Once again, we’re in Las Vegas while my husband plays in the World Series of Poker. While Las Vegas has always been an adult Disney land, the adults seem to be getting younger—or maybe I’m just getting older—and their choice of clothes, or lack there of, is rather surprising. Men wear flip flops, shorts and no shirts at all, and women look like they’ve piled out of bed and put on the first thing they found on the closet floor. The real people watching, however, comes when the midnight crowd emerges from their rooms. Young carbon copies, jockeying for entrance to A-list clubs walled off by velvet ropes and burly bodyguards.
This is a different crowd than the ones you see in the daylight. The locals refer to them as the “Vampires.” These guys wear jeans, straw fedoras and enough bling to open their own jewelry store. The chippies appear to be drunk and/or high and wear vacuum-packed strapless dresses, which barely cover their butts, and six-inch gladiator shoes in which they can barely walk. The girls are all self-conscious, constantly tugging at their outfits, pulling them up to cover their boobs, pulling them down to cover everything else while the guys treat them like they’re steak on a plate. Sometimes I think today’s young people are following Britney Spears, Milely Cyrus and the rapper d’jour straight off the edge of the cliff and into their hotel rooms with nary a thought to the consequences.
The world may still be spinning on its axis, but we seem to be going in a direction I don’t understand. Many of those directions are counter intuitive to having a healthy society. Sometimes I think we need better roles models, for males and females of every age, who will forge a more self-respecting path for all of us to emulate. I realize this isn’t my typical blog about surviving breast cancer, but perhaps it’s because I’m overwhelmed with the razzle dazzle of sin city. It’s a lot to take in for a girl who lives in the middle of nowhere.
I’m like many of you who’ve had to come to terms with life the way it is, not the way it was, or the way you wish it was, and that’s OK. It’s more than OK. I’m still here, and I’m blessed beyond reason. Like Dorothy, in the Wizard of Oz, I’ve battled my way through terror and enlightenment, and I realize there’s no place like home. While I’m not sure Las Vegas is part of my new normal, I am sure the bleary-eyed guy wearing the “Party Till You’re Homeless” shirt is not.
