THE BIG FAKE
Vegas. It’s an exciting city. Lots of glitz and glam. Lights, lights, and more lights. If you’d like to get your 20,000 steps in over the course of a day, it is your kind of gig. However, if you struggle with any type of addiction, I suggest you discover another location for your next vacation!
Last year, thanks to Covid, we had to find a last-minute fill-in for our long-awaited vacation. Vegas would do in a pinch. The sky is customarily a gorgeous blue hue, the temperatures are great, and the humidity is almost nonexistent. It is an urban area built in the middle of a vast, bone-dry desert.
And, if people-watching is one of your favorite little amusements, it is the best vacation EVER. Wow.
The place is stuffed with ordinary people trying to feel extraordinary for a weekend. Run-of-the-mill Midwesterners masquerading as rich and famous for a dizzying few days. Most are dressed like the rest of us schmoes, but then there are the standouts. You can tell they spent a lot of money to look provocative. Rich. Unique. Forgive me for being a bit judgmental, but I perceive many to look, well, inauthentic.
And there was the casino. I was enjoying my chalupa on the patio of a charming little Mexican restaurant when I noticed the gambling establishment. Like all local casinos, it was gorgeous. Massive bastions of stunning craftsmanship designed to evoke the wow effect.
But, on closer inspection, I noticed that the large building beneath the construction cranes was actually—a massive canopy of material. The top floors were fake. Bogus. A perfectly designed covering of cloth was draped over the upper floors of the casino to make it appear as though there was no construction going on underneath it. It seemed to be a perfect building—but it was all bogus. A well-designed counterfeit. An image of perfection.
