Vegas Beauty

I am on a plane returning from a four day trip to Las Vegas. The first of the week I was attending a business meeting and I had decided to take an extra day to take advantage of the free flight and cheap room rates. I have been reading the latest issue of The Sun magazine. The Readers Write section is my favorite and this month’s theme is beauty. Coming from Vegas it is interesting to reflect on that word. I’m not writing to critique Vegas, but I do want to remember the contrast of Vegas as it relates to beauty. I find Vegas fascinating and being alone there allowed me time to sit and watch. There is plenty to see. Everything is designed to maximize engagement through fantasy. Engaged means we are spending money. Being there is like being on the set of a movie. People acting out parts, playing roles they don’t normally play, doing things they would never do back home. I am struck by our need to create beauty or what we perceive as beauty. At times it seems desperate. Massive air conditioned cavernous buildings…all designed and decorated to seem like you are outdoors … maybe walking through the streets of New York City, or Venice, or some sexual Disneyworld. Giant Palm trees evenly spaced and reaching high for the ceiling with a painted clear blue sky and puffy clouds…the illusion betrayed by an air-condition duct. Music is carefully orchestrated to add a soundtrack to the setting. At first, the illusion works. The visual impact is like watching a fast paced movie for the first time…it all looks cool…but the longer you watch…the story starts to fall apart. You realize the actor is using a stunt double. The buildings aren’t real. That woman in the tight red skirt cut way too high, twisting though Tuscan cobblestone streets in stripper shoes that get worn for one weekend …starts to look like an Accounts Payable Clerk after a day or so. The guy with the spiked-up hair and wrinkled cargo shorts sits… mouth agape, staring through sunglasses at an indifferent stripper swinging around a chrome pole. He’s getting sooo wasted in Vegas and he can’t wait to tell his coworkers back home at the Jiffy Lube…all about his raucous adventures.


I don’t believe real beauty can be bought or applied...it just happens. It happens when that woman is back at home and she pushes her hair behind her ears… peeking through reading glasses at her kid’s homework, at that moment she is beautiful, or when she lets a single tear spill out of her eye while watching a sappy movie. Sexy isn’t a tight dress and hoochie mama heels…sexy is when she slips on an over-sized flannel shirt and curls up on the couch with a glass of wine to watch Myth Busters. That guy that thinks he looks cool when he is doing his best “dazed and confused” impression…never looks cooler than when he stops in a park to pick up trash he didn’t drop… or when he spends half the night fixing the leaking sink in greasy jeans and a t-shirt. Beauty just happens.

I don’t believe real beauty can be manufactured. On Friday I rented a Motorcycle and rode north to Mount Charleston. After two days on “The Strip”…twisting the throttle, hearing that familiar rumble and feeling the engine pull me toward the mountains in the distance...I couldn’t contain my smile. It was almost like escaping from the stomach of a giant primordial beast…catapulting off of its tongue just as its mouth is slamming shut. I turned off the main road and shot across a dry cracked desert bed. As I climbed, I could feel the temperature drop. I could smell the Ponderosa Pine and the White fur that shades the landscape. The clouds seemed brighter than I had ever seen them…and they slowly drifted across the blue sky. The road twisted back and forth, digging into rock and the lush forest like a ribbon holding down a bulging package. I actually laughed out loud from the pleasure of hitting a turn just right…the bike feeling like it was on a rail. Real beauty cannot be manufactured.

I think Las Vegas is important. Like a museum, it reminds us of our mistakes. It houses our creations. It takes us to a different place for just a few hours. It reminds us that…in the end, we cannot buy or create pleasure, nature…or happiness. At 5:30 this morning, waiting on the Airport shuttle, I enjoyed watching the nights actors crawl out of dirty cabs and stumble towards the hotel, defeated in their battle to make it everything they had envisioned it to be. Those spandex dresses struggling to hold in belly’s that could no longer be sucked in. The heels are off…the curtain drops and the show is over. Jiffy Lube is feeling nauseous…and the morning sun burns away the backdrop.