In this newsletter, I’ve scattered a few links to corresponding songs. I invite you to take this musical journey with me.
I remember walking along the Las Vegas Strip on a Tuesday night in 2016. I was wearing a pencil skirt. Everyone’s always like, Oh, it takes forever to walk down The Strip. It’s much longer than you think. It’s even longer when you’re there for work, you’re not drunk, and you’re trying to put as much distance between yourself and your boy coworkers having the time of their lives at Top Golf.
I worked for an uncool company so my laptop was a 12 pound Dell. Not one of these hot young things like a Macbook. Nothing makes me blush more than when people ascribe the word sexy to anything that’s not human (i.e. “the interface on this new app for prescription wayfarers is so sexy”) but my Dell was not sexy. It was so heavy in my Liz Claiborne bag that my right shoulder was like a foot lower than my left shoulder. The steady banging of it against my hip once drew blood. It was just the slightest bit, but I’ll bet you OSHA hasn’t seen that before. As it made contact with my side, it pushed my skirt just the tiniest, tiniest bit to the right so that after 10 minutes of walking the zipper that was supposed to be in the middle of my back was creeping around to the front of my body. You know when you see a little kid who’s pulled their pants up themselves and the seam of the crotch is on the diagonal? It was like that. After 45 minutes of walking, my skirt could have done a whole 360. Like a real 1940s girl boss, I was wearing t-strap heels. And like if Tutankhamun was a girl boss, my feet were mummified, but not in linen and cats or whatever, but in Tough Strips Band-Aids. My feet absolutely BEG to be blistered (oh they’re so bad!), especially when navigating through Hell itself, so I was thankful for the (albeit hideous) protection. (My Dad hates gifts so one year my sister gave him Tough Strips for Christmas, knowing he’d use them. He’d always injure himself and then try to hide it from my Mom. “Oh, this hole that goes all the way through my hand? That’s nothing.” To this day, it’s still his favorite gift.)
I would have taken a cab back to my hotel but I was under scrutiny from HR for consistently expensing Uber Blacks to and from the airport. I always say, do what you can while you can. In high school, the girls on the cross country team who were good enough to get attention for injuries got special permission to wear gym shoes instead of dress shoes during the school day. The coach (“Coach”) would just write them a pass. One day I realized - My teachers don’t know I don’t have an injury. What are the chances they’ll ask for a pass? I took the chance. After a few weeks my art history teacher peered down, confused, and asked if I...had a pass. I did not...have a pass. (“Sorry! Just forgot it!”) Anyway, the next day and all the days after, it was back to Doc Martens for me. My injury was that I was just bad at running. No special shoe privileges for having parents without athletic genes.
I filmed this during said work trip and sent it to my sister. What can I say, Las Vegas inspired me <3
Where was I
Where am I
What is life
Oh, poetry
Vegas for work is tiresome. I went a few times. Vegas for fun is Heaven. I went once. It was my 30th birthday and a few friends and I were down to clown. Dirty 30s baby! (Shouldn’t it just be dirty 20s and your 30s are just kind of stained?) My friend Kaitlin arrived at the Cosmopolitan first, but because I’d accidentally given them her maiden name, she couldn’t check in. For four hours, she sat on her suitcase at the pool and waited. When the four of us finally united, we screamed for a while and then went to CVS to buy $100 worth of water. To get there, we passed through the swamp that was the hotel lobby casino. The cigarette smoke was so thick that it made bowling alleys in the 90s seem as if they’d imported their air straight from the Alps. I don’t know why my parents took us to bowling alleys as kids. It’s like they wanted to get us out of the house but only at the expense of giving us a 40% higher chance of lung cancer. It’s not infrequent that I’m walking through an airport, get a big whiff of smoke and think - There’s a bowling alley in here?! - only to find that I’m walking past a smoking lounge. I try not to make eye contact with the prisoners inside. They don’t want to have to be in there but they hardly have the physical choice. Kind of like when I was 10 and I’d be at an estate sale with my Mom. Hella cigarette smell in there, too.
The real cherry on top of my birthday sundae was that on Friday we’d be seeing my favorite band, Diplo. He was playing (SPINNING) at world famous Encore Beach Club, a Wynn Nightlife property. I’m kidding when I say he was my favorite band, because my actual favorite band is the Ken Burns Civil War documentary soundtrack. (I remember replaying Johnny Has Gone For A Soldier in the car on the way to high school, a single tear rolling down my cheek, with complete conviction that in my past life, I was the mother to a boy who’d gone off to war. To make it even sadder, I didn’t approve of the sweetheart he’d left behind. She was kind of annoying, terrible posture, and acted like my Jasper was actually HERS. The gall…Oh well, back to my darning...) Judge me if you will, but I kind of love club music. Sorry. I love to party. I love a good bass. I love it when the beat drops, because it always does. In life, we aren’t always guaranteed a beat drop, and if it happens we never know when it will so we’re always caught off guard and the feeling is unsettling. But when you queue up Animals (Radio Edit) - Martin Garrix, you’re guaranteed a sweet, sweet reward a mere 58 seconds in. (I actually had to Google best beat drop songs because I have no idea what I’m talking about. Whatever, humans are naturally contradictory. I just like a good time.)
