My Fantasy Land, "O" My

When I was a little girl I remember being able to see a green, white and yellow neon sign in the distance from the window of my bedroom. There was big white star on top of it and I truly believed that across the fields behind my parent’s house there was a fantasy land with beautiful kingdoms and where mysterious animals reigned.

At the time I didn’t realize that New Jersey isn’t exactly known for that kind of mysticism. England and Ireland, sure, afterall they have fairies in the trees there, but fairies are a bit thin on the ground in the Garden State. But for many years I remember looking out and seeing that sign in the distance, putting music on my little record player in my room, and letting my imagination run wild creating stories of heroic rescues of beautiful maidens… and they were “just over there”.. across the field.

Unfortunately, going the way of Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, so went my kingdom over yonder. It was a horrible discovery… oh so Jersey in a way. A Mafioso-style hit on a 5-year-old’s beliefs.

We were coming back from my brother's football practice in my dad’s paneled station wagon when all of a sudden it occurred to me that the sign that we had just passed on Route 130 was that sign, MY SIGN, directing me to the kingdom. And there was not one single castle or exotic tiger in sight. I wasn't riding a white horse with a knight, I was riding in a station wagon, for the love of Pete! In fact, it was worse that that. It still hurts to even say it now! It was a sign for a HOLIDAY INN. “OH” my child’s soul cried out! I must be wrong, it couldn’t be… but it was. For the first time in my little life I think I knew depression. What a bummer! A lousy Holiday Inn sign!!! Could anything be more cruel?

So that day I left behind my fantasy world and made my way in the real world, resigned sadly to never feeling that way again. But I found out that’s not exactly true – on the same trip to Vegas as the Red Rocks excursion.

Again, one of my biggest sources of touring information, my brother, told me about something that I “had to” do when I was in Vegas. I had to go and see “O” from Cirque du Soleil. He had been saying for years that it was incredible and I wouldn’t believe my eyes.

I had seen some pictures and coverage on television from the show, but nothing that really gave the impression that it was anywhere near my brother’s numero uno entertainment event, seeing Pink Floyd’s The Wall in 1979. When he saw “O” he ranked it right up next to that show. Now Pink Floyd I could understand as being incredible. I remember him sitting me down in the rec room at my parent’s house, all of nine-years-old and him saying, “Ok, Jen you have to sit and listen to this entire album. You’ll never hear anything else like it. There’s no breaks between the songs.” And to this day, there is no other album like it. I can imagine that there was no other show like it either. So while “O” looked interesting from the pictures, I couldn’t see how in the world it could ever compare to that experience but I had to try.

So on Superbowl Sunday I did something that I might lose my citizenship for… I stopped watching the game, before halftime, and went to the show instead. I figured that I’d be the only one there. No other red-blooded American would be there. Maybe some Japanese tourists but I didn’t think it would be full. It was. This started to make me think this might be something else.

Dean told me, "Be there in time for the clowns." I'll say this straight away -- I don't like clowns. Never have. I always wanted to know what they were hiding behind that make-up. But these clowns were French... more mime than the psycho clown from a Stephen King novel. The hobo clown friends come in to the sound of dripping water … from the ceiling. And the fun begins there. They warn people that in certain places you will get wet, but who thought you might 30 rows from the stage. Ok, it was certainly a different way to begin. I can’t hear water dripping without remembering the clowns.

From that point on I was returned to the fantasy world of my childhood. From the dropping, or should I say evaporation, of the curtain to its dramatic re-emergence at the end you are taken on a journey. Part Phantom of the Opera... on CRACK and part Salvador Dali painting come to life… with a 40-foot pool/stage that is as much a character in the show as any of the swimmers/actors/athletes featured.

O is a show that is dedicated to water. I’m sure they meant it to be reminiscent of H2O but from the audience’s point of view, it was “OH!” What they do, you can’t even believe. All I know is that whatever drug the guy was on who created this fantasy world… they should package and give it to the leaders of the world to chill everyone out. There would be no war if everyone lived in that world.

The original, live music guides dancers with spectacular make-up on carousel horses as they circle into the pool, a woman singing on a piano melts into the depths, men on fire dance on the water's surface like skeeter flies on a pond, a high-flying sailing ship skeleton becomes a trapeze, a church bell becomes a launching pad for high flying over-water acrobatics… and on and on and on. Your brain just goes into overload and I can't even describe it as it really is. You just have to see it yourself.

As I mentioned before about the pool/stage. Of all of it, the thing I want to see the most is how the hell they are able to take it from a 40-foot deep pool to a dry stage in the blink of an eye… literally. Snap your fingers and it’s a dry floor. There are divers who are beneath the surface of the water that give air to the swimmers, where do they go? Dean said they used to ride the stage to the surface at one point in the show and flop around on stage like dead fish in the version he saw. You can understand why. The stage splits twice, thrice, four times and pools form and then disappear before your eyes. It is the star of the production. You could NEVER do this anywhere else. Incredible is the only word that describes it.

So I sat, spellbound, with my mouth hanging open and my eyes gaping wide and regained my memory of the fantasy land on the other side of the field from McCay Drive. I have to believe it was always there, but I couldn’t see it anymore. Now that my eyes are reopened, it stays with me now.

