ShoWest Diaries: Days 3 and 4 - Journey to the Center of the Earth, 21 Premier Party, and My Dinner With Christian Bale

In which our exhausted reporter loses track of time and space but gets her very own Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D spelunking head lamp.

The longer a person stays in Vegas, the more it starts to mess with your head. By the latter days of ShoWest 2008, as I walked the path to and fro my ultra-deluxe lodgings at the TravelLodge, conveniently located between the henna tattoo parlor and the 7-11, I found myself thinking a lot about the girls, each displaying their own unique brand of naked, featured on the infinite number of handbills littering the sidewalk. Mostly I found myself thinking about their parents, wondering how many of them looked at their sweet baby girl and thought, "Someday I hope she grows up to have pictures of her lovely birthday suit clog the sewers of Las Vegas."

But this is such a totally downer thought to have, completely unworthy of Vegas. Have another tequila squishy and fuhgettaboutit!

This was actually the second time in my life I've been to Vegas, and both times, in fact, I was there on business. The first time was for an educational media conference; essentially a group of teachers, librarians, and educational media purveyors gathering to explore the exciting world of educational documentary. The first evening of the conference I showed up at the scheduled "meet and greet" cocktail party to find the lobby empty and nothing but the dregs of some wine in a box, potato chip crumbs, and some wilted broccoli and congealing ranch dip. Eventually I found the rest of the attendees in another part of the hotel sitting politely in attendance at a new educational Holocaust documentary. That was actually kind of a high point of the conference (don't get me started on the ants in my room), and I think it's fair to say I was looking forward to an opportunity to replace the painful memories of that experience with something a little more, how you say, not shit.

Naked handbills aside, mission accomplished! By day three I have seen so many movies (none involving the life cycle of the salamander), accumulated so many free t-shirts, eaten at so many free buffets, and still found time to buy some new shoes and see Cirque du Soleil, that I am quite convinced that Vegas is the happiest place on earth. Plus, there are no ants in my room.

Article Author: Kati Irons

I am a film and music librarian for a public library system. Like many of my kind, I suffer from RKS, or Random Knowledge Syndrome. These musings are the inevitable end result of that condition.

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