take the bus to fremont street at your own risk

last week i went to vegas with derek for his big national convention. correction - we went to LAKE las vegas, a spot outside of the city where all the new resorts are being built now. did you know they actually have places in nevada where you can't smoke, there's no gambling, and you can't even shop? we do. loews lake las vegas resort (fancy schmancy shit, eh?) is like being in the netherworld of the sin city area.

while there we met a guy who said that one of his hobbies was vacationing, which at first seemed at bit crazy, but once i thought about it became a revelation of sorts. i am not good at relaxing. i needed a chance to get away from my life. thus, having little distraction was an inadvertent blessing for me. i read an entire book (bitter is the new black by jen lancaster- me likee, it funny) while hanging out with my ipod stuffed in my ears. i lounged about and ate like a fat girl. one thing i can say for derek's new employers? they know how to feed people at a hoo-ha.

derek sneaked me into some general sessions to hear both of the keynote speakers for the convention, sugar ray leonard and ben stein. does sugar ray ever age? he's cute as a button and super fun in a crowd; the type of guy who could work a party and everyone would be happy you invited him. he even let some people take pictures with his gold medal and a championship belt. when ben stein spoke it was a rattle of forty billion topics coming at you rapid fire with some witticisms peppered in between. he's not such a great joke teller, what with his odd delivery and all, but he is very smart and it was like watching a paradox jump out of a cake at times. i followed most of it with ease (hey, i DO occasionally pay attention to derek's work) with the exception of one little homophone mistake:

what george heard - as we turns our gays towards iraq... QUOI?!?!
what ben stein really said - as we turn our gaze towards iraq

friday night we took a resort shuttle to the strip. now honestly, why do they make the only "free night" of the convention on a weekend when things will be crazier than than a shithouse bat out there? if i were in charge, as we all know i should be, par-tay nite would be a thursday. this way it would still be rockin' enough for those who needed a weekend feel, without all the weekend tourists throwing up in the washrooms. but no one was listening to me.

i mean really, how many washrooms downtown should have vomit in them? apparently all of them, right? that's what people must have thought the weekend that we were there. i'm too old for that shit. i have way more class than that. AND i am the most demure thrower-upper in the history of regurgitation. at least that's what mary says.

anyhoos, in order to get a bus back to loews and spare ourselves a sixty dollar cab ride, we had to be back to the bally's meeting point by 11 pm. if you ask me, and once again they did not bother to ask me, 11 pm is a draconian hour to return from debauchery on the strip. however, i am a cheap girl, so it was better than actually paying to get back to squaresville, nevada. after taking a bus downtown for dinner, we wandered through the spontaneous gay pride parade that was stirring up bitch-screaming on fremont street and tried to get out of vomitville before the bus left without us. we bought a few postcards on the way out and strolled trough the whoop-a-dee-doo laser light show towards the bus to the strip. at around ten after ten, we asked the driver if we could make it to bally's by eleven.

"nope, it's a friday night and we won't make it. traffic is pretty bad."
"but it's just now after ten. we have to catch a bus back out to the middle of nowhere or else pay for a taxi if we don't get there by eleven. are you seeerrrrious?!?"
"yeah, it gets like this. good luck."

the double decker bus was so full that the driver eventually resorted to pausing at bus stops only to open the door and tell people that he wasn't letting anyone else on until he get could some of us off of his bus. after getting blocked into an intersection by a hummer stretch limo and sitting through innumerable redlights, the bus was still at a crawl. traffic was putting my nervous-breakdown-causing beverly hills commute in los crapeles (on really bad days? 8 miles = 2 hours, one way) to shame and we decided to get off around the stratosphere and sahara to catch the shiny new monorail to our stop.

flash forward: 10.43. picture me in heels, derek in a suit, and both of us flying off the bus like we'd been stung by bees. let me tell you something here - fat girls in heels are NOT supposed to run. whipping down the street to the sahara, because the bus never can just stop on the damn corner where you want them to stop so you can just cross the fucking street to your eventual sixty dollar cab ride doom, i developed muscles i never knew i had. unfortunately , those muscles are all used to wheeze. thinking it best not to run aimlessly full speed through a vegas casino, we stopped to ask where to find the monorail. do they always have to put rail stops as far away from your personal emergency as fucking possible? now that we had a destination we ran for it. i was sure we'd get tackled by some casino guard named princess juan for suspicious activity, but we managed to make it all the way to the back and all the way outside and all the way up the eighty thousand flights of stairs in time to see a train pulling away.

