Mommy, what are bail bonds?

C O N T E N T S

My Favorite Flick
By Don George, Editor

Las Vegas
By Cynthia Gorney
- Books on Las Vegas
- Getting there

D E P A R T M E N T S

Postmark: Bangkok
By Steve Van Beek

Passages:
"Under the Tuscan Sun"
By Frances Mayes
- Books on Tuscany
- Getting there

Table Talk
- Readers' Tips
and Tales

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Your virtual travel agency

I L L U S T R A T I O N   B Y   L I N D A   H E L T O N

BY CYNTHIA GORNEY | our first morning in Las Vegas we woke on the ninth floor of a black glass pyramid, and my 12-year-old son lifted the window shade, which tilted back over his head at a diagonal, as one might expect a pyramid window shade to do. We had a view of a castle. The sun was extremely bright. We sat inside the pyramid and studied the castle for a while. Then we got on the elevator, which rises and falls at a 39-degree angle along one side of the pyramid and so is described in the overhead signs as the Inclinator, and we walked to a restaurant with hieroglyphics on the upholstery and Nubian sculptures on the walls.

My husband examined the breakfast menu. "Cairo Lox and Onions," he said. He appeared to be addressing no one in particular as he read aloud straight down the left side of the menu, a note of wonder in his voice. "Pyramid Special," my husband said. "Eggs Benedict á la Cheops."

A woman walked by in very tiny star-spangled shorts, her midriff oiled, a golden crucifix shining from deep within her cleavage.

My 9-year-old daughter wondered if she could have a pancake.

"Pass me a Keno card," my daughter said. Keno is like Bingo, except that in Las Vegas it is arranged for your personal convenience so you can simultaneously place bets and lose cash while buttering your toast and enjoying your breakfast. The Keno ladies will strut right to your table in their amazing little outfits and take your cards and money while you work out pencil calculations on the place mat. Joanna, my daughter, is good at arithmetic and every time she filled out a Keno card she added up the money she would have won if she had won, which in fact she did not, partly because her numbers never came up and partly because her parents declined to give her dollar bills with which to place real bets. As parents we were somewhat unclear on the concept, to be candid about it. Was wagering together at the breakfast table meant to be one of the New Family Attractions in Las Vegas? "Come on, Dad," coaxed Aaron, our 12-year-old, nudging his father for a fiver to put down on the next round, but Bill gave him one of those not-in-this-lifetime looks and Aaron adroitly changed tack.

"So OK, let's talk about video games," Aaron said. "We'll need a LOT of money for video games."

I ate my toast (burned, I noted; it's hard to ruin toast, but the hieroglyphics-upholstery cooks had managed it) and wrote this down. I am a newspaper writer by training and sometimes when I am unable to summon an appropriate response to the visual cues around me, I take notes, as though I were on deadline in front of a train wreck. I had taken notes the night before at the hotel registration desk, where my husband set down the suitcases while a lady in her bridal dress walked around beside the barges that carried people along the Nile River inside the hotel. There were also some talking camels. To approach the next desk clerk you had to walk around what appeared to be a full-size Egyptian barge sail, and the bellmen wore bloomers and interesting silk turban thingies. At the top of a set of escalators a large illuminated mezzanine was ringed, unaccountably, by a backdrop skyline of Manhattan. Perhaps they have confused Manhattan with Cairo, I thought for a moment, but plainly I was still rooted in bourgeois logic and had not yet grasped the "world of dreams and fantasy for people of all ages." That was the language of a press release forwarded to me from the Las Vegas News Bureau, which is efficient at composing prose of this nature. "A one-stop, multidimensional resort destination." "A non-gaming fantasy world of imagination designed to attract a spectrum of domestic and international travelers spanning all ages and economic status."

Since "people of all ages" is the time-honored public relations code phrase for Bring Your Children, some of these exuberant press releases had in recent months turned up in the editorial offices of a family magazine I sometimes write for, along with enough upbeat newspaper articles about the new Las Vegas that a nice editor had called to ask how I would feel about taking my family to have a look. "Las Vegas," I said dubiously into the telephone, within earshot of my son, who whooped loudly enough to be heard on the other end of the line. "Yes," Aaron yelped, doing that fist-pumping thing kids do when overcome by emotion. "They have the BEST VIDEO ARCADES IN THE WORLD. Tell her YES!"