Vegas Baby! (I Hate You.)

CBGB's is shutting down this Sunday. In the thirty-three years of its existence, it cultivated and celebrated the New York rock 'n roll scene and put it on a world stage, and thrust bands like The Ramones, Talking Heads, Blondie, and countless others into the limelight. Unfortunately, their lease is up, their rent is no longer affordable, and they're closing their doors. BUT WAIT! Here's where it gets way, way, way more sad:



This is not the last we'll see of CBGB's because, that's right, they're moving the club to the Las Vegas strip (or rather Vegas Baby! to the average drunken skank). I can't imagine anything more offensive than to turn this institution into a Vegas sideshow. I'm sure they probably have an overpaid commercial artist working on recreating the graffiti and vomit stains as we speak. I can only hope they're going to resurrect Joey Ramone, reanimate his head, and attach it to a robot body to have him greet the bingo parlor dregs at the door and tell them about the mojito of the day.



In case you've never had the pleasure of visiting Las Vegas, let me tell you a little bit about what it's REALLY like. You've seen the commercials with the hot chicks in bikinis who crave your middle-aged wiener night and day, the high-rollers in the expensive Italian suits who randomly throw thousand dollar chips at total strangers for fun, the Elvis impersonators and showgirls you trip over every ten feet or so?



Doesn't exist.



I've seen more attractive people in line at the Golden Corral in Ocala. When I was in Las Vegas, the average group of tourists was a family of Weebles from Nebraska wearing matching fanny packs and visors pushing grandma in front of a slot machine and lighting her cigarette through her open tracheotomy hole so they could pull up a well-reinforced chair to the buffet trough and shovel chicken marsala into the mouth-holes of their slack-jawed faces without having to listen to grandma's neck-hole whistling. If I had been wearing stirrup pants and a tube top, I still would have been the best dressed person I saw there in seven days. I actually paid to get into one of those "exclusive" nightclubs after being carefully scrutinized by the door guy only to enter the club and find about fifty guys at the bar in Tommy Bahama shirts with big beer bellies and flip-flops smoking cheap cigars and throwing back half-priced well drinks like they were the handfuls of dead fish that get fed to the dolphins at The Mirage – WHICH, by the way, you have to pay five bucks to even SEE.



Oh, and the "World Class" shopping? Sure, if you call buying walking around the mall inside Caesar's Palace with an armload of bags from Claire's Boutique "World Class". I know they've gotten a little pricier since they added the "Stuff by Hilary Duff" Collection, so you'll have to forgive me if I seem a little out of touch.



Maggie