Living Las Vegas

Real Life in the Shadow of the Strip

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Top Vegas Hotels: Bellagio, Luxor, Rio

Roads from the Ashes: An Odyssey in Real Life on the Virtual Frontier, by Megan Edwards

New Dazzle on Fremont Street

I’ve never known Fremont Street without its “Experience.” The canopy has shaded three blocks of Fremont for nearly ten years, and I’ve lived here less than five.
“Oh, it was different before,” old-timers have told me. “Grittier, dustier. We miss it.”
I can’t miss what I’ve never known, but I can easily imagine grittier and dustier. For [...]

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Lovely Rita

The chair I’m sitting in reminds me of Sunday school—it’s the stackable kind with a straight back and a Naugahyde seat. The room is dark, and a disembodied male voice is instructing me and the other 200 people sitting on Sunday school chairs to make sure our cell phones are turned off. Then the lights come up on the bare stage in front of us, and a woman walks out from a wing. She starts talking…

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Battle of the Book Events

Alzheimer’s disease and wife swapping. They don’t ordinarily come up in the same conversation, but this is Las Vegas, a city known for juxtapositions that don’t exist in nature. We’ve got penguins and flamingos living side by side at the Flamingo, for example, and the Sphinx is only a stone’s throw from Grant’s Tomb. Last [...]

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Something Even More Spectacular: The Liberace “Play-A-Like” Contest

If it’s understatement you’re after, don’t go to the Liberace Museum. If you admire self-effacing modesty, stay away. Are you a person of quiet tastes? Be warned. The strip mall at the corner of Tropicana and Spencer will assault your tender sensibilities.
And don’t expect any apologies, either. Liberace was the guy who coined the phrases, [...]

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Spirit of the King

Elvis impersonation has been around long enough to show obvious signs of its own idiosyncratic evolution. You no longer hire an Elvis without first deciding whether you want the young Elvis of Ed Sullivan fame or the mature Elvis in white jumpsuit. Just the other day, I saw one of these senior Elvi (oh, and [...]

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