An entertainment interlude

Yesterday I put in a marathon poker session at the Venetian. I came away up by a couple hundred bucks, but other than that there isn't much to report about it. However, in the middle of it I did have a memorable entertainment interlude.

There are four shows on the Discovery Channel that I watch regularly: Mythbusters, Dirty Jobs, Sons of Guns, and American Guns. The last two are, oddly, both reality shows about gunsmith shops, the former in Louisiana and the latter in Colorado. Both places create custom firearms and do restoration work on classic and antique guns. I like tinkering with my own guns (mostly Glocks and Smith & Wesson revolvers, which hardly qualifies me as a proper gunsmith, since those may be the two easiest kinds of guns to work on), so I enjoy watching these programs.

The two main Mythbusters, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, have been doing a touring stage show called "Behind the Myths." I've seen every episode of their TV show over its ten-year run, most of them more than once. It's easily one of the best non-fiction shows ever aired--interesting, funny, and creative. So when I heard that it was coming to Vegas, it was pretty much a no-brainer that I would be going to see it. I hooked up with two of my buddies from the poker world, Missing Flops and ApolloAVP, to buy tickets the first day they went on sale. (As it turned out, we should not have been so afraid of missing our chance due to an early sell-out. They had so many tickets left unsold that they later began offering them at a two-for-one sale. Oh well.)

I actually found the show a tad disappointing. It wasn't terrible, but it was kind of ho-hum. Being an avid fan, I've seen all the outtake compilations and many, many interviews with the principals. A good portion of the stage show is video montages and audience Q&A, and I don't think I heard or saw anything that was new to me in those segments.

But there were a few cool things:

1. Blendo was on stage. Blendo was a bot that Jamie and Adam designed and built in the early days of the fighting-robot craze. It was one of the first to be really, really violent to its opponents, so much so that after a few appearances, show organizers realized that the thing put audiences in danger, because the early arenas did not have sufficiently strong containment mechanisms. Blendo spun hardened steel appendages really fast, and they ripped huge pieces off of opponents' machines, hurling them in all directions. Here is a YouTube video from 1997 of Jamie and Adam being awarded the heavyweight championship of Robot Wars without even doing a single match, because the organizers could not ensure the safety of the gathered crowd, so menacing a machine was Blendo. Blendo was a real benchmark in the development of fighting robots, and it was neat to see it there on stage. Incidentally, Jamie mentioned last night that Blendo was how they got introduced to the producer of a documentary on fighting robots, which led to their later collaboration to create Mythbusters.

2. They had a sound system installed by Dolby Labs with mega-enhancement of the lowest frequencies, so that when they played a montage of explosions done on the TV show, the audience members got a better visceral sense of the body-shaking reverberations that one would experience seeing them go off in person.

3. Jamie had built a four-barrel paintball machine gun about the size of a VW Beetle. They put a brave audience member inside Adam's own medieval-style knight's armor, and unleashed hundreds of paintballs at him in an unbelievable barrage. If you don't find that entertaining, I don't think we can be friends.

It's not a show I would be interested in seeing a second time, but I'm glad I saw it once.

While I was waiting for my two companions to arrive, a familiar face passed by me. It took me a few seconds to place where I recognized him from--you know that sense of disorientation when you see somebody you know in an unexpected context. Was he another poker player? A dealer? Somebody I used to know in Minnesota? Nope. Then it dawned on me--it was Joe, one of the gunsmiths on "Sons of Guns." (And, actually, my favorite of the bunch. He is quiet, shy, cerebral, and methodical, kind of like Jamie--not your usual reality show personality.) I saw him sit down at a bar a few steps from where I was standing, and then quickly realized that two of the people he was with were Kris and Stephanie, also from the show. Kris is another gunsmith. Stephanie is the receptionist/bookkeeper. She is also the daughter of the shop's owner, Will Hayden. She and Kris got married--in Las Vegas--at the end of the second season. (Because of this, I think the show should now be titled "Son-in-Law of Guns." But they didn't ask me.) Stephanie also happens to be an experienced shooter in her own right. She has designed several "package" gun modifications to appeal both stylistically and functionally to the tastes and needs of female shooters, which Will tends to dismiss with a sneer until he realizes how big that potential market is.

