LAS VEGAS -- This is a sad little city. It's sad because someone hurt its feelings. Mike Tyson, the big meanie. Land of the weird,
home of the strangeNow, you may think that it is impossible to hurt the feelings of a city that was built by gangsters and now has absolutely no shame about promoting a road production of "Grease," starring Sally Struthers. That's right. Sally Struthers.
You thought her entire career was raising money for starving children, even though it looks like if she skipped a few meals not so many kids would be starving. Hey, that's not mean. If I skipped a few meals, there might not be as many starving children either. I'm just saying that you don't usually associate the little dumpling from the old "All in the Family" show with entertainment. Unless you are in Vegas.
But Vegas has embraced Struthers, along with a huge ensemble of other personalities cast off by the fickle public, like Mackenzie Philips, who had a long-running gig as a drug abuser after her television show, "One Day At At Time," folded. She's in "Grease" too. Even the elfin Gary "What-You-Talkin'-About-Willis" Coleman is loved in Vegas. And John Tesh, who's not technically washed up, is here putting on one of his Extreme Elevator Music concerts. And he is loved.
Cynics will say Vegas is a town for losers. It's really a town for second chances. And that's why it seems like everyone around here is in a funk about the way Mike Tyson bit a chunk out of this city's pride. And damn it, it was his second chance. This weird little collection of strange architecture and big dreams gave him a chance to redeem himself and he betrayed it. He treated Evander Holyfield like a $2.95 buffet.
I arrived in Vegas the day after Tyson staged his own version of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." At the national columnists convention in Williamsburg, Va., my colleagues were incredulous. "Why would ANYONE want to go to Vegas?" I said, "A guy was paid $30 million to take a bite out of another fella's head. I gotta be there."
Bryon Umebayashi is another guy who had to be in Vegas. He came from Kailua a year ago when he realized he'd never be able to buy a house in Hawaii. Now he's working at New York-New York, the new hotel and casino designed to look like the New York skyline, complete with a Brooklyn Bridge, 150-foot-tall Statue of Liberty and a roller coaster that can do amazing things to a stomach full of 99-cent shrimp cocktails.
He's like a lot of Hawaii transplants who have made Vegas their home. When he gets homesick, he just pops downtown where he's bound to see someone he knows from Hawaii visiting the California Hotel, although more are beginning to stay on the strip. There are also several other Hawaii residents working at New York-New York. They figure if they can make it here, they can make it anywhere. Except Hawaii.
"I'll own a condo within a year," Bryon says. Second chances. That's what Vegas is about.
"We were let down," Bryon says. He's talking as a Vegas resident about Tyson, not as a Kailua kid about the Hawaii economy. But it could be either.
I do my best to cheer up this sad little city. "This hand bites worse than Tyson," I say when I draw five horrible cards in Caribbean Stud. The dealer grimaces. Apparently I'm no Gary Coleman.