WHEEZE.
"oh piss, was that our train?!? i'm sorry, stimpy. maybe another one will come. these are going to be the most expensive postcards i've ever bought, aren't they?"
"it's okay. we'll just see. i'm going to get a monster drink from the machine and just sit here with my head in my hands. i bet we can still make it."
"yeah, gimme a sip. if we're going to throw up from running, it might as well be bright green to make the experience more vivid."
"i hope you really like those postcards. you might have some sixty dollar postcards there, yep."
WHEEZE.

it's coming up on the deadline for the last bus to nowhere now. stop one, stop two, stop three... come on, man! take us to bally's! as i contemplate adding to the vomit quota in las vegas, we finally finally finally pull up towards our rail stop at a tidy 11.02 pm. and wait a second, what's that? i can see the bus from here. a sigh of relief comes and my wallet stops sweating when i see derek pawing at the window in a state. i now realize that, although we can see the bus and it hasn't pulled away yet, we have to run through another gigantic casino just to get outside.

"wait for us! WAAAAAAIIIIIITTTTTT!!!" i'm waving my arms around and screaming like a junkie as we run down the monorail platform. at this point i have drool flying out of my mouth and absolutely no fear about any princess juan guards stopping us. my determination to be too cheap to take a taxi, especially when the bus to nowhere was clearly in sight, could overpower the entirety of any casino security force. i am in a dead sprint through bally's with my purse whapping against my body like a horse whip. did you know that running with a purse on your shoulder can really throw off your balance? if i didn't own rubber-soled heels, my dentist would be cashing in on a personal lottery right now. but damnit if i was going to lose those golden postcards. i had the strength of a girl who was reaching for the last cupcake in the whole of human existence and i was GOING TO GET ON THAT BUS.

so you can imagine my shock when we popped out the first set of side doors we saw and realized that the bus wasn't there. no bus to nowhere. no people. no nothing. my jaw dropped and i could feel myself about to pee on my own leg from frustration. "oh no. oh no, it's gone," i said wistfully as my head drooped and i tried to wheeze more quietly. then derek became my hero. he jerked his head to the left and pointed. "THERE IT IS! let's go!" he shouted. i was almost pissed off, just because i had finally resigned myself to just laying on the sidewalk and wallowing in tears made of green barf. (they don't actually arrest you for stuff like that in vegas, do they?) as we ran another block up the driveway to meet the driver, and yes it really was uphill once again, it occurred to me that he would get there first. i have a 28-inch inseam. a hedgehog can run faster than me, so why was i still running? he waved to me from the door of the bus. i slowed to a busy girl clipped walk tried to put myself back together, making a mental calculation of what i would do with my "found" sixty dollars. should i give derek at least thirty? he did run all the way to the bus.

stumble, stumble, wheeze. collapse. we climbed on the bus to nowhere to a few giggles as those people already waiting joked with us, "you made it, huh? cutting it a little close there, aren't you?" hehehe, glad you could join us." yeah, my cheap ass is very happy to be here. now i'm going to go look at my postcards and try to breathe. marveling on the luck of having such a dramatic moment turn out so well, i did a virtual victory dance in my seat, wheeze-injected as it was. i looked over at derek, whose head was lolling back and forth as he made tiny groaning noises and coughed.

"hey stimpy, are we gonna start working out this week?" i smiled.
"NOT FUNNY YET."


what i'm doing this weekend:
improv show
opening of youth show
more rehearsals