I’ve never known how to behave around guys who call each other “bro.”
I didn’t grasp the implications until I took my seat on the plane: Friday, 5pm flight from New York to Vegas. Right…
I’m seated amidst a bachelor party of 27. After one run of the drink cart, they’d consumed all the alcohol on the plane. The pair next to me had four bloody marys between them and converted the contents, near-instantaneously, into fart form.
JFK is the most calamitous airport I’ve ever endured. Bamako runs more smoothly. On arrival yesterday, the gate staff couldn’t figure out how to get the cabin door open, so the full flight waited in the aisle for 20 minutes while they worked on it. Today, while taxiing on the runway, the captain announced we were 40th in line for takeoff, due to low visibility. We sat for 90 minutes without AC. The characteristically genial and soft-spoken New Yorkers onboard were shockingly expressive about the predicament.
Meanwhile, I slept.
Sleep has been a prized commodity lately. I had to get up before 6am this morning to go on Good Morning America.
I’d post a video link if I could find one.
I still don’t know why I was on the show. I don’t think they do either. It would’ve made sense a month ago, when I was traveling across the US and passing through New York. They couldn’t schedule it, so they rebooked me for today. But I’m done with the US tour now, and the video won’t be finished for another 8 months. So I don’t really have anything to talk about.
But I can always dance, I suppose.
In person, Nicolette Sheridan could easily be mistaken for a drag queen. She stood on one side of the room, in front of the full-length mirror, while her handlers added one more pound of makeup to her face. It looked like fresh snow on an alpine precipice – one loose yodel and it could all come crashing down. I stood on the other side of the room while my handlers picked lint and dog hair off my collar.
When did it become normal for women to have orange skin? Is there some orange ethnicity — aside from Oompa Loompas?
Good Morning America has a Wii in their green room. It runs Big Brain Academy, part of the Japanese fad of IQ testing games. At the end of an examination, it tells you what career path you’re most suited for. I got “Marketing Guru.” Suzanne, the marketing guru who chaperones me to these things, played a round and was told she’d make an ideal “Adventurer.”
So there you go.
I’m in Las Vegas now at the Orleans hotel and casino. Suzanne says it’s known as the “Poorleans.” Be that as it may, I got a free upgrade, and my room far exceeds the chair count benchmark set by that scene in Knocked Up. I have twelve chairs in my room – that’s not even counting the wraparound couch.
Twelve chairs! I’ve only sat in two so far.
Vegas has its charms.
I walked here from the airport. I’m pretty sure I’m the first person whose ever done that, even though you could throw a rock from the runway and hit the strip. The layout here is openly hostile toward the peripatetic.
Had dinner at the Hooters casino. My waiter was named Tom.
Where are your hooters, Tom?
I felt kinda jipped until I realized I was in the Dan Marino steakhouse within the Hooters casino – which apparently supersedes the established Hooters precepts. Anything goes.
The billboards on every major road in Las Vegas tout comedians who I assumed had died long ago. Louis Anderson? George Wallace? Rich Little? Seriously. Rich Little?
It strikes me that even on the billboards – The Billboards – these people look deeply unhappy.
And who the hell is Danny Gans? Am I supposed to have heard of Danny Gans?
Fortunately, my reason for being in Las Vegas has nothing to do with Las Vegas. It is so colossally interesting and I am so flipping giddy about it that I can’t even get into it right now. I’ll have to report after the fact. Time for bed.