It feels weird to be putting on makeup at 10 AM on a Saturday when you’re not going to a baptism, but Vegas demanded that we look our absolute best. We were feeling pretty fresh after the previous night’s waters, and being 30, we wanted to bring a sense of refinement to the weekend. I wore my nicest pair of khakis, a twinset, and some sensible loafers I bought on sale at Clarks. Jk. I wore a sundress, which in Vegas is basically the same thing. In Vegas you could wear a hat and absolutely nothing else and nobody would bat an eye, because their attention would be focused on the woman wearing nothing, with no hat, and even then it’s kind of whatever. At 10:30 we went to the lobby to get our taxi with a million other people equally primped and pre-sloppy. Okay. Let’s get real. Las Vegas is Hell. I’m not stupid. It’s disgusting and wrong, but when all walks of life are there to have a good time, when 3 strangers - one with leg tattoos, one in head-to-toe Chanel, and one with leg tattoos and head-to-toe Chanel - are all doing a shot together, it’s a beautiful thing. Kumbaya, brought to you by Absolut. In Las Vegas, there is no past and there is no future. There is just the present. Las Vegas is Buddhism and DJ Snake is God.
The Encore Beach Club opened its doors at 11 AM and we arrived 7 minutes after. Besides the staff, there was no one else there. Apparently it’s cool to show up late to a beach club just like it is to a house party or anywhere else. My Grandma lived in an assisted living facility where the residents would wait outside the dining hall doors at 3:30 pm for dinner. That’s what it felt like. It felt like Easter Mass and my Mom rushing us around (“We are NOT going to have to split up” so we arrive 50 minutes before it starts, and sure enough, every pew is empty. Nonplussed, my Mom walks us all the way to the front, and then naturally, “Where is your father?”) Tell me, where do Dads go? Where do they always go??? Someone needs to write a parody of the Where Have All The Cowboys Gone? song about Dads:
I will do the laundry
If you pay all the bills
Where is My Dad?
Where is Your Dad?
Seriously, where is Dad?
Where have all the Dads gone?
(The answer is to find a bathroom.)
Once we got over the fact that we weren’t cool, we happily realized that we could find the best daybed by the pool to start drinking on. Except oops, all the beds and literally every plastic chair were reserved and cost a thousand dollars, so we sat on the concrete and talked about someone’s aunt or something, you know something adult women talk about. As we loosened up with a few vodka sodas (“So she grew up in Texas but moved her family to California? Oh, interesting…”) people gradually trickled in. Human gods and goddesses dressed to the nines. Men in necklaces and women in stilettos like drunk royalty.
It could have been Covid’s coming out party. People and droplets galore. So many bodies in the pool that you could barely see water, and the water that you did see was probably vodka (“vokka”). In college we used to do this thing called “flying” where you basically drink to the point of total confidence and then just wander around and make friends with people to eventually bring back to the group. Let’s just say we had more success flying in Des Moines than at the Encore Beach Club, a Wynn Nightlife property. My sundress wasn’t doing me any favors and for some reason the group of males who looked like they could have all been named Aristotle didn’t find us hilarious/they didn’t notice us. Whatever. We were strong, independent women and could buy $50 appetizer sampler platters for ourselves. We didn’t see anyone else eat the whole day. Just us.
After plenty of trash drinks and trash food we were on top of the world. I made sure to self-care myself too, with frequent coconut waters and trips to the bathroom where the old Polish woman attendant would sunscreen my back (I think I acted sooo nice, like wanting her to think I’m “one of the good ones,” asking her if she had kids and stuff, HATE MYSELF, at least I tipped her like a million dollars). In no time at all (it had been 5 hours), Diplo came on stage and stood there with his headphones and his records (?) and stuff. What. A. Blast. Have you ever been having the absolute time of your life, everything’s so so so great, you’re just IN it, and you’re dancing so unbelievably well that you’re like - Oh my God, I think I’m... becoming famous…? Like you’re dancing so good that there’s no possible way that you couldn’t be becoming famous? I have. I think I love Vegas because in my heart I know I am meant to dance.
Understandable then that I needed to rest on one of the coveted daybeds an hour later. The four of us lied there, laughing, delirious. Once again, we were the only people there besides the staff. The party had ended (is there anything sadder?). It was time for everyone else to move on to their other plans, and for us to get kicked out. We ordered pizza at the hotel. I’d learned the hard way that if you so much as blow on a Diet Coke in the mini fridge, you get charged for it, so I nursed a warm Smartwater and listened to the tune of the gals mumbling, “Should we go out tonight?” in their sleep. It was a beautiful scene. All was well. We had found a small part of Heaven in Hell.
I found some footage. I watched it and immediately felt an anxiety attack coming on. So this is just a screenshot. This is Diplo.