Vegas, Gay Men and Me

This past weekend I was back in that haven in the middle of the desert, Sin City, and a zillion other names. That's right, I was back in fabulous Las Vegas (the fabulous is if you believe the Welcome sign as you drive into the city).

Middle of last week, I felt an extreme need to get the hell out of Los Angeles, and agreed to go with my friend David to Vegas for the weekend. We managed to find flights out of LA, but finding flights back in proved to be more difficult. Yet the need to be away was so great that we bought outbound tickets without having return tickets as well. It's just a 5 hour drive from Vegas to LA, so we thought worse case scenario, we'd rent a car and drive back on Sunday. Luckily, 2 seats opened up later that night. As much as I love a good car trip, 5 hours of driving through the desert doesn't really appeal to me when I just want to get home.

Anyway, we had grand plans for the weekend. And they involved 2 very very gay men.

Friday night we saw Barry Manilow in concert. Yes, the Barry Manilow. Funny story: I actually met Mr. Manilow around 6 years ago when I was working at a Holocaust museum in LA. He was our celebrity guest at the annual Youth Holocaust Commemoration. Didn't get much interaction with him, but damn if he didn't bring with him an entire entourage of people. I'm supposing to protect him from all those 5th and 6th graders. Anyway, his show was suprisingly entertaining. I knew far more of his songs than I had previously realized. (When we decided to see Manilow, I told David that I was going to sing "Copacabana" no matter what song Barry himself was singing, mostly since that is the only song of his I thought I vaguely knew). I found it odd that for the song "Mandy" Barry did a duet with a video image of him from the 70's, but who am I to judge? Throughout the concert, we were treated to a slew of horribly cheesy dirty jokes a la Manilow. I never knew Barry was so dirty. We were all given glowsticks to crack open during Copacabana and the entire theatre was full of raving geriatrics. Overall, I left shouting about how much I loved Barry and was now a "fanilow".
This feeling has since waned.

The other gay man we saw was Elton John, the gayest of them all.

EJ's show was in the same theatre where Celine Dion does her shtick most of the year. I've seen Celine and EJ's show couldn't have been more different. Celine's show was done by someone from Cirque de Soleil (which now has around 4 or 5 shows in Vegas). EJ's show was done by a guy who has directed a slew of music videos and commercials, and it showed. I must sy for a man who likes penis, there were an awful lot of naked female breasts in the videos that played at Elton sang. The breast highlight was during the song "The Bitch is Back": the video was Pam Anderson doing a pole dance wearing precious, precious little and from the top right hand corner of the same popped out two HUGE inflatable breasts. It was quite easily the largest rack I've ever seen. As for the show itself, he may be old, he may be short and fat and waddle across stage, but man oh man can Mr. John perform. The music as good if not better than the original recording and in an age when it is so accepted to lip synch, he belted out each song with extreme gusto. In person it is easy to see what an incredible virtuoso he is; like his music or not the man can play. Though David and I spent the better part of the pre-show waiting debating about what he would close with, EJ surprised probably most people and closed with "Your Song", a sweet and sentimental favorite that helped everyone leave feeling just that much better about the world.

With Siegfried and Roy out of it, Liberace dead and no more headlining Elvis impersonators, at this point all I have left to see to complete the "cheesy-show tour of Vegas" is Wayne Newton. I'll be the one singing "Danke Schone" through the entire show.