LVW: The Tropicana's Strange Gladys Knight Thing

And here's my latest Las Vegas Weekly entry, trying -- and failing -- to analyze the notion of Gladys Knight as the face of the Tropicana. Enjoy. -sf

Tropicana’s decision to headline
Gladys Knight is a real head-scratcher
By STEVE FRIESS

Until last week, the Tropicana’s new management had been firing on all cylinders. It’s impossible to overstate the miracle they have pulled off in just 18 months, turning a decrepit and tragically mismanaged joke of a Strip institution into a resurgent, widely re-embraced remnant of Old Vegas.

They cleaned it up, first of all. Then they pursued a South Beach branding effort that included the Nikki Beach pool redesign and the addition of some food and beverage options. Brad Garrett’s Comedy Club provided a splash of low-cost celeb appeal and the Las Vegas Mob Experience offers a neat, gee-whiz attraction to round it out.

But on March 18, the resort announced the new face of its property, the person deemed its marquee entertainer. Keep in mind how important this position is and behold what Celine means for Caesars Palace or what Donny & Marie do for the Flamingo.

Who is the Trop putting forth as its Garth? Why, that au courant hipster, Gladys Knight.

Commence head-scratching.

Read the rest at LasVegasWeekly.Com

Show is UP: (S)Talking Brad Garrett

I think with this episode we've probably exhausted the Brad Garrett topic for now, but this was a really good interview -- he's a great conversationalist -- so check it out. Thanks to David McKee for guest co-hosting again, too. Check his out his blog. Click on the date below to listen or right-click to download and listen at your leisure or subscribe via iTunes or Zune.

July 12: (S)Talking Brad Garrett
SPECIAL: Brad Garrett's "Stalker" Speaks

The first line of his obituary will identify him as the put-upon brother in the classic sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond,” but before that role of a lifetime Brad Garrett was an accomplished stand-up comic who opened for Frank Sinatra, Julio Iglesias and many others. That’s why his decision to slap his name on the space at the Tropicana that has traditionally been a venue for comedians is less surprising than it appears at first. Garrett, who performed for the first two weeks at the club and promises to appear at least one weekend a month going forward, chats this hour about how he regards his quote-un-quote role of a lifetime, how awkwardness about his size led to his comedy career and how the liberal actor keeps the peace with his notoriously conservative former co-star, Patricia Heaton. Also, Brad and I dig into the question of whether he is being stalked.

In Banter: Lots of restaurant talk, the Harmon is stuck, Sheldon Adelson is defying expectations, the Main Event is still healthy, Dallas’ NFR/boxing gambit and the ATM companies want to help you lose more and faster.

Links to stuff discussed:

Yelp on Johnny Smalls, Julian Serrano, Nu Sanctuary, Ferraro’s andFirefly
Get tickets for Brad Garrett’s Comedy Club at the Tropicana
Guest host David McKee’s blog, Stiffs & Georges
VegasHappensHere.Com posts on Brad Garrett’s stalker situation
Our special episode with Garrett’s stalker
The Las Vegas Business Press’ Tony Illia on the Harmon stagnation
Steve’s NYT piece when the Harmon was shorn
WSJ piece on the Dallas stadium hoping to compete with Vegas
Stiffs & Georges on the various Sheldon Adelson stories and the Singapore place’s seeming success
Minus 5 is opening at Monte Carlo
Hash House A Go Go opening at M
Rock N Rita opened at Circus Circus
The Main Event of WSOP draws 7,319
Terrance Watanabe’s settlement with Harrah’s
The Jeff German piece about how RICH out-of-control gamblers should be stopped
The Arnold Knightly piece about whether average gamblers should be enabled by the ATM

The Strip/Petcast Are Live Saturday!

We'll be doing our usual hours of The Petcast (two shows recorded together) and The Strip on Saturday 4-6 p.m. Pacific Time at LVRocks.Com. Listen live, see us via webcam and join us in the chat. Or wait for the podcast version, of course, and subscribe via iTunes or Zune to The Petcast or to The Strip in iTunes or Zune.

