With the downturn in the tourist business here in Las Vegas, since September 11, many local shows have been running special “two-fer” prices for local residents during October. One of these was the Blue Man Group show at the Luxor. What you do is show your Nevada driving license as proof of residency, and you can get two tickets for the price of one. Normally the big casino shows are out of our casual price range, but the two-fer offer for the Blue Man Group was too good to pass up.

We managed to get lucky and get tickets for Wednesday, the same day as an invitation to lunch in Town from the Harvard Club of Nevada. Lunch with the Harvard Club is not the sort of thing that would normally appear in our appointment reminder book, but as parents of a Harvard student, the opportunity to meet similar people and possibly “network” with them seemed like an opportunity to be taken advantage of.

So we took Wednesday afternoon off from work, changed into slacks instead of our usual jeans, and spent the rest of the day in the city.

The lunch was business-like but not very formal, and we did meet some interesting people and also agreed to act as official HC representatives for a 2 hour shift at the local upcoming college fair.

After lunch we parked the car in the Luxor parking lot, and picked up our tickets for the Blue Man Group show, then decided to spend the rest of the afternoon walking up and down the ‘Strip. The objective: To have coffee and a croussant at a cafe in the “Paris” Casino.

The casinos on the Strip are further apart than they look.  Also, the Sun was hotter than we expected. So consequently, by the time we reached Paris we were really looking forward to that coffee.

Strangely, this was harder to find than we expected, but after some browsing in the faux la rue de cafe, we settled on ice-coffee and a crepe.

We wandered back to the Luxor via the Aladdin, which I think recently went bankrupt. It’s still open, but for how much longer? we wondered.

Blue Man Group

I saw my first Blue Man Group show in Boston a number of years ago. I still remember it vividly, and if anything it made me more keen to see the Vegas show.

If you’ve seen a Blue Man Group show, then you know what a challenge it is to describe one. If you haven’t, then to describe it in too much detail might take the edge off the child-like delight you experience when encountering the Blue Men for the first time. Perhaps the best thing to do is to suggest checking out http://www.blueman.com/feature/liveatluxor.shtml. 

For those not near a web browser, I will merely say that the three blue men (always there are three, with 6 accompanying fluorescent musicians) are child-like aliens who never speak but observe and reveal the fascinating world we live in through rhythm and optical illusions. My kind of brain food.

The show did not disappoint.