I don't usually bother famous (or even semi-famous) people when they're out in public on their own time, i.e., not in a deliberate meet-and-greet mode. In fact, I don't think I've ever done so before. But on a whim last night I decided to approach and ask if I could snap a photo of them. They were incredibly nice and accommodating. They wouldn't just let me take their picture. Kris said, "It's weird if you do that without being in the shot." So they recruited a passing cocktail waitress to handle my cell phone camera (which, sadly, is really crummy). The first shot was nearly black because of the dim light, so then they insisted on staging it again where the light was better. I was by this point highly embarrassed to be intruding so much on their time, but they wanted it to turn out right.

Well, it didn't, really, because of the camera's lack of flash, low resolution, and the nice young lady's unsteady hands. But here's what resulted:

That's Joe, me, Stephanie, and Kris. And yes, Stephanie's breasts did brush up against my arm, so I've got that going for me, which is nice. I know you're all jealous.

I assumed that their presence near the Mythbusters show was no coincidence. I asked if they were involved somehow, and they said no, just there to watch. Their presence in the audience was mentioned in passing from the stage, but as far as I could tell they weren't involved in any other way.

An unrelated side note: While waiting for my table at the Venetian poker room (temporarily at the Palazzo during renovations), I saw this guy:

Of course, I've seen these enormously long booze glasses around town many, many times before. But I've not previously stopped to contemplate the physics of drinking from one. He was intermittently sucking on that gargantuan straw that's sticking out from the top. It seemed to take him a long time to get any of the liquid. This strikes me as a really bizarre and difficult way to get a drink. You have to create enough negative pressure to evacuate a large volume of air above the liquid before it will rise to your mouth. This seems to require sucking some air out, pinching off the straw, exhaling, sucking again, etc. All for the "pleasure" of consuming a large quantity of alcohol from an absurdly designed, impractical souvenir vessel.

Add this to the list of peculiar things about Vegas that I just don't get, even after six years of living here.

Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt

(Photo from here.)

Last night I had the rare treat of seeing Lyle Lovett and John Hiatt in concert at Green Valley Ranch. The tickets were free, thanks to my House Seats subscription. To be honest, I had somehow never heard of Hiatt, though I did recognize one of the songs he played--the lovely "Have a Little Faith in Me"--maybe from a movie or TV show somewhere. (Now that I'm looking it up, I see that it has been covered by Delbert McClinton and was sung by Jewell in the movie Phenomenon, so I've probably heard it from both sources.) Looking over the basic facts of his career now, I find it remarkable that I had somehow overlooked him.

Lovett, though, I had not overlooked. I have several of his CDs and like them a lot. I enjoy his quirky voice, quirky lyrics ("And if I had a boat, I'd go out on the ocean/And if I had a pony, I'd ride him on my boat"), and quirky synthesis of country, jazz, and blues traditions.

The concert is pure simplicity: Two men, each equipped with a guitar, a microphone, and a chair. That's it. They've been doing these joint recitals for years, and they work splendidly together, with distinct but highly complementary styles. They take turns performing, with a little light banter between songs. Each occasionally does a little backup vocal or guitar, but mostly sit back and yield the stage to the other. It seemed clear that they didn't have a set order of pieces, but played whatever came to mind, triggered by a theme or idea in the other's previous song.

Because the tickets became available only on very short notice, I put out an offer on Twitter to give away the extra one. Good move, me. The call was answered by one "CoolDave88," who turns out to be a reader, a fellow grinder, somebody who had shared the final table of a HORSE tournament with me, and an all-around enjoyable person to get to know. He was a Hiatt fan but had not listened to any of Lovett's stuff, so we came at the concert from opposite perspectives. We each left feeling glad to have been introduced to another interesting artist worth exploring.

