Las Farce

I found the following scribbled on a Venetian notepad in my camera bag. This is from last year’s Terri Clark : The Long Way Home Tour, and was written the night we were in Las Vegas:

First impressions about Vegas – street level. Downtown, at least, is extremely clean, though I imagine this is due to no small effort by the Las Vegas PD. Everything also seems very fake. Perhaps the fact that I know I’m surrounded by desert on four sides contributes to this feeling. None of what is here could really exist without a massive amount of importation – water, electricity, food – very little here is taken from the surrounding environment.

There are lots of pretty things to see, but the level of…trickery, I guess – makes the whole experience of seeing anything feel like a giant deception. It reminds me of Orange County CA, but with more lights and casinos and smoking. (Oh god, the smoking. It’s enough to drive me to an NBC suit.) I feel like at any second the entire facade of glitz and statues and neon could fall away and suddenly we’d see behind the curtain to a land of antiseptic steel and men in white coats making everything around here work, like when Dorothy met the Wizard in Oz.

Shame that for all the neon and lights and trickery all I get for my show is 120k of PARs and 4 ACL bars. 😛

Off to Blue Man. Then back to the hotel. I want to go home. I miss Mosaic and Mike and Kendall and Matt and Julia and Eva and 21st Ave Starbucks and the ER at Vanderbilt and being around normal human beings.

Exit, stage left.
Sparks