Las Vegas. January, 1992

I don’t drink. I don’t gamble. I don’t engage prostitutes. I love Las Vegas. For one of the same reasons that I like Washington, DC: People from all over the world come here for vacation, allowing you a global cross-section of society without having to travel very far. Of course, this may not be the most polite and tidy cross-section (I endured a severely inebriated Scottish woman’s harangue against the riders on a Strip bus early one afternoon, for example), but so be it. I’m also drawn toward the glitzy artifice, the insistence on the purely superficial and transient, on things not what they seem. Female impersonators. Elvis impersonators. ZZ Top impersonators, for God’s sake. Even the buildings are impersonators: Caesar’s Palace, The Venetian, Paris Las Vegas, Excalibur, Luxor, the poseur list goes on and on. After several trips here, I now pepper my itinerary with some of the more obscure “attractions”: The Liberace Museum (now sadly closed), the public library, trailer-park yard sales. My early morning running route takes me miles off the Strip, out to the airport and back, passing working residents sipping their coffee, waiting for the bus. No high rollers these, just ordinary folks like you and me when we’re not on vacation.