The music was marred only by our seats being surrounded by people who seemed to think that we came to listen to them rather than to the performers. They chatted away freely, as if watching television in their living rooms, and sometimes sung along to let everybody else see that they knew the lyrics. It's so annoying how self-absorbed and inconsiderate people can be. A couple of rows back, two guys actually got in a fight over something or other and got hauled out by security.

Also, on our way in, security confiscated the bottle of water I had started drinking while playing in the poker room before heading downstairs to the concert venue. They said that no outside drinks were allowed. I pointed out that this wasn't an "outside" drink, it was a Green Valley Ranch water bottle, given to me just a few minutes earlier by a Green Valley Ranch employee. They were not moved, so I handed it over. I really wanted to ask the goon, "Do you feel good about spending your life harassing people on the enforcement of such idiotic policies?" But I bit my tongue. A stupid bottle of water that I had been given at no cost wasn't worth a confrontation.

Those minor irritations aside, it was a far more pleasant way to spend a couple of hours than sitting at a poker table. If Lovett and Hiatt's show passes your way, you might want to give them a try.

Lovely evening

I had an absolutely delightful evening. First was dinner with friends at a place called Old Ebbitt Grill, which is apparently the oldest restaurant in Washington, having been in operation since 1856. It was kind of crowded, but excellent food for everyone, from appetizers to desserts.

Then we walked a couple of blocks to the Ronald Reagan Building and saw the Capitol Steps. I've seen them on TV a couple of times, and heard them on the radio (NPR) any number of times. In person, they're even funnier. Most laughs I've had in a long time. Their song parodies rank in cleverness with, say, Gilbert & Sullivan or Tom Lehrer. I think I might try to make this an annual event. It would be worth keeping up on the political news all year just so that you get the jokes! That photo, BTW, is King Jong-Il on the left, with two representatives of the United Nations unable to figure out what to do with him, together doing a song, "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Korea?" (You can watch a version of it here.)

Both the dinner and show were our Christmas gifts from two of Cardgrrl's closest friends, and it was just the perfect thing. Thanks, D&L!

Pictures from around town (3)

Tuesday night I took Cardgrrl to see Cheap Trick's rendition of "Sgt. Pepper" at Paris for her last night in Vegas. Here's a few photos from the very end of the show:

The Smothers Brothers are a lot older than I thought

The Smothers Brothers announced their retirement from touring last night. Here's what the Las Vegas Sun's web site says:

"Those confidantes knew the announcement was coming, and many came from different states to be a part of it. While some were in disbelief — it's difficult to process change after more than 40 decades of consistent performances — the atmosphere was positive, a celebration for what the Brothers feel is a new chapter in their lives."

Wow! They've been performing together for more than 400 years! Who knew?! I'm just surprised that that isn't the lead. I mean, having two brothers both three times older than the previously recorded oldest person--that's your story, not that they're finally retiring.

Discount tickets

This is the best information I've seen yet about those discount show ticket outlets that are found all over downtown Vegas and the Strip:

http://www.lvrj.com/neon/for-those-who-want-a-deal-on-a-las-vegas-show-discount-kiosks-can-help-64346322.html

(Hat tip to savelv.com for the pointer.)

Mac King

There are a bunch of magic shows around town. I've seen a few of them, and they're pretty much interchangeable and forgettable. For a long time I assumed that the "Mac King Comedy Magic Show" was another of them. But then I saw some random comment from Penn Jillette about Mac King being the most innovative magician on the Strip. That caught my attention, and I started looking for opportunities to see the show. When Cardgrrl checked into Harrah's on a recent visit, they gave her a discounted coupon for the show, which she passed on to me. Yesterday I finally used it.

The show is really great. Except maybe for the cutting-the-rope trick at the beginning, essentially everything is presented in ways I haven't seen before. He is constantly foiling the expectations you have developed from a lifetime of seeing other magic shows. Because I never knew for sure where tricks were going, they surprised me, and made me wish I had a videotape of the show so I could go back and watch to figure out how things were done. Most magic shows leave me much less curious than this one did.

