"How can you see with sequins in your eyes?"

VIVA LAS VEGAS!

Las Vegas is my home away from home away from school. I had been there 16 times--and my family decided to have a 17th go this Thanksgiving at the Land of 92 Percent Returns. No, no, we aren't high rollers and we don't own stock in Caesar's Palace. But, we were one of the few to first discover the Las Vegas miracle back in 1992 when all the renovation began to transform a pop culture embarrassment into a pop culture extravaganza. Seven years later, it's the most popular vacation destination in the world. The obvious question: why? How can a place that allegedly has prostitutes cavorting on the Strip, rednecks losing their family savings at the slot machines and streets burdened with violent crime attract your average vacationer? Because that, my friends, is an urban legend that had a hold on our imagination until about two years ago--and the myth has finally been exploded once and for all. (I credit every major news magazine that runs a "The New Las Vegas" story when they run out of Campaign 2000 fodder.)

Las Vegas is Disney World up 30 notches times 30 hotels. It's the ultimate postmodern landscape--a dizzying simulacrum of our collective consciousness. In other words, it is pop culture. Just take a virtual journey down the Strip--the pirate-themed Treasure Island, the luxurious tropical visions at the Mirage, the canals (with gondola rides!) and warm cannolis at The Venetian, the Arthurian legend at Excalibur, the cobblestone streets surrounding Lake Como at the $1.3 billion Bellagio, etc. etc. Where else in the world can you wake up and look out one window and see the Eiffel Tower (a half-size recreation stands over the Paris hotel); or look out another and see Egyptian pyramids at the Luxor or the Chrysler and Empire State Building at New York, New York? It's a substitution for culture--a fantasy of epic proportions stuck in the middle of a desert. Las Vegas is the greatest expression of our culture's current artistic sensibility (or lack of it).

TEARING UP MY EARS!

Because Vegas is attracting so many vacationers, it can afford to be more exclusive. Every new hotel is making a point to sell only to the "sophisticated" crowd--at the recently built Monte Carlo, Bellagio, Venetian and Paris hotels, there are no "showgirl" theatrics, the restaurants all demand at least $35 per person, Gucci and Versace dominate the in-hotel shopping malls and the miminum blackjack bet is $10. The cheesy glitz and glamour of the '80s Vegas has dissolved into a decadent celebration of pretentiousness in the '90s Vegas.

The only good thing I think that comes out of all this is the fact that the shows in Vegas tend to be more sophisticated and exciting than anything you'll see on Broadway. It's a bold statement, but you need at least 10 trips to Vegas to catch all the worthy productions. On this, our 17th go at it, we hit the jackpot. After seeing the spectacular musical "Chicago" at Mandalay Bay the first night, we somehow managed to finagle tickets to see sold-out 'NSync at the MGM Grand Garden Arena the following night.

Oh my lord. Now I know what it must have been like to have seen the Beatles or Elvis perform live. Those entertainers, of course, combined talent with pizzaz. Now, there's a trace of talent, an occasional whizbanger of pizzaz, and a hell of a lot of screaming. Oh the screaming! It has to rank as the eighth wonder of the world. It shatters ear-drums, gives you an irregular heartbeat, gives you irritable bowel syndrome I felt like I was in a hyena stampede for two hours. Why are these girls fainting, throwing their underwear, crying their eyes out for boys who they can barely see from their nosebleed seats? A blockmate of mine put it succinctly: "Natural selection, baby. Natural selection."

A FRENCH-TASTIC CIRCUS

I was rewarded for my patience the next night when we caught the new Cirque du Soleil production, "O," at the decidedly upscale Bellagio hotel ($100 a ticket!) It's insanely high-priced, but if you've never seen a Cirque du Soleil show in your life, the experience is priceless. There are only four productions currently on stage in the U.S.--"O" at Bellagio, "Mystere" at Treasure Island in Las Vegas, "La Nouba" in Orlando and "Alegria" at the new Biloxi resort in Mississippi. I've seen the first three and "Mystere" is definitely my favorite--but that, perhaps, is because it was the first one I saw. Performed with live music (a combination of techno and opera), each show is an apocalyptic circus of startling imagination. Everything is designed to be an illusion--to take you in one direction and then make you refigure (the best example I can think of in "O" has a clown drifting on a raft in an ocean; a shark fin begins to swim around him and he panics; he suddenly calms down, picks up a fishing pole and hooks the fin, pulling it up to reveal a crescent moon which he gleefully hangs in the sky). It's also a decidedly French experience--it's incomparable to anything that I've ever seen in American theater (the only comparison I can make is to 1995's The Fifth Element--and that, of course, was made by a French director).

But the theme of the Cirque du Soleil experience is always the same: only from periods of intense chaos do we ever get the brief revelation of genius. Between each acrobatic or Herculean feat of circus theatrics (these beat anything, anything you'll ever see in Barnum and Bailey--in "Mystere," there's an entire sequence of bungee jumping acrobats costumed as birds), you're treated to a two or three minute interlude of dazzling fantasy: a parade of stilted clowns dressed as elephants, a giant inflated snail floating across the stage, a five-foot baby bouncing a giant ball around the theater, a mirror reflecting the audience onto the ceiling. Maybe one day it will be trendy to like Cirque du Soleil--and shows will pop up all over the country just like Riverdance. Oooh. The thought makes me nauseous. Until then, appreciate the chance to discover this surreal secret of dizzying imagination.