Saturday, September 10, 2011

Stuff I Found Cleaning Out My Vegas Office


As you may have read in my acclaimed love-letter essay to Las Vegas and my life there in Las Vegas Weekly, I spent my final days in Nevada packing up a house and office stuffed to the gills with historical and peculiar Vegas stuff. There was a shelf in my office closet with at least a six-foot pile of press materials that proved akin to an archeological survey, newest to oldest layered upon one another like a geological formation.

The stuff I unearthed was Vegas in its most optimistic, boosterish form, such as the above document outlining the expansion plans for the airport. I also found this promo for CityCenter...



...which is technically true because, uh, the future always begins now. Duh.

I loved this relic...


...and made sure to put this piece of Frontier glass in a safe place.


I found this magnet from the late, great Dive at the Fashion Show Mall, where I used to take my little brother all the time for fries and to peer through the periscope that offered a Strip view. It was just last month that a listener of the podcast asked me something about this place:


I found these artifacts of the earlier days of our podcast...


We used to send CDs and thank-you notes to all our guests, and once we got this back from the amazing Paula Poundstone:



Here was one of the table centerpieces from the final performance of Siegfried & Roy, a fundraiser for Keep Memory Alive, the foundation that funds the Lou Ruvo Cleveland Clinic for Brain Health in Vegas:


I found it rather unsettling that I did not and still don't remember that I had actually been a patient in 2002 of the most infamous endoscopy doctor in America:


At the same time, I find it awesome beyond words that I found this, which my old R-J friend Natalie Patton sent to me in 2000 when I was about to depart for China:


And I have no idea whatsoever how I came into possession of this rather invaluable bit of family history...


...but I'm so glad I have it.

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