Vacation Stories: Silicone Valley

Las Vegas is an American patische. Maybe it's even simpler. Its a joke. And we are the set up, the punch line, and the laugh track. It's also really bright at night. Maybe you know all that. It is where the trip began and ended.

A lot happened on the trip (which covered some 600 miles over the course of 9 days), but I begin with an observation about Vegas: I have never found myself surrounded by some many fake breasts in my life. Well, there was that one time with the "fantasie" in Paris in 97, but in all I honesty that was the result of confusion. I thought I was ordering the foie gras platter. Oh, heck, my credit card company didn't believe me either.

In last Vegas, like the heat and the sand they were unavoidable. Wall to wall fake breasts. In the chests of women of all sizes and ages. It was a fake breasts wonderland, and they floated by everywhere leaving many with starry-eyed fascination.

There is even a monument to fake breasts: the pyramid at the Luxor. Yes, I know it is a pyramid, but dig on this. It is man-made like the fake breasts I kept noticing. Also, for a pyramid, it was very breast-shaped. And, at the top, it has a nipple-like device that beams light to the sky at night. Like the Estonian woman had during the fantasie, where...forget it, I've said too much.

It was all very fascinating to me, in a detached, observational way. I've never actually known anyone who has implants. I have probably been around fake breasts before, but it was never so obvious to me. Vegas was where women went to show off their plastic surgeon's good work. They should have put advertising on them to help publicize the plastic surgeons. Some women's tops were so small there was room enough to advertise not only their surgeons, but the National Symphony Orchestra's 1976 album "Excerpts from The Ring of the Nibelung." [Das Rheingold: Entrance of the Gods into Valhalla. Die Walküre: Wotan's Farewell and Magic Fire Music; Ride Of the Valkyries. Siegfried: Forest Murmurs. Götterdämmerung: Siegfried's Rhine Journey; Siegfried's Funeral; Immolation of the Gods]." With room with the tag line, "But it! It's hot!"

How fitting. That on a bed of silicone and saline, we floated on....