Nearly clairvoyant!

In the last post I said that the set list for the concert was 12-15 songs. It was 15 songs, and they were:

• 
  Bennie And The Jets(Stagecraft: Letters modeled after casino signage dropped down from the ceiling, spelling out "Elton". Elton John's piano is on a red star with white neon acrylic underlay.)
• Philadelphia Freedom(They broke out the video screen and used video effects last seen on "The Electric Company", early pictures of Elton John in nutted-out 70's regalia. Also, lots of neon-graveyard effects on both sides of the stage.)
• 
  Believe(Video screened movie of male dancer in black-and-white pirouetting around black-and-white hotel lobby. Giant inflatable roses on the stage.)
  
• Daniel(Essentially a farewell-teenager-sent-to-Vietnam montage on the big video screen.)
  
• Rocket Man(Aforementioned video.)
  
• I Guess That's Why They Call It The Blues(Black and white photo montages of alternately happy and sad people.)
  
• Tiny Dancer(Giant heart medallion drops down near piano.)
  
• Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me(Video of male and female dancer alternately arguing and seducing each other.)
  
• I Want Love(More neon graveyard stuff. I don't remember if they used the video wall for this.)
  
• Candle In The Wind(Marilyn Monroe montage on video wall. He played the original version of this, and left the stage briefly.)
  
• Pinball Wizard(Here's where it got pretty crazy. He came back in a different pair of shoes, and the neon on stage went insane. 2-foot balloons are dropped from the ceiling. There was a hilarious video featuring pinball machines, but more specifically, slot machines, casinos, lap dancers at Treasures, crowds on the Strip, and a stone-faced blackjack dealer with huge mall hair whose expression never changes as people fly past. If aliens arrived and needed a quick explanation of Las Vegas, I would have gotten them front-row seats to this thing, told them to watch the movie, look at the performer, look at the people surrounding you, and that's all you need to know.)
  
• The Bitch Is Back(Giant inflatable legs clad in fishnet stockings inflate stage left. A bubble machine starts up. The video is Pamela Anderson in stripper attire, gyrating around a pole. On stage by the end of this number: giant inflatable lipstick, cherries and bananas arranged suggestively, the giant inflatable breast above stage right.)
  
• I'm Still Standing(Another 70's montage video that was difficult to see because there was still a good deal of inflatable objects on the stage.)
  
• Saturday Night's Alright (For Fighting)Ushers move down into the front rows in the orchestra pit. As soon as he starts playing, he gestures for people to come up. My first thought is, "Plants or fan club types." This is not stuff that a headlining performer does. But then I remember that we had to go through metal detectors at the front gate, and this would apparently be why.
  
• Your SongGiant L-V-E letters inflated on stage. Stage workers put up a fight with "O" and drag it off stage, but the heart neon thing is perfectly placed. I'm not sure if that was supposed to happen or not, it seems too coincidental to NOT be faked. Coming down on the top of it is a standing figure in a chrome, feathered outfit, bowler hat. The crowd goes nuts. John walks out stage right, looks up, and says, "Who's that guy?" The flashback Elton is hoisted into the rafters.
  

We also hit Tangerine, the latest bar-of-the-moment at Treasure Island, excuse me, the TI. For me the TI is always going to be the blue calculator that drew me parabolas when I was 14, but the Treasure Island folks are doing their damndest to make you forget that this was Mirage Resorts' "family-friendly" outlet.

I don't know why I bother to go to these places, and neither does Natalie, but she said that some students of hers were working there and said it was impressive. So for a little while, we'd play along. We don't get out as much as we used to think we did and have a tendency to grab as much fun as we can as fast as we can.

The whole entrance is covered in white linen, not unlike a biohazard tent, and lit with orange lights. We walked through the rope lines, which weren't full, and I promptly forked over a $20 cover charge. We walked in and the second thing that I noticed was that the bar was sunken, so it looked to be staffed by midgets. The other thing that I noticed is it gave you no place to sit down. We headed out to the back, where there were places to sit down. There were bar stools all along the lagoon where the pirate ships fight. The show started about 10 minutes after we stood there. All of the bar stools were taken, but there were some sumptuous leather couches that had little "reserved" signs by them.

No seating available, so we stood and watched the show. They changed it in February to "The Sirens of TI." Here's what this means: One of the crews is now made up of women in PG-13 outfits. There's singing and semi-seductive dancing. You will stand in line longer and there are more fireworks. That's it.

The area cleared out afterwards, including a couple of barstools! Joy! We sit down and look at the throngs of people clearing out across the lagoon. An employee comes up and says, "We need to move these chairs out." They have just removed the last non-reserved seating from the establishment. We look around the place; big room, deejay, small stage where the performers might be. Cigars for sale. Finally, we've had enough; we've been here for only a half-hour. As we're leaving, I ask a bouncer, four inches taller than me: what's it take to get a reserved table?

"Bottle service," the bouncer replies.

I roll my eyes. He goes on: "$150 for a bottle of wine, all the way up to $750 for Courvosier. Skyy Vodka's $350. It usually works best for a group of four to six people." Yeah, and it works really, really good for a club that charges $37.50 for a glass of wine that's not even that hot. And if Skyy's going for $350, that's about $348 too much.

Nat and I ran the math. So there's women in lingerie dancing on the bar. Okay. But for $150, I can waltz right into Sapphire, pay the same cover charge, be assured of a place to sit, and the women in lingerie are dancing a lot closer than the bar. And I didn't happen to ask what a bottle of Bombay Sapphire would cost at Tangerine, but if Courvosier's $750 and Skyy's $350, I'd anticipate around $400-for $400 at Sapphire I'd be carried out in a smoke-and-baby-powder coma. And it would be DAWN.

Perhaps I'm too old and married to appreciate the Vegas club "scene," but I've now been to ghostbar, Tangerine, and Club Rio, and didn't like any of them. I paid $75 for VIP at Texas Station's Armadillo Lounge and had all-you-can-drink, and THAT was fun. I'll go see Darby O'Gill and the Little People at GVR and that's a $3 cover (!) and that's always fun. And to be told that you couldn't dance at ghostbar-in short, you had waited in line to stand around, drink, and admire the view, invited unflattering comparisons to places like Images at the John Hancock Center in Chicago. At least there were chairs to accompany the view there.

We headed back to Caesars, where we'd parked, and passed an oxygen bar in the corridor. We had always been intrigued by these places; I've seen them at several of the hotels. We decided, what the hell. "If you've been drinking oxygen intensifies the buzz and you won't have as bad of a hangover," the chipper young woman told us, and we were certainly ripe candidates for that. Then again, I don't get hangovers unless there's cheap wine or extreme intoxication involved, and if you're asking "how extreme?" it's somewhere past six or seven pints of G&T. She unwrapped sets of nose clips for us and off we went.

I chose Sublime, because it had limes in it, and spent most of my time fiddling with the knobs. The oxygen bar is right near the exit, and the dopey and curious were looking at us strangely. I pointed out loudly that you're not really having fun until there's tubes stuck up your nose, and eight of the people looking at us left. I tipped the sales staff to alleviate any discontent about chasing away the curious. Those weren't customers. They were morons. The additional oxygen didn't have much effect on anything, as far as I could tell.

And that was the end of our evening. We were offered scalp massages and various homeopathic gewgaws, we politely declined.

Guess we're not Strip people.