Well, I'm pretty sure that Dean knew nothing about my fantasy world -- he was already in high school by the time I had it -- so he couldn't have known what he was giving me back when he made the suggestion to see "O." All I can say is that somewhere there's still a five-year-old with blonde curly hair in her room with Raggedy Ann wallpaper who is looking out her window on a summer night dreaming about her magic castle across the field. Thanks Dean!

Vegas on the Rocks

A trip to Vegas has never been high on my priority list and surprisingly enough in all of the tradeshows and conferences that I’ve been a part of, none of them has taken place in Sin City.

The first and only time that I was there was in 1988 and from what I had heard, things had changed a lot… but only on the surface. There’s more amusements, more lavish hotels bringing a shimmering facade to the desert floor but one thing had not changed… the people who were there. From the low-end casinos a block off the strip to the opulent ones at the Bellagio and Wynn, most of the gamblers had the same hopeless look that I had seen in Atlantic City 3,000 miles away a couple months ago. A clear, vacant desperation rested on their features as they gambled away their kids’ college tuition, or rent money or the last of their money for food in false patronage to the gambling gods on the slim chance of just one more lucky pull on the one-armed-bandit. I found it very sad to see… and they only got $2 out of me. I’m not one to go against the advice of Kenny Rogers… I know when to hold ‘em and when to fold ‘em.

No, there was nothing that was inspiring to me about going to Vegas. The shows looked good, but expensive, and I did reallocate my spa massage budget to see Cirque de Soleil’s O, which was incredible and will be the subject of another blog. But aside from that, there was no real desire to be there. Or so I thought until I looked outside the Strip to the Northwest… specifically Red Rocks Canyon, 45 minutes outside the city.

Most of our collective vision of Vegas is from the movies. In that medium very little reference is ever made to the deserts and hills surrounding the city. In fact about the only time you ever hear about the desert is when someone’s about to get whacked for pissing off the local mafia… see Joe Pesci in Casino (I always wonder if Pesci will EVER come out alive at the end of a Scorsese mob film) and Bill Macy in The Cooler for a couple of clear references. So, given this frame of reference, you expect to see a vacant wasteland of scattered bones or freshly dug graves from mafia hits, expended shell casings from bullets and maybe a vulture circling above for scraps. Certainly not a place of inspiring beauty.

I hadn’t heard too much about Red Rocks aside from the amphitheater that is supposed to be out there – home to, I believe, a great live performance of Sunday Bloody Sunday by U2 from my teenage years. But looking out of my window on the 23rd floor of The Flamingo, the streak of red earth in the distance pulled me in.

Once you make it past the strip malls and dive hotels to the line in the sand where development stops and Red Rocks begins, you cross into another world. It’s not especially warm this time of year in Vegas, and because of this the crowds are just not to be found at Red Rocks. I’m completed stoked when I drive into the park because it’s the desert picture I had always had in my mind. The Tom Petty or Tears for Fears video on the deserted highway or maybe even more accurately the night drive through the canyons from Thelma and Louise… with the Ballad of Lucy Jordan in the background. When you come from the most populated state in the union, it’s hard to find a deserted road anywhere. This was a treat… eventhough I wasn’t in the red convertible 1968 corvette that I had pictured in my dreams.

You pass small signs for wild burros and horseback rides as you pull into the state park to find a 15-20 mile loop that takes you past massive sandstone and terra cotta boulder formations and up on vistas looking down through the desert valley. The wind whistled through the valley and around the rounded rocks that look like frozen sand dunes as I wound my way from place to place for a little over an hour and I blew through the cheapo throwaway camera that I had picked up at the last minute.

The Native American Gods who dwell there must think something went very wrong with mankind when they started building the pleasure palaces to the east of this beautiful location. But at least there are still places like this where urban/suburban spread have been locked out. Thank God for some environmentalist that protected this space or we’d have a casino built ON TOP OF the Red Rocks along with condos and golf courses through the valley… wait, I think that’s called Palm Springs.

A couple of days before I went on this trip, I was having dinner with my friend Kelly at a French bistro in NYC. It turned out that it was psychic night at that restaurant and we decided to have a little fun and see what she said. After getting through the “you’re going to meet a tall, dark handsome stranger” part of things… where I replied that I already had… she said something that I remembered as I made my decision to take the drive that day.

She said, “I see that you need some time in the desert. To clear your mind and prepare you for the wonderful things you have ahead of you this year.” Huh? Wait a minute, my airline ticket wasn’t sticking out of my bag, was it? How could she know about the desert? I said, “Well I am going to Vegas in two days.” Even the psychic looked startled… I guess she doesn’t get them right that often, or maybe that specifically. She recovered saying, “See it was just in the cards that you go there… so to speak.”

I guess I was meant to see a prettier side of Vegas on that trip and I fulfilled a dream sequence that had been in my head for a long, long time. And since the cards she referred to were tarot and not a deck of 52, I came home with a great experience and my rent money still in hand… at least until the check for this month clears the bank.