It is far and away the funniest magic show I've ever been to. The guy is just naturally funny. For example, at one point a female audience member was instructed to keep a few cards secure. She chose to tuck them inside the front of her bra. When it came time for the cards to be revealed, he asked for them back. She seemed a bit unsure of what to do. She tentatively reached toward the top of her shirt, and but then stopped to ask, "Should I take them out?" Without missing a beat, he responded in deadpan, "Just the cards."

At another point, a young woman was told to write her name across the card she had selected. She was a little unclear on the concept, and used the giant black pen to write her name across the BACK of the card. He rolled with it, and had a great time pretending how difficult it was to pick out the right card with the deck face down.

And if you don't laugh when he dons the "cloak of invisibility" and tiptoes around the stage, well, there's just something wrong with you.

I've never seen free tickets for this show, but it was well worth the discounted $10 apiece price, and I would readily go to see it again.

Shows 'n' stuff (no poker content)

I did some non-pokery stuff this week.

1.

Monday night I got two free tickets to "X Burlesque" at the Flamingo. Tickets came from a subscription service I've mentioned before: http://lv.houseseats.com/ The performers (seven of them, I believe) are unarguably attractive women who hit the genetic jackpot in terms of matching contemporary society's ideals of beauty. But I thought the show was pretty lifeless and dull. I didn't even stay to the end. Not my cup of tea.

2.

Also through the houseseats.com service I scored two freebies for Cheap Trick performing the Beatles' "Sargeant Pepper" album live at the Hilton Tuesday night, in what was once Elvis Presley's theater. You can read more about the show here and read a review of it here. My friend Shamus also wrote about the whole deal here. (I offered him my extra ticket, but, for some strange reason, he didn't put his entire life on hold and fly across the country on 24 hours' notice. Same thing with Cardgrrl. Go figure. And these people call themselves my friends. Ha!)

This was one of the most enjoyable shows I've been to in Vegas. The band did not just do a slavish copy of what one hears on the album, as an unimaginative "tribute" band probably would. Rather, one gets a definite sense that Cheap Trick is playing music that they love, respect, and admire, but doing it their own way. For example, tempi were usually faster than the Beatles played. It's highly evocative of the original, but not merely an auditory copy. Of course, some things just shouldn't be changed--e.g., having a prominent clarinet part in "When I'm 64," and it was delightful to have a live orchestra with Cheap Trick making their major contribution. (Hey, Shamus, while I'm thinking about it, here's an idea: Next time you post a hand history and need some pseudonyms for your opponents, how about "Vera, Chuck, and Dave"?) The whole thing was just a glorious celebration of some of the best music that the rock genre has produced, with the band having every bit as good a time as the audience.

3.

I get a daily email from http://www.savelv.com/, announcing one or two free or cheap things to do in Vegas. Today's was an interesting surprise: An exhibition of dinosaur fossils at the Venetian. It's in preparation for a big auction coming up next month. See details here. My ex-wife is in town for the next week, and we were both kind of interested in this, so we went. You can see my photos here. It's a little odd seeing all these things with estimated bidding ranges attached to them. Usually such things are in a museum, not for sale.

4.

After that, we went to Madame Tussauds Wax Museum, also at the Venetian. I had never been there before. I had one free ticket and a $10 off coupon for another ticket, so it cost only $15 for both of us (usual price $25 each). It's OK, but nothing that's worth going out of your way to see. You can see my pictures here. You might even see your favorite Grump (hint: "Make it so"), and/or your favorite Grump's ex-wife (hint: bunny ears). Also, don't miss the last few photos: odd items for sale in the gift shop.

Pay to see Joan Rivers?

As I was leaving the Venetian earlier today, I noticed this enormous ad-mural painted on the wall between the casino and the parking garage.

Pay $48 to see Joan Rivers? After what she said about poker players? They'd have to pay me to sit in her presence.

Louie Anderson

The main reason that I chose the Excalibur for my play today (see post below) was that I had scored from http://showtickets4locals.com/ a free ticket to see Louie Anderson at 7:00, so I played some before and some after the show.

