What happens in Vegas … is a blur

Just flew in from Vegas, and boy are my arms tired.  Almost as tired as that joke. It was my first time ever in Sin City, and when your group of four ladies has a combined age of 225, it’s a somewhat different experience than the one depicted in the movie “The Hangover”.

Firstly, I think Priceline has a bit of sick sense of humour.  That’s the site where you plug in your bid and what area you want to stay, and then if your bid is accepted it books you at a hotel without letting you approve it first.  It’s also the one that has William Shatner as a spokesman, and he must have a dark side even darker than the one he sometimes vented on  Mr. Spock.  Otherwise, I don’t know why else they would book a group of women celebrating a 60^th birthday, into the hotel on the strip that’s known for having the “hottest, most action packed pool in Vegas, complete with DJ”.    We couldn’t wait to get into our string bikinis and let the masses feast their eyes on us, bat wing arms, surgery scars, spider veins and muffin tops be damned . The pool turned out to be even more action packed than advertised, and while kind of entertaining to watch, we decided not to actually swim, for fear of contracting an STD or worse – an unwanted menopausal pregnancy.

I found Vegas particularly exhausting, because as a mom of 20 somethings, I was continually fighting the urge to dispense my sage advice around to the young girls wearing impossibly high stilettos and outfits comprised of small pieces of string and glitter.   I wanted to be an evangelist for good.  You would think a tattooed, fist pumping, young girl grinding up against a chiseled guy at the bar would be keen to learn about the connection between 6 inch heels and inevitable bunions that will eventually have her busting Hulk-like out of her footwear – but you would be wrong.  Even the show-and-tell part, where the Crocs came off for the big reveal didn’t do the trick.

I never really got the hang of the slot machines either.  I prefer the ATM drill, where it spits money out at you if you are lucky enough to remember the right numbers.  It just seems wrong to sit there pushing perfectly good $20 bills into a machine for the privilege of listening to bells and whistles and then staring trancelike at a row of pictures of fruit and gold bricks, without having a clue about what it is that I want to come up.  I found Pac Man complicated, so I’m pretty  well lost at “Progressive Flaming 7’s with 20 lines”.

I know lots of people love to play the slots, but I had trouble concentrating, when merely a few feet away there were scantily clad young ladies the age of my daughters, wearing red and black bustiers and thong underwear dancing on the tables to a deafening beat.   I wanted to let them know that in a flash they will go from $20 dollar bills stuck in their thigh-high fishnet stockings, to Kleenex stuck in their sleeves, and they ought to start preparing for that eventuality with a little dignity.  They were really distracting, and I wanted to bring them a robe and a sandwich, and mostly a vat load of Purell.

We did have lots of laughs, but in true mean-girls fashion, they were usually at each other’s expense.  Highlights included my sister getting off at the end of the moving sidewalk in the airport, then realizing she had gone the wrong way, and she promptly tried to get back on, heading the other way.  Like it was going to magically change direction.  (She thinks the world revolves around her).  Naturally it tried to toss her off, which still makes me smile when I think of it.

However, we were able to stay true to one part of the Hangover movie . No, it wasn’t a tiger in the bathroom.  In spite of not actually having been roofied, we did have considerable difficulty remembering stuff.    We had many false alarms, where each of us separately thought we lost something critical – a wallet, a passport, etc., only to find it shortly thereafter,  –  sometimes after having made a scene like chasing a cab down the driveway or rooting through the garbage in the airport – and always in a location where we ourselves had placed it.  The worst memory lapse was the morning after “2 for 1 cocktails night” when we tried to remember who paid for dinner.  To make it easier on the waiter, I had paid the bill and the girls paid me.  At least some of them did.  Try as we might, we can’t remember who paid me and who didn’t.  We had to end up splitting the difference.

At this rate I think the next trip for the four of us might have to actually involve a tour bus and quite possibly, hanging onto a rope.  That’s fine, we’ll still be making memories … however fleeting they  may be.