Went To See The Gypsy
We took to the road again last week, stealing a few days to spend together as our daughter’s piano and ballet school, The French Conservatory, was having a recital in Las Vegas.
It’s not too long of a drive, around two hundred and eighty miles or so and you don’t cross into Nevada until the very last part of the journey. I was reminded of the heat, dust and emptiness of much of Southern California as the car devoured its battery life. We passed through the Mojave Desert, drove alongside an endless freight train or two and bought sodas at California’s largest gas station where the temperatures were hot and the wind was hotter.
Gold was the first thing I noticed as we approached Las Vegas. Gold plated towers glinted loudly in the late afternoon sunshine. They served to set the tone. After hundreds of miles of dust and desert the technicolor of the Strip appeared, as if a vision conjured by a madman’s fevered brain. We stayed at the Mirage, one of the gigantic luxury casino hotels; it took me a moment to readjust my ability to deal with massive size and scale; felt like my head might explode. I’ve had a similar experience before when dealing with what passes in this continent of wonders for appropriate expressions of entertainment.
There were people everywhere and there was no escaping the scale of America’s eating issues. Covid seemed like a bad dream floating somewhere in somebody else’s past. Everyone was after something. Whether they found it, I can only hazard a guess. We took an evening stroll with our daughter. Our son’s fine sense of discernment had taken up residence in the sanctuary of the hotel room; our daughter’s six year old sensibility fell in love with the shlock glamour and technicolored tack. We wandered into the Venetian across the road; stopped to admire a gondola or two floating on an indecently turquoise canal and found ourselves in St Mark’s Place, staring up at a sky too impossible to be blue. After about half an hour of this level of wizardry the sky outside didn’t seem real either. My pity for the poor souls lost in a Lotus Eaters’ world of chips, fruit machines and ever vanishing dollars grew with each minute we stayed in this false paradise.
Fortunately for us, our true purpose for being in this desert bound landscape pulled us back out along the highway the following day. We drove to the Vegas suburb of Henderson which boasts an Italian Village and a picturesque venue for a recital, La Ponte Vecchio overlooking Lake Las Vegas. You could have been in any upscale American locale; worlds away from the Strip’s seedy ambience. The wind storm which had blown behind us on our way from Los Angeles was circling the weekend and, were it not for some dexterity in last minute adjustments, might have derailed the afternoon’s entertainment. That’s showbusiness I guess! In the end, all turned out splendidly and we took our seats for our first post Covid experience of live music and watched as talented pupils of various ages performed classical pieces upon the piano, violin and guitar with ballet pieces included at intervals followed by a superb selection of pieces from the Conservatory instructors.
I deeply admire the Conservatory for its steadfast commitment to the highest of standards in the teaching of traditional classical music and ballet. I’ve never found anything quite like it in all of our years in the US and I hope that they can bring their considerable cultural influence to bear as they move forward with their expansion into a Las Vegas branch.
For me, I was happy to leave the junk glamour and sorrow of Vegas in the rearview mirror. When we arrived home we heard that my husband had passed right by the spot of a fatal shooting which had occurred a couple of hours earlier that Sunday morning on Flamingo Road, one of the many wasteland streets which surround the Mecca of the Strip. There had been no trace left when he ran past. Most things will cost you in Vegas but death it seems comes cheap.
