This Is How We Do It

Ahh, Vegas. Gotta love a city where they do a big groundbreaking flanked by Cirque du Soleil performers (below all the way left)!

There's Mayor Oscar Goodman and a couple others shoveling some symbolic dirt to mark the groundbreaking of Union Park, a $6 billion development that I wrote about at great depth in the New York Times on Wednesday. (Made it up to #11 on the Most E-Mailed Stories list that day, natch.)

Here, in fact, is the mayor clutching a copy of that story as he speaks to Valerie Miller of the Las Vegas Business Press. I'm told he read from the piece at his press conference earlier in the day. (Probably not the parts where Valerie's boss predicted the economy could slow down some of the project, but...)


...and some sorry ballerina-looking person in a pose because the Nevada Ballet Theatre is to find a new home at the Smith Center for the Performing Arts to be built at Union Park...


...and here's celeb-chef and Union Park hotelier Charlie Palmer making some remarks, one of I think 43,222 people who got to do so...


But the BEST part is that wherever Goodman goes, gin is sure to follow. Here were our alcoholic choices for the evening, the Mayor's Martini, the Loutini and the Union Park...


You can click on the picture above to make it bigger and get the recipe.

But the big, baffling question -- which I totally forgot to ask the Mayor when he greeted me because I was disoriented by how he was so happy with me and I thought maybe I was getting a street named after me -- was: Where the &$&@! were the showgirls? Man, they really DO want this Union Park thing to be respectable!