I have liked Louie Anderson for a long, long time. I actually remember his first appearance on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. This is the first time I've seen him perform in person.

He was charming and funny. It seems clear that he has, now, decades of material that he can call on and mix and match as the spirit moves him. Surprisingly, I think this detracts from the show. Things aren't as sharply timed and they don't flow from one subject to another as smoothly as when he had it all prepared as an integral whole. On the other hand, he did a fair amount of interaction with the audience, and it showed off his spontaneous wit. He made some very, very funny material from just asking audience members the obvious name, where you're from, and what do you do questions. For example, he learned that one guy worked at the While Sands Missile Testing Range testing the Patriot missiles. Anderson asked him, "Can I give you some coordinates? There's this poodle next door that barks all night."

I had another of my occasional semi-insomniac nights last night, so I was feeling pretty sleepy, which probably lessened my capacity to enjoy the show. It was certainly true that everybody else around me was laughing a lot more than I was. I didn't hate the show by any means, but found it just pleasant and mildly amusing for the most part, rather than fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious.

Anderson is a known commodity. You pretty much know the kind of material he does, as well as his favorite subjects (his childhood and parents, big family, being fat, Vegas), and that's exactly what you get. That makes this whole mini-review not particularly helpful, because you undoubtedly already know whether you're going to like him or not, based on his large body of past work.

Me? I like the guy, and would go again if given the chance.

All you need is "Love"

(I was about to title this post "Yellow matter custard dripping from a dead dog's eye." But who needs that?)

Wednesday night, Cardgrrl treated me to a sort of late birthday present: We went to see "Love" at the Mirage. It had been at the top of my list of want-to-see Vegas shows since the day it opened.

It was all I had hoped for and more. Stunning, captivating, intriguing, overwhelming, creative, evocative. There is often so much going on at once that you can't even notice it all, let alone absorb, interpret, and appreciate it. But there are other times when the chaos is replaced with something simple and beautiful. I think I will never again be able to listen to "Something in the Way She Moves" without recalling the elegance of the white-clad trapeze artists gracefully flying overhead.

You can find reviews aplenty on the web, if you need them, so there's no point in me trying to describe the show. Besides, you basically already know if you want to see it or not. If you like Cirque de Soleil and/or you like the Beatles, you will want to see this thing. It would be a crime not to. If you're too young (or, I suppose, too old) ever to have caught the Fab Four bug, and the other Cirque shows leave you saying "meh," well, then, I suppose it's best that you walk on by. But you will be missing something truly special and spectacular.

"Love" has zoomed into the top five best shows I've seen since being in Vegas. The others are Penn & Teller, Elton John's "Red Piano," Ka, Blue Man Group, and Spamalot.

OK, that's six, but who's counting?

It is manifestly not the case (pace Lennon and McCartney) that all you need is love. But if you get some "Love," I think you'll be happy you did.

"Fitz of Laughter"

I just got back from seeing Kevin Burke's stand-up comedy show, "Fitz of Laughter," at Fitzgeralds downtown. I had free tickets. (Have I ever mentioned here how much I like getting free stuff? I have? Oh, sorry.) You can read reviews here and here.

This really is old-school Vegas kind of material: a mix of comedy and a little magic, preceded by a warm-up comic doing impersonations.

Is Burke the funniest guy ever to stand behind a mike? No. He never had me in prolonged, uncontrollable spasms the way that Chris Rock, Sam Kinison, Richard Pryor, Louis CK, and a few others have been able to do.

But on the other hand, he's enormously likable. He's one of those rare people that is just kind of intrinsically funny in everything he says and does. He has a great rapport with the small audience--enough that I even acted as one of the three audience dummies on stage for him when he asked me to, something that I would ordinarily resist mightily. When I cracked a little joke that made the audience laugh, he mock-bellowed, "Don't you EVER be funnier than me!"

It's hard for me to imagine that anybody could walk away thinking that this was the best show ever, but it's just as hard to imagine that anybody could walk away without having had a genuinely good time.

