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Stories from a man who fails to meet media expectations of what it means to be gay:
white, frivolous, over sexed yet sexless, shrill, single, stylish, a clown, unimportant, et al.
lunes 01/26/2004
Vegas the trip, part two, or
�I�ll never look at hula hoops the same way again.�
This is pretty much everything I didn�t bother to write about in the last entry and finishes off my quick Vegas vacation�ette.
First random comment: I know that common consensus is that a ban on smoking would kill Las Vegas, but dang, dealing with all the smoke is pain. Breathing it all in is nasty and after a few minutes of walking through a casino, everything you wear ends up stinking to high heaven. Even though I over packed, I ended up wearing everything, since my plan of rewearing clothes was shot.
Humor under the rails: The second night of our trip, we had tickets for Rita Rudner. I�ve seen her act before, but I�ve never seen her standup routine before and was a bit curious. She�s performing at New York, New York in a smallish cabaret with poor seats, and which rumbles slightly every so often from the roller coaster that weaves through the building.
We got there somewhat early, eager for a chance to sit, relax, people watch, and stare at the decorative mirrors on the far walls sway slightly with each pass of a tourist filled coaster car. As the audience made their way in, most seemed to be in their forties, something which would have no doubt freaked out the hotel reviewer from the last entry who considered anyone over thirty-five a senior citizen. The poor boy would have probably run screaming out of the theater for fear that age was a contagious disease.
Aside from not being juvenile, there was also a somewhat strong dyke undercurrent to the audience. There lots of female couples and groups of women, as well as a couple of �questionable� men. It seems that Rita has a good sized queer following.
The show was good and she was funny, with most of the humor falling into �Vegas, what a city,� �men don�t get women,� and �marriage=hilarity� veins. As married jokes about shoe shopping, beauty regimes, and failing memory piled on, I laughed and tried to decide whether John or I were the stereotypical Man or Woman in each situation she described. Well, except for the joke about men leaving tiny amounts of juice at the bottom of pitchers/bottles so that they can legally avoid responsibility for dealing with refilling it/throwing it away. In that respect, we�re both �the man.�
While their humor is decidedly different, I realized that Rita Rudner and Margaret Cho do share some things in common. Mainly that they don�t treat their audiences like idiots. Not underestimating the intelligence of an audience is a rare talent these days. No wonder I like them both.
Second random comment: Despite going there for shows two nights in a row, there is something about the New York, New York casino that bugs me a bit. I�m not sure what though. The place is just as artificial as the rest of the strip, and oddly, I even sort of like the way it looks somewhat, so that is not my problem. It may simply be that it is too popular; both nights the place was packed, and I even when I�m not feeling somewhat ill, I am not exactly the most gregarious and social of creatures.
Despite my vaguely negative attitude towards the place, it was the only time that trip that I got cruised. I was sitting on some fake rocks, next to the fake bridge that spans the fake stream in the fake central park area, when I noticed a young man trying not to too obviously look at me. He was cute in a nerdy boy sort of way, and was there only for a few minutes before his college aged friends showed up and they all walked off. He only turned around quickly once before they disappeared into the crowd.
Vertigo: Our first night in Vegas involved vertigo, fish, and more bare and pasted breasts than I had ever seen before in my entire life. We had dinner at Mandalay bay and finding ourselves with time to kill before the 10:30 Zumanity show, we blew away some money on not gambling, but on the Shark Reef aquarium thing at the faaaaar, waaaay back end of the building. Sharks in the middle of a dessert�yeah, weird.
The place was good for what it was, if way overpriced, and even if I never did manage to get my �complimentary� walking tour audio wand thingie to work correctly. They were pushing some hammerhead sharks as the main attraction and reason to go, although there are other rare animals such as some golden crocodiles. They were interesting, but it should also be kept in mind that I also thought the full sized gourami were interesting as well.
I forgot that I do not deal well with underwater glass tunnels and this place had two of them. Even now, I could probably give myself a headache and nausea by merely remembering the sensation of standing next to the curved wall of the tunnel and looking down. Ugh.
The aquarium is hampered with an ancient temple collapsing into the sea decorative theme. While amusing to a certain extent and allowing the designers of the place to stick pseudo-crumbling columns and statues into the enclosures, the folks in charge unfortunately went overboard with it. To simulate a tropical feel, mist is pumped into some sections of the path. At one spot there was so much mist you could barely see anything other than the sopping wet floors beneath your feet and a big �warning wet floor� sign.
Even if I had been in the mood, it would have been hard to play along with them with that wet floor sign. I don�t think that presumably law suit preventing warning signs are that common in actual generic Asian temples in the process of collapsing into the coral reef which somehow exists beneath the jungle.
Third random comment: While walking through the cactus garden at the Ethyl M. Chocolate factory (one of the few free things in the city), I saw a woman reach out to touch a Teddy Bear Cholla. I almost yelled out a warning, but her husband stopped her, suggesting that stroking the thing was probably not a good idea. She looked at him with a �whatever� expression and put her hand down, but he was correct, it�s never a good idea to touch cactus covered in so many tiny spines that it looks fuzzy and soft.
Nipples for days: After wet fake temples, we went to NYNY, for the late showing of Zumanity. It�s certainly an interesting show where it makes perfect sense for the gift shop to sell lingerie, edible chocolate sex games, and feather boas. I did not buy a feather boa, not so much because it was extremely unlikely I would ever wear it, but because it was $65 and I�m cheap.
