November 27, 2005
tRIP: Saturday Festivities
Saturday I slept in, which felt wonderful.
After getting moving, I met up with The Crew at Mon Ami Gabi, which is the sidewalk cafe at Paris. Dave and Marc seem to like to sit outdoors by the sidewalk, and watch the crowd go by. There were 10 of us, so we had to sit at 2 tables. Eating outside is nice, but not when it is so windy your drink keeps getting blown over. One table of us moved inside, the other didn't seem to have a problem.
The plan was to see our respective shows, and then meet for dinner at Emeril's. I've seen the Broadway version of Avenue Q very recently, and I really wanted to see Henry Rollins talking show in person once, and he was only playing once at House of Blues in Mandalay Bay. So I sold my ticket to Avenue Q to Hilly, and went to see Henry.
I should have asked how long Mr. Rollins would talk, turned out to be two and a half hours, which meant my 7:30 show lasted until 10:00, an hour later than the reservation for dinner. I got there just as they were closing.
Emeril's does a really nice surf and turf. It was very yummy.
After dinner, we went to Olympic Gardens, a large strip club kind of at the far end of the strip. It is one of the classier places, supposedly, but I found it to be just an uncomfortable, badly-maintained, place with naked women in it shaking down desperate, frustrated, chumps for far more money than the whole experience is really worth.
The draw of the Olympic Gardens is that it has male strippers upstairs, dancing for the women. Dave, Haley, Hilly (who is also Dave, btw), Chris, Mike, and Sue, all went upstairs. But I didn't really have anyone to impress by staying up there, and I long since got tired of being at strip clubs to watch other patrons react. So I hung out downstairs. They had a great time upstairs. I'm surprised they stayed downstairs once they realized the female strippers were mostly second string. This is not a busy time of year for the strip clubs, it seems.
Surprise, surprise, I had a great time. I wasn't expecting to. I ended up attracting strippers, who would sit and talk. I fell in love (briefly) with one stripper that turned out to be a total geek. I knew this when she told me her name was (I think) "Shara, which means leprosy in Hebrew". She had earlier told me she "was a trouper". Not a normal M.O. for a stripper. She was also into The Sims, World of Warcraft, and assorted Anime.
After Olympic Gardens we played some more craps, then turned in for the night at like 3 AM.
Posted by Wookie at November 27, 2005 01:41 PM