once was. Some Bigwig Casino Executive must have freaked at floor space that was not wall-to-wall machines.

-Zeno

PS I think it was the real Elvis too!