The official website seems to be pretending that there was a plot and point to the show, but if there was, it wasn�t evident that night. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, since I went into it only expecting a �sexy,� barely clothed, Cirque du Soleil version of a Vegas cabaret act, and that was all I saw.
It was mostly good, if somewhat uneven. While a couple of acts were not too interesting to me, cirque shows always have something else to look at onstage, in this case that meant while a wild looking man and woman did a caged wrestling/sexual predatory/dance/chasing each other thing, I waited for the act to end while studying the two bare chested men doing hand stands off the sides of the cage.
Better acts were a woman dressed in an over the top slutty Catholic school girl outfit doing impressive things with hula hoops; two women slipping, sliding, and convorting in a large glass bowl (the two men writhing underneath the bowl as water splashed on them weren�t too bad either); and a swinging around on draperies act with a small person and his lover flying over the audience (despite the possibility for hoky gimmick, they were actually the most romantic of the acts).
The show could stand some editing, but over all it was a good, filled with the usual expected cirque trademark gimmicks of good music (in English!), preshow audience interaction, and wild costume concepts, only more �adult� and a lot more bare (which given the costumes for their family friendly shows, says quite a lot).
When checking for possible links to use for the entry (none of which I ended up bothering to use) I found a couple of leave a comment/review sites. I was surprised by the comments for Zumanity. While I enjoyed the show, and while everyone I know in the �real world� had fun with it, the majority of people making an effort to leave comments hated it. Actually that�s an understatement, they LOATHED it at a nearly 4/5 ratio.
Quite a large number of the comments started off with the words �I�m not a prude, but�� It�s never a good thing when a review of a show selling itself as a sensuous and provocative erotic adventure starts off with the writer declaring that they are not a prude. Other common phrases were:
�Just because I am from the Midwest��
�Just because I am an American��
�The people sitting next to me who applauded at everything must have been plants.�
�Those were some of the ugliest women I�ve seen on stage!�
�Go see a topless review instead, it�s cheaper and the women better looking.�
�I�m not prejudiced but��
�Watching two men kiss for 25 seconds on stage is NOT entertainment!�
Common words used were: ugly, vile, upsetting, crude, perverted, waste of money, and disgusting.
I don�t think that these people saw the same show that I did, in some cases literally. Two acts that garnered the most hate were a S&M act (cumulating with a woman engaging in simulated autoerotic asphyxiation?), and two men dancing a tango then kissing (or as one woman put it �a black and a white man throwing each other brutally around the stage then making out for several minutes,� making me think that she�s never seen a tango before).
Neither act played that night. I�m not sure if this was due to act rotations or some other more permanent reason. While I don�t mind not having seen a woman �torture and strangle herself,� I think I would have liked to see the tango act.
The strong negative reactions at the sites surprised me because what exactly were these people thinking they were going to see in a show that promotes itself as pushing the envelope of eroticism? After some thought, and a couple of conversations about these reviews with some friends, I realize that I should not have found the negative reaction unusual. They are interesting to a certain extent, but no, probably not surprising.
The comments about being from the Midwest and American were almost amusing because one of the defenders of the show mentioned Americans possibly not liking the show because of our repressed attitudes towards sex. That started off a long and rather defensive thread to the site, where many people felt it necessary to defend American morality.
I found it telling that several of these real American men made a point of questioning whether the other audience members who were enjoying themselves were real or fake. The shear arrogance of the unacknowledged attitude that a differing opinion is not only invalid, but probably artificial as well is amazing.
The insistence that the female cast members were all ugly was very strange, since as far as I was concerned, the women all were largely attractive. I�m now wondering if there is a connection between this ugliness viewpoint and a conversation I had with a friend where she mentioned that it was novel looking at a Vegas stage and not seeing huge silicon breasts everywhere. She was delighted in seeing athletic looking and normal sized women. Her opinion was apparently not shared.
There is probably a connection between these �the female cast was ugly� statements and two women several people made a point of specifically criticizing: two large, buxom sisters who served as background characters and as preshow entertainers, hand serving patrons strawberries while acting all french maid sexy. I thought they were cool, and wished they had a larger role in the show. I was dismayed to read comments calling them �fat and ugly,� and part of the overall �ugliness of the show.�
The few people who left positive comments spent a lot of time discussing body image and mentioning that even nonsupermodels can be beautiful and sensual.
I could go on at length about the implications of a majority of commenters hating a male dance act solely because they were men (no one discussed their dancing abilities, merely that watching them was gross), but just mentioning that more than one of the negative reviews used the words �homosexual agenda� is explanation enough.
Despite the overall negativity, some of the comments were mildly amusing. One made me chuckle, where a woman referred to the horridness of having a dancer dressed as the devil named Jesus. Considering that in Latino culture, Jesus is a perfectly acceptable name (and having met more than a few drug using, gang banger, unwed fathers with that name), it didn�t even occur to me until after the show that this was probably done purposely to provoke a reaction. Anyway, Jesus was actually one of the more interesting characters on stage, and wasn�t dressed as the devil, but was actually a satyr, aggressive and lonely in his exaggerated maleness. Which I guess might as well be the devil depending on your religious beliefs.
While that made me chuckle, the comment which made me laugh out loud was someone praising the show mentioning that he had agreed with an earlier comment that the show was a cross between Cabaret and Rocky Horror, until he realized that the first comment was actually meant as an insult.
I�d go on, but I am suddenly finding myself depressed.
More later,
nico
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