A weekend in Vegas
Q: You wanna know what the most interesting thing about the month of February is? A: Absolutely nothing. OK, sure, the Aquarian/Pisces firmament is bejeweled with such dazzlers as Valentine’s Day, Groundhog Day, Presidents Day, Chinese New Year’s, Ayn Rand Day and, of course, who among us could possibly forget National Baked Alaska Day?
Oh, man, how the revelry has petered out.
Unless one can afford to jet down to Rio for Carnivale, there ain’t nothin’ left worth upchucking against a sodium lamppost for, unless one wants to count piss-poor Mardi Gras faking its usual February maleficence as frolicsome fun.
Face it, fellas: Winter’s gone weary; spring hasn’t sprung. Our New Year’s resolutions are now about as pure as yesterday’s driven slush, and, with prissy, puritanical Lent suddenly looming monolithically before us, just what’s there left to do except dress up like steampunk freaks and toss good money at bad. Indeed, cherished readers, boredom can be quite expensive!
Case in point: Dear Howard here just returned from a world-class, weekend losing streak in Las Vegas. Just for the record, I loathe gambling. What little I do gamble, I prefer my wallet upon leaving a casino be larger than when I entered. That leaves little wiggle room but to sally-up to the roulette wheel and drop one’s wad on either red or black. Its 50/50 winning odds are the best you’re gonna get.
Yet, somehow, Hit-Me-Again-Howard here spent all of last weekend squandering solid Benjamins over and over on exactly the wrong winning color — every single time! Like, what are the chances of, given just two colors, never once winning? Well, 50/50 — that’s what one’s chances are. Every single spin.
Oh, well. At least there are always plenty of shows. Unfortunately, though, Vegas’s entertainment spectacles are equally rigged: RuPaul’s Drag Race, LIVE! — a residency show at the Flamingo — being a prime example.
Illuminating Vegas’s common practice of incorporating bait-&-switch tactics to fill seats, poor Joe Schmoe, who flew all the way from Idaho just to catch an up-close glimpse of his idol, RuPaul, will depart Vegas sadly disappointed upon discovering that in no way does Ru, herself, participate live, in the flesh, in her own fuckin’ spectacle! In fact, so angry was the person seated next to me that he suggested we go Dutch in sending Ru a beautiful M3gan doll as thanks.
Yes, RuPaul nary graces an appearance at her nightly, eponymic LIVE Drag Race, and her Vegas residency flounders for it. Her entire show of nothing but five prior seasons of Drag Race winners mincing through an “audience-favorite” runoff competition — replete with a buffed-up himbo “pit crew” donning gold lame wife-beaters, all prancingly swirling and twirling about at a fever pitch in a desperate bid to keep the audience half-way lusting to fuck something up on stage as it’s forced endure more than two hours of lip-syncing by talent-free pool with names as unimaginative as their dazzle-free performances.
Truman Capote is credited to have remarked (jadedly, no doubt), “There is such a thing as life-saturation: the point when everything is pure effort and total repetition.” Clearly, Capote had never experienced a staging of Puppetry of the Penis, now permanently playing (when not on world tour) at its Las Vegas residency, the Jewel Box Theatre, located inside Sin City’s rather grandly named Erotic Heritage Museum.
The true exuberance with Puppetry of the Penis is how everything about this howler lives down so smarmily to one’s very lowest tongue-in-cheek expectations — from the mangy, crushed red velvet stage curtain with its tatty gold-fringe swag, to the audience’s folding metal chairs — reminiscent of condemned laundromats and ’70s potluck church socials. Oh, and for anyone worried about the embarrassment of possibly being, uhm, involuntarily aroused during showtime; well, fear not, pretty piggy.
Inviolate are Nevada’s laws permitting “blue” performances onstage in front of a general-viewing, public audience. Enforcement is two-fold: Via threat of imprisonment, all male performers are forbade achieving onstage erections; moreover, to touch the genitalia of another fellow performer (accidentally, be damned) equally guarantees a night spent in the pokey.
As our two, well-cloaked puppet masters spouted these arcane statutes of what we would and wouldn’t be enjoying for our viewing pleasure, their blue-draped Dracula capes slowly began fluttering down to the floor and, finally, grins spreading ear-to-ear, they hooted, “So, you twisted fuckers, y’all ready to see some dick?”!
Little Known Fact: When flaccid, any adult human penis, irrespective of size (believe it or not) can create an entire menagerie of zoological wonders! Nor, apparently, is penile origami dependent upon swingin’ a big, grinning Louisville Slugger between one’s legs, as both performers at my show possessed junk that one could only label, to put it kindly, as being merely “family-sized.”
Tis stunning what just a mere pair of ordinary human testicles attached to a limp, fleshy four-inch tubesnake can create: A bird’s nest of hungry chicks, for instance, fighting for a worm from mama, a sea mollusk, a pelican or giant snails.
Gradually, we move further up the food chain to a human’s beating heart, and brain, traveling round the world to view the Eiffel Tower in Paris and witness a squatting Australian aborigine blowing into a long horn known as a didgeridoo before heading to Hollywood for a sight of Princess Leia’s hairdo, Miley Cyrus swingin’ atop her wrecking ball and a seductive Kim Kardashian smiling over-the-shoulder at her colossal ass with its monumental butt crack. And as a cherry on top, we were off to the movies for a play-by-play reenactment of the infamous basement dance from The Silence of the Lambs. Nonetheless, I have to say my personal origami favorite was the passing of Olympic torches (in direct violation, too, I noticed, regarding touching a fellow performer’s family jewels); however, the night’s showstopper was, undoubtedly, the hamburger — a four-step, secret process revealed exclusively to all hallowed patrons harbored within the moldered walls of EHM’s Jewel Box Theater.
And so Howard’s February high watermark of entertainment. Catch you again next month, guys, when springtime’s in the air!
— Howard Lewis Russell
Have a gay entertainment inquiry for Howard? As you see, there’s nowhere so low he won’t stoop. Try him sometime, at AskHoward@dallasvoice.com. Go ahead, toss your best dice. Who knows, you might get lucky. After all, somebody has to hit jackpot!
