Have a Blue Christmas, in Las Vegas Part I

That’s right. My Christmas this year was mostly spent wandering the Las Vegas strip like a stray dog. I was there for 4 days, which is an incredible amount of time to be in Vegas. Despite being mildly depressed, I made the most of the trip. The second night I was there I walked all the way from the Flamingo to downtown to the Fremont Street Experience (a very looong walk.)  Along the way I passed a zillion little wedding chapels, one of them which had a sign that said “Michael Jordan and Joan Collins were married here,”(presumably not to one another.)

Fremont Street has come a long way since the 1971 car chase scene in the movie Diamonds Are Forever. They have an incredible light show on the ceiling of the entire walk which even sometimes features 60’s psychedelic jams like the coincidentally appropriate song by The Zombies, “She’s Not There.”  I took a video of it on my phone, but this one on youtube is better:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3rrSBD7bpk]

They had a stage set up with a band called “Candy and the Canes” playing covers of popular Christmas songs like “Last Christmas, I gave you my heart…etc.” A couple of the girls in the band were pretty attractive, from a distance at least.

Back on the strip, they had a lovely ice skating rink outside The Venetian. There’s never a girl around to go ice skating with when you need one.

The highlight of my trip was Christmas Eve morning in my hotel room, as there were 4 episodes of Married With Children on in a row. When I was a kid I used to identify more with Bud, but now that i am older I relate much more to Al or the family dog, Buck.

I have a strange story about my flight back, after everyone boards the plane and we are on the runway two seconds away from taking off, the pilot gets on the intercom and says “I’m sorry , but we have to head back to the gate. There is a passenger on board that is a potential security risk.” So we get back to the gate, and security removes this shifty Pakistani looking dude wearing a hoodie from the airplane. I’m not sure if he was actually up to anything and nobody had really noticed him, but he had the creepiest look in his eyes and a shit eating “joker” grin on his face. They took him away and we never saw him again. My guess is he is either being waterboarded right now, or getting ready to cash in on a racial profiling lawsuit. It was slightly terrifying. I was glad to make it home.