Gordie Brown

Late yesterday afternoon I scored a free ticket to see Gordie Brown last night at his new home at the Golden Nugget (after finishing his run at the Venetian, then spending a while at Planet Hollywood). This impressionist show is one I've been wanting to see the entire time I've lived here.

I liked it. I was in the fourth row, so a nice, close-up view. The obvious comparison is to Danny Gans, since their acts are very similar. I think that Gans is a better mimic, with more impressively spot-on vocal imitations of various singers and celebrities. But Brown, I thought, was overall funnier and more entertaining. If I had an out-of-town visitor who wanted to take me to see one or the other of these guys, I'd lean toward Brown.

It's really difficult to explain with text what bits were funny and why--sort of the essential "ya had to be there" sort of thing. But I thought the best moments were (1) a duet between Cher and Joe Cocker (Brown doing both parts, of course), (2) switching between Billy Ray Cyrus's "Achey Breaky Heart" and Barney the Dinosaur doing his "I love you" song to show how amusingly similar the melodies are, (3) Aaron Neville's rendition of the national anthem at a baseball game (complete with stadium reverb) that is so slow it lasts through an entire double-header (Brown rapidly moving back and forth between the never-ending song and the announcer's play-by-play).

Well worth seeing, if you get a chance.

Interesting show at the Palazzo

Yesterday I saw this item in the Review-Journal about a new free show at the Palazzo. It sounded intriguing. Besides, I had a two-for-one coupon for one of their restaurants, and a double-your-bet free play coupon for a table game. (My traveling companion chose black for me on a roulette wheel. It came up red. $25 gone. But the upside is I would have won $75, so on an essentially 50:50 bet it was definitely +EV.)

We caught the 4:30 show. I took too many pictures to upload them here, but you can see them in a Flickr set here.

Basically, three young women dressed and made up as classical statues come down the escalator, take their places one by one in the pool area in front of the waterfall, and strike various poses while classical music plays. They also have tubes hooked up under their outfits so that water can come out of their fingers and heads. Yeah, it sounds goofy, but it's kind of cool. When they're done, they come out and stand in front. That's when the assistants start hawking photos. Of course, you can take all the pictures you want (and I didn't even see anybody get backroomed for it!), but if you want to get in the picture with the statues, you have to pay and have their photographer take the shot. They they glide off to the up escalator and fly away, with a mop guy behind them cleaning up the water so nobody slips and falls and sues the hotel.

About the time the statues are making their exit, two young women on long stilts and hand crutches, dressed as vines, are making their way in. I thought this was the more interesting part of the show. They display real athleticism as they move around, but a nice aesthetic/artistic sense at the same time, which is not an easy combination. After making their way through the crowd (with considerable daring--they brush right past people, seemingly unafraid of being knocked off their stilts), they take up positions against a wall and move through various motions and poses. It's all quite cool.

I took these video clips with my new cell phone camera. The resolution is low (sorry), but you can at least get a good sense of what's going on.

Nathan Burton

Got some free tickets, so went to see Nathan Burton's "comedy magic" show today at the Flamingo. It's OK, but well beneath my boys Penn & Teller. (Then again, that may be true of every magic act.) He did two variations on a standard mentalist trick (appearing to have written down in advance what somebody in the audience would say), and about eight different variations on a person appearing in and/or disappearing from a box when there is no apparent way in/out. That's my main criticism of the show: there were basically two tricks, with small variations. Not a lot of variety.

There's a comedy act in the middle, but not your standard stand-up variety. Instead, this guy pulls four volunteers from the audience, puts funny masks on them, gets them to agree to make certain funny gestures when he taps them, then has them race to blow up and pop balloons. I know what you're thinking--it sounds incredibly stupid. Yes, it does. But he is a fine showman and makes nearly every second of the routine come out funny. I kept thinking, "This shouldn't be funny, but it is!"

