The moment I stepped off the plane, it hit
me: Loud music, glitz and grit, scantily-clad women sidestepping college
students in skinny jeans and dirty shirts. The smell of money, car exhaust, and spilled cocktails. It was a hundred degrees out, the sun
was relentless, and the neon signs cast tawdry light over the casinos and cars
and malls and people from all walks of life, from the drunk and disillusioned
to the men with dollar signs in their eyes.
Welcome to Las Vegas.
Our cab driver—a stubby man who was no more
than thirty—looked at us sideways and told us, straight away, that he wouldn’t
be talking on the ride to our hotel because he didn’t “like people.”
Did I tell you we were in Vegas?
Our hotel was a gargantuan golden structure
that brought to mind the James Bond classic, Dr. No, in which the protagonist is painted in solid gold and
ultimately dies of suffocation.
Gold was everywhere, but it failed to sparkle much in me besides terror:
it rendered the place surreal and frightening. I thought I might faint. I thought I, too, might die from asphyxia.
This isn’t news: Las Vegas is contrived. It’s an adult’s playground that’s filled
with temptation. Parts of it are
opulent and beautiful; other parts are seamy and unkind. It’s filled with
smoke. It’s at once great fun,
and, depending on the season and the time of day, either mildly or wildly
offensive, even dangerous. As my girlfriends
and I rode the elevator up to our room, a large part of me shifted (and not
just my body as I avoided the couple in the elevator with us—a middle-aged men
with a chin that reached his chest and his wife, whose mouth was turned down
like she’d just received impossibly bad news, both of them carrying half-filled
glasses of white wine that were most likely dispensed ‘for free’ while they
gambled away their kids’ college educations). I found my mind reaching for the solace of nature, quiet
amidst the angry house music that pounded through the burnt-out speakers.
I decided to take a walk along the
strip. This wasn’t my first time
in Las Vegas, and despite the blistering weather and aggressiveness all around
us, I was looking forward to our main reason for visiting, which was to see the
Michael Jackson Cirque du Soleil show.
Since I’d last been to the city, however, hotels had sprung up like
mushrooms after an abundant rain.
It made me feel small and insignificant and yet crowded in, and I thought of the
panic-attack-inducing claustrophobia I’d experienced during previous
visits. But I tried something
new. I tried to see Las Vegas with
fresh eyes.
I stood on the sidewalk, peering up at the
ways the city had attempted to reproduce the natural beauty of Italy—my
country, my original home. Take
The Bellagio, built after the style of the town of Bellagio on lake Como in
Italy. Fountains sprung up out of
water that mirrored the faces of passersby every fifteen minutes, in sync with
the sensuous music of Andrea Bocelli.
I walked on, towards The Venetian, where gondolas manned by men and
women in black and white traveled across chlorinated canals, giving visitors
views of the luxury shops that constellated the hotel: Gucci, Prada, Roberto
Cavalli. Then there was Paris Las
Vegas, albeit not Italian, but which tried to capture the majesty of the Eiffel
Tower. The reproduction shot over
three hundred feet into a blue, twilit, manufactured sky.
I laughed quietly as I continued on my trek
up and down the strip, imagining how my ancestors would feel if they saw these
imitations of Italy, with its geographical wonders, its architectural
achievements, its complex, layered history, its divine artwork and culture. They would have been amused, annoyed,
flabbergasted. Just as I was.
I concluded the evening at Cirque du
Soleil. Spellbound by the
heart-stopping, perfectly in-tune dancing and singing, I realized that despite
all its imperfections and its naïveté, America is indeed the ultimate pioneer of
creativity and inventiveness. Italy
cannot be recreated, but you can’t blame anyone for trying.
No comments:
Post a Comment