[This story goes on the Las Vegas Voices page. On the home page, under Web Exclusives, this should go in the 2nd slot. Wording: Fabulous Las Vegas, May 22]
[The link for Damon’s Crime piece can be removed from Web Exclusives}
FABULOUS LAS VEGAS
By John Katsilometes
[ PLEASE INCLUDE HEADSHOT]
During the three-day respite I enjoyed between jobs a couple of weeks ago, I finally visited the Amargosa Opera House. You might know of Amargosa, which is not quite the Entertainment Capital of the World but is the cultural hub of Death Valley Junction.
As is Amargosa lore, Marta Becket, a singer-dancer-artist from New York, happened upon the opera house during a break in a tour of college campuses in spring 1967. She and her husband, Tom, took a week off to camp in Death Valley and the trailer they had been toting suffered a flat tire. While Tom had the flat serviced at the nearest filling station, which was on Highway 190 in Death Valley Junction, Marta took a look up the road and spied the haggard, adobe Corkhill Hall. As she would later say, she was about to embark on the second half of her life. The opera house and adjoining hotel are the only businesses in this unincorporated stretch of desert that sits seven miles south of the California-Nevada border on Highway 127 (about 90 miles from Las Vegas, and 30 from Pahrump).
Becket famously painted an audience inside the theater, which seats about 150 actual patrons, because she did not want to sing and dance to an empty house. That was not an issue on May 12, when the hotbox (there is no air conditioning or proper ventilation in the old hall) was just about filled with theater-goers wondering just how much Becket had left in her tank.
Today Becket is 82 years old. Our show marked the end of her annual theater season, which has run from the first Saturday in October through the second Saturday in May since 1968. She no longer dances, as she injured her back a few months ago after tumbling from a chair while hanging drapes. For the show we attended, she glided onstage in a long, shimmering blue dress made of velvet. She wasn’t wearing a bra and her hair was colored a walnut brown. She simply sat and told her story, her gaze fixed high above the crowd as if she were reading her story from the ceiling. She sang a few numbers from her past, pulling from the few costume props placed on tables at her reach (including boas and an oversized moustache). She told tales of the folks painted on the walls, including the man who requested to be painted into the crowd, who promised to buy the opera house but reneged, and who was thusly brushed away.
After 45 minutes Becket was through, saying, “I hope it was not too hot for you.” As is customary after the final show of the season, the hotel staff hosted a closing-night party. Becket arrived for punch and cake and sat gingerly at a table to sign copies of the show program, or “red book” as it is called, for dozens of fans.
There are plans for the performances to resume on Oct. 6. She mentioned a new production centering for 2008, for which she might have mended enough to return to the dance-and-mime routines of years past. But if Marta Becket does not take the stage again, she will have fulfilled her dream. And the standing ovations she has received for nearly 40 years in the desert will have been well-deserved.
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A good friend of mine for years, longtime Vegas radio personality Dennis Mitchell, is bringing “Breakfast With the Beatles” back -- to KUNV 91.5-FM. The syndicated Beatles show airs at 7 a.m. Saturday. Having been vanquished from KKLZ 96.3-FM earlier this year, Mitchell has been shopping the show to Southern Nevada radio stations before finally finding a home at KUNV. We applaud that station’s general manager, David Reese, for bringing the show aboard.
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The air-conditioning outage that chased us from our place of residence last week sent us to Binion’s (which I have already blogged effusively about) and also to the Artisan hotel on West Sahara Avenue near Highland Drive. We were assigned the Edouard Manet suite, which was fittingly decorated with the paintings of that artist. The experience in the chic boutique hotel was a refreshing change from the hotel-casino ambience we're so accustomed to in Vegas. A $15 bottle of wine awaited, and, in an unexpected turn of events, free adult movies air on (of course) channel 69.
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Vegas moment: During the aftermath of the Helldorado Parade downtown, a team of bagpipers snaked into Hennessey’s Tavern (which I am compelled to note is not getting a lot of bang out of its buck for that big Bass Ale pint glass out front) and about blew the lid off the joint. Also at that corner, on Las Vegas Boulevard and Fremont Street, a guy who had finished off a plastic football of beer threw the container across the street to a friend in a kind of Manning-to-Harrison moment. Touchdown!
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For me, the most interesting chatter surrounding the Thursday Planning Commission meeting is the review of the Real Estate Interests Group’s proposal to develop the southwest corner of Charleston Avenue and Main Street. Included in that plan for the western region of the Arts District is a mixed-use development with three casinos and a sports arena.
As a friend of mine who has been in Vegas for a long time and has witnessed several development plans surface and fade recently noted, the arena proposal in particular seems a bit far-fetched. It calls for a 22,000-seat arena that evidently will not be suited for an NBA team. But what of a downtown baseball park at that spot, to replace the clean but outdated Cashman Field? Such a facility would give the 51s a state-of-the-art ballpark and could give a shot of activity to downtown similar to (but smaller in scale, of course) to what San Francisco enjoyed when the new Giants park opened in the formerly moribund China Basin district in 2000.
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On our menus: Big Dog’s on West Sahara Avenue offers a steak-and-bratwurst combination (that’s a ribeye steak and bratwurst on a hoagie bun with a side of slaw and fries) for $10.25, a portion of which should be donated to the American Heart Association.
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I’m on to you: A white Nissan Altima sports the plate IMON2U.
Fabulous Las Vegas appears daily (well, almost) at this Web site. John Katsilometes can be reached at 990-7720, 812-9812 or at [email protected]