It's certainly not a terrible show overall, but I think I'd feel ripped off if I had had to pay more than about $10 for a ticket. For free, I felt more than adequately entertained. I even shook Mr. Burton's hand afterward and told him, "Nice show." It hadn't really been my intention, but he was standing there greeting people as they left, and it would have been awkward to walk by without saying something. So I guess this counts as my celebrity encounter for the day, too.

A little of the Divine

A friend got some free tickets to Bette Midler's show at Caesars Palace last night, so away we went. I'm not a huge fan, but she's OK. I have exactly one Midler CD in my collection, a "best of" sort of thing.

The show was all right, but not great. The filler to singing ratio was very, very high. Lots of fluff--kind of lame jokes (some old, some about current events), way too many remarks about how old she is getting to be (63), showgirls dancing around (strange sight of the night: 20+ showgirls in mermaid tails driving around the huge stage in motorized wheelchairs. Yeah, really.), and so forth. I'm sure she sang fewer than ten songs in the nearly two-hour show. There was nothing particularly terrible about the whole show, but nothing in it wowed me or made me want to go back and do it again someday.

The photo above is the same one that is on the $5 chips Caesars issued when Bette's show was announced. It always looks to me like she has a plant growing out of her head--especially when the picture is reduced in size to fit on a poker chip. I suppose it's supposed to be a showgirl headdress, but it looks weird.

Are you a Fanilow?

Yesterday around 4:30 I was getting ready to go out for some poker, when an email hit my inbox from http://www.houseseats.com/, announcing "last-minute" free ticket availability for Barry Manilow at the Hilton, 8:00 pm.

OK, time for a confession. I'm a straight male who likes Barry Manilow. Not crazy Fanilow level or anything, but I'm a sucker for a good love song or schmaltzy sad one, and Barry fills the bill.

So I speed-dialed my best friend, and, bless her heart, she was willing to sit through it with me, even though her musical taste runs more to the Beastie Boys, The Cure, and Linkin Park. So I nabbed the tickets and off we went.

The seats weren't quite as primo as the ones for Blue Man Group the previous night, but they were perfectly fine: about four rows from the back of the main floor, toward the far right, in what had once been Elvis Presley's theater. Paying full price would have been $137.50 apiece. (That's the second-cheapest price level. They run from $104.50 to $247.50.)

I can't add this to my list of best-ever Vegas shows, but it was certainly good enough that I'm glad I went. My complaints: (1) They started about 10 minutes late. (2) It was fairly short, about 1 1/4 hours. (3) They passed out chemical glow sticks, which just encouraged people to do that stupid slow arm-waving thing. (4) Some idiots in the audience always felt compelled to sing along, apparently on the assumption that everybody had come to hear them sing, rather than Barry Manilow. (5) It was much too amplified. (It's been said that if you think the music is too loud, you're too old. You can imagine, then, what it says about you if you find Barry Manilow too loud.) (6) I had a hard time seeing over the head of the guy in front of me--had to keep bobbing and weaving. (7) Even though the show is ostensibly meant to focus on Manilow's hits (the previous iteration of his Hilton show, "Music and Passion," featured on the poker chip shown above, is no more; this one is called "Ultimate Manilow: The Hits"), he did ultra-shortened and medley versions of many of my favorites in order to cram them in and get them out of the way to make room for pimping his soon-to-be-released album of other people's 1980s hits, as well as his other "decades" collections.

Perhaps most peculiar is that my friend and I both independently concluded that he was lip-syncing at least part of the time. There were spots in which he seemed out of phase with what we were hearing. Once I caught him whispering something to a fan in the first row while his singing voice finished the last second or two of a phrase over the speakers. This was all pretty mystifying, because for most of the show it was perfectly obvious that he was not lip-syncing. For example, he hit an off note once, garbled the lyrics of "American Bandstand" in one place, I heard his voice crack once, and at one point he paused a song to respond to something shouted from the audience--not things you would pre-record. His speaking voice sounded unusually raspy, so perhaps he has a cold or is developing a vocal cord problem, can't sustain an entire show, and thus has some voice rests built in, in the form of recorded music. I don't know. It was kind of weird.

