Another strange casino photography incident

As I was leaving the Rio tonight, one of the cocktail waitresses climbed up on a little stage they have amidst the slot machines. They do this frequently, providing a bit of amateur entertainment to the gamblers. A few sing, most just dance to a recording while colored lights flash.

I thought a picture of her would make a good "Guess the casino" entry. I snapped off a couple:





Then it dawned on me that my snazzy new cell phone has rudimentary video capture capability. I hadn't even tried it out yet. I had the sudden idea that I might be able to make a video "Guess the casino" post, which would be cool if it worked. I fiddled with the controls, and got it recording. (It ran out of memory before the end of the song, because I hadn't entered my preference to save the file to the large-capacity memory card instead of to the default internal memory.)

But just after I got it going, something strange happened. If you listen closely, you might hear a female voice, a few seconds into the recording, saying something like, "That's not going on YouTube or anything, is it?"

I turned to look, because I wasn't even sure she was talking to me. She was. It was another cocktail waitress.

I think you'd have to know me to understand this, but there are many, many times in my life when I'm flummoxed into silence. This is most commonly because only a few possible things to say occur to me, and I have just barely enough social awareness to know that they're all horribly inappropriate and better left unsaid.

This was one of those moments. You might notice a pause before I reply. What I was actually wanting to say was, "Why does it matter?" Or maybe, "Are you so stupid as to think that nobody has posted such a video on YouTube before?"

After a few seconds of brain lock, I finally came out with, "That's not my intention." I really hadn't formed any specific intention. I was primarily trying to see if I could figure out how to make the phone work as a video camera. If I were lucky enough to succeed at that, and the resulting clip turned out well enough to be worth looking at, then I might post it on my blog. Had I stopped to think, and had I thought that the difference mattered, I might have told my inquisitor that sometimes I post videos directly on a blog, sometimes I put them on YouTube and then embed them in the blog post, and I wasn't sure which, if either, I would do in this instance.

I added, "Why?" She said, "I'm just checking." I said, "Oh." And that was that. She gave me kind of a stinkeye and walked away.

As I left the building and reviewed this interaction in my mind, the oddness of it grew and grew. There are no signs posted saying "Please do not videotape our dancers." The woman who spoke to me never said anything direct like, "It's fine to tape this for yourself, but please don't post it on the Internet"--which seems like the obvious thing to do if one's goal is to try to prevent such dissemination. Perhaps these young women, who obviously can't very well talk to passersby while they're dancing, have agreed to sort of act as surrogates for each other, all sharing in a request for videotapes not to be posted online. But if so, why not state that request clearly and affirmatively?

But even if we assume that Cocktail Waitress #2 was acting as a stand-in for Cocktail Waitress #1 in making her inquiry, why do they care? How is it rational to be willing to get up on a platform and dance provocatively (more or less, depending on one's perception), while dressed in a skimpy outfit that one might expect to see one's new bride wearing to bed on her wedding night, in front of dozens or hundreds of strangers, and do this several times per shift, day after day after day--and then object to the possibility that the act will be seen by others on YouTube? If they're embarrassed about what they're doing, or don't want certain people (e.g., their parents?) to discover what part of their job is, then for heaven's sake don't do what it is you want kept secret in a very public place in front of countless strangers!

It's ludicrous for them to think that they will be able to prevent people from taking still photos and/or video clips, and subsequently putting them into the family photo album, or on Flickr, or MySpace, or YouTube, or a personal blog, or whatever. It's even more ridiculous to think that they can keep that kind of control through the passive, indirect, unclear style of communication that #2 employed with me. It's completely irrational, and I can't stand irrationality--which is why I have such a hard time with humanity in general.

The more I thought about it, the more it annoyed me. (That is true for much of what happens in my life.) When I got home and transferred the video file to my computer, I discovered that it is of such poor audio and video quality that, absent the verbal exchange, I probably would have deleted it as not worth posting and sharing. But because they annoyed me, I've decided to be petulant and defiant about it and post it here.

I did try to post it directly via Blogger, as a small gesture toward keeping with what I had stated my intention to have been, but the server wasn't accepting the file after two attempts, so I gave up and uploaded it to YouTube after all.

Take that, Ms. "I'm just checking."