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In Las Vegas, it’s not love they’re looking for

Randy Wyrick

It’s 7:30 on a blessed Monday morning, which is too early to line up to get into a strip joint.

But we’re in Las Vegas, the city whose foundation is solidly built on the lowest common denominator, the city where the tube top and the mullet came to live out their tattered lives, walking hand-in-hand into a neon-lit hereafter.

Bunches of guys are parking in an industrial park, streaming into a non-descript building we’ll call the Las Vegas Center for the Performing Arts where they’ll witness the South Las Vegas Boulevard Metropolitan Ballet. At least that’s what they’ll tell their accountants when they try to list their bar tab on their expense accounts.



Las Vegas is like a low desert version of Vail, built to be exactly what it is and not converted by someone who had a grander vision for a dilapidated mountain town. In Las Vegas, the grand vision is watching tourists dispose of their disposable income.

Let’s face it, we’ve all spent a little time plunging into the murky depths, and we’re not talking the same path Jonah went down when God sent him on the original whale watching cruise to Nineveh – (“We’ll give you an inside look at whales no one’s ever seen before!”) And we’re in Las Vegas, which knows more about murky depths than any land-locked city on earth. And it is land-locked, unless you count the beach at the Mandalay Bay Hotel, which is actually pretty cool.

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But c’mon. It’s 7:30 on a blessed Monday morning. The work week is just stumbling to a start. True, these women do this for a living, and since I didn’t actually go to that emporium or any others like it, I can’t speak to their professional abilities. My best guess is that since they’re gyrating during the early Monday morning shift, they won’t get picked up by a talent scout to join the Pittsburgh Steelers cheerleader corps (That’s a joke, folks. The Pittsburgh Steelers don’t have cheerleaders.) These women work for a living; they probably dropped the kids off at kindergarten and headed off to their job.

This is just business – supply and demand — and everyone has a role to play. It’s a little like that tree-in-the-forest deal. If a stripper drops her pasties and there’s no one there to tip her, does she still get paid for being mostly naked?

Of course they were being paid, and so the women’s role in all this is clear. They supply a service for which they are compensated.

But what of the guys? At 7:30 Monday morning these guys are ambling into a gentlemen’s emporium – and they ain’t the maintenance crew. However, it is a gentlemen’s emporium, and the equation wouldn’t be complete without the gentlemen – the demand side of the equation.

So the business/entertainment circle is complete.

Of course, this is to romance what a meth lab is to the higher sciences. I mean, how elevated does the thinking need to be when you have Cooter and Shooter in the tool shed arguing about how much more ammonia they need to add to the mixture before they create the explosion that memorializes their untimely demise as a Darwin Award?

When it’s all said and done, this is still Las Vegas. Its foundation is solidly based on beautifully packaged things you can’t have, and that includes these women.

Early on a Monday morning, or any morning, your favorite women are the ones shuffling around the house in a bathrobe and fuzzy slippers.

Bring her a cup of coffee, give her a hug and a kiss and wish her a good morning – because if she smiles back at you, it is a good morning.

Randy Wyrick is the Daily’s business editor. Reach him at rwyrick@vaildaily.com.

Vail, Colorado


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