In spite of the above nit-picking, I had a good time. It tugged at every sappy, soft-hearted, nostalgic bone in my body to hear "Weekend in New England," "Somewhere in the Night," "Trying to Get the Feeling Again," "Mandy" (done in an interesting manner: with Barry singing and playing the piano in parallel with the projected videotape of a 1975 television performance of the same song), "Looks Like We Made It," and my all-time choke-me-up favorite, "Even Now." Manilow is the king of wistfulness. If those last three songs can't reach something deep inside you that still pines for a lost love and wonders what might have been, well, you're lacking one of the emotions that make us human. Carrying an old torch is simultaneously happy and painful, and nobody can stoke those flames more effectively than Barry.

Two good shows in two days--excellent value from my houseseats.com subscription, I'd say. But enough of it for now. I need to get back to earning and to the main subject of this blog, which will soon return to being about poker.

Blue Man Group

I've been a subscriber to http://www.showtickets4locals.com/ for a long time, but I recently also joined http://www.houseseats.com/. The former is free; the latter costs $89 per year. However, it offers a lot more tickets to the premium, high-end shows--things like Barry Manilow at the Hilton and Le Reve at the Wynn. Last night was the first time I've used it to nab some primo tickets: the Blue Man Group at the Venetian. Row 12, on the aisle--two superb seats that normally would cost $132 each.

It's a show I've wanted to see for years, and finally got the chance. It's every bit as good as people say. Describing it seems kind of pointless. Let's see: They show a bunch of signs. They throw marshmallows at each other (and at the audience; I caught one, as evidenced above). They beat on drums that splash colored water in the air. They dine on Twinkies with an audience member. They play with the orange hand lights used to guide jets into their gates. They make tuned drums out of PVC pipe. They stream scads of rolled paper over the audience. They munch loudly on Cap'n Crunch cereal. They teach you rock and roll dance moves. They play around with color perception and the "persistence of vision" phenomenon. They wear TVs on their heads. They never say a word. See? It all sounds really stupid. But it's actually ingenius and creative and and interesting and unprecedented and fabulous. So you just have to go see it for yourself. There is no show like it anywhere.

BMG joins the tippy-top of the best shows I've seen since living in Vegas: Penn & Teller, Ka, Elton John's Red Piano, Spamalot, and Blue Man Group--all absolutely first-rate. (And come to think of it, what a variety! Not one of those shows is even remotely similar to any of the others.)

Plan on seeing BMG next time you're in Vegas (or any of their other venues--see link below). Hey, you might even get a souvenir marshmallow.

http://www.blueman.com/

Downtown light show

My timing for leaving Binion's was good--I caught one of downtown's overhead light shows. It's one of my favorite ones, with a fire-and-ice theme, ending with Bachman Turner Overdrive's classic, "Taking Care of Business." There's something seriously wrong with you if you can listen to that cranked up to stadium volume and not feel compelled to move with the music.

If you've skipped downtown entirely during your trips to Vegas, and figured that everything you need or want to see is on the Strip, you're missing out. The world's biggest music videos on a three-block-long screen is just one of the things you should add to your plans next time around.

Oh, what the heck. Might as well show you the whole thing (though obviously you miss out on the sense of scale here):

"The Soprano's Last Supper"

I got a free ticket to this show last night from showtickets4locals.com. Went to the Riviera to see it. Not the worst show I've seen in Vegas, but very disappointing. Got a couple of chuckles out of it, but just not very funny. About half of the show is the actors getting the audience members to get up and dance, which doesn't interest or amuse me.

I'm a big fan of "The Sopranos," and you'd have to be to have any shot at enjoying this thing. If you don't understand references to Adrianna's FBI friend, get the joke about Ralphie when they hold up a bowling ball bag with body parts in it, or grasp the significance of a mounted singing trout given to Tony, then the whole show will undoubtedly seem incomprehensible.

It wasn't incomprehensible to me, but it also wasn't worth an hour and a half of my life. I had hoped for a smart send-up of HBO's best show ever, but instead got a pretty pathetic song-and-dance that just happened to feature the characters.