Here's the schedule:

4 p.m.: Barbara Techel, an author who has written extensively about life with her partially paralyzed and incredibly cute dachshund, Frankie.

4:30 p.m.: David Mizejewski of the National Wildlife Federation to discuss his observations of the wildlife damage caused by the BP oil spill.

5 p.m.: Comic Brad Garrett* and I discuss "stalking," hearing aids, old gay audience members, Patricia Heaton's politics and more. Guest co-host David McKee of the Stiffs & Georges blog fills in for Miles.

*Note: The full Brad Garrett interview will be available on the podcast sometime Sunday. Only about half will be played during the live show.

The LVW Col: The Old Man & Robbie

Now for a change of pace, re: Brad Garrett. I liked my headline (above) better, but oh well. Enjoy. -sf

Not just some old guy
A flash of insight at a stand-up comedy show
By STEVE FRIESS

A sense of dread hung over me for most of the hour Brad Garrett commanded the stage. It was nobody’s fault, really, least of all the comedian cracking up the packed house. But it sat with me nonetheless.

Earlier, I had insisted my friend Walt join me. Walt is the elder half of The Olds, a couple I regard as surrogate gay grandparents and who provide a makeshift extended family in this city so far from my blood relatives.

It wasn’t easy to get Walt out. Nearly 85 and in physically excellent shape, he’s begun to turn away from even things he loves. And Garrett’s part of something he loves most, the sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond. When Walt said no on the phone, I drove over and made sure he came. I’ll be damned if the geezer’s going to rot without a fight.

At the Tropicana showroom, an usher wanted to seat us in the back. Both Walt and I have the hearing of 85-year-olds, so I asked for better seats and we ended up in the front row.

That seemed great until it became evident that Garrett channels Don Rickles, picking nearby stereotypical people as running jokes. Walt, then, became the standing target for old jokes, which he played along with cheerfully.

Yet I sat anxious. Garrett mines his marks’ marital and sex lives, so it seemed only a matter of time before he quizzed the old dude about sex.

Did I mention Walt is gay?

Read the rest at LasVegasWeekly.Com

EXCLUSIVE: BRAD GARRETT'S "STALKER" SPEAKS

OK, so the whole Brad Garrett stalking/impersonation thing is a little creepier than I originally concluded. Having spent a couple of days examining the situation and doing what other journalists declined to -- ask the accused for her version and check out her claims -- I'm in a slightly different place than I was earlier this week.

Before I go any further, I want to mention that you can hear the accused woman answer all my questions on a special edition of The Strip. Click here to play that or right-click here to download it and hear it at your leisure. It's, uh, unusual.

To review, over the weekend, the new Tropicana headliner told celebrity journalist Robin Leach that he was being stalked by a "he" who was impersonating him on Twitter under the name BaddGarrett. The same person, Garrett said, was calling ticket brokers pretending to be him, seemed to have uncomfortable access to images of him and his family and may have even been at his comedy show in the first week. Leach not only took to his blog to report Garrett's accusations without comment from the accused person, but he also was on his Twitter telling the BaddGarrett Tweeter that she was sick, twisted and heading for the slammer.

I interviewed Garrett on Tuesday for this coming Saturday's regular edition of The Strip, and we discussed this. He seemed aware by that time that the "he" was actually a woman and he knew, as I do, her identity and location. Yet he refused the suggestion that her mischief was nothing more than a Twitter parody or, at worst, a fraudulent impersonation. He thinks it's active stalking.

Having spoken to this woman twice now, I admit that it's really, really hard to know. Much of what she claims is zany and time after time what she said about what she's been up to on Twitter does not comport with reality. She initially claimed she had never impersonated Garrett but only intended to do some loving parody and help promote the comic's endeavors.

That may, in fact, have been largely true in the public Twittersphere, but she engaged in several private chats, known as direct messages, in which it is clear she is permitting and encouraging people to believe she is actually the comic. One person misled was Vegas comic Keith Lyle, who shared with me several DMs received from BaddGarrett over the course of weeks.

During the week of June 6, for instance, Lyle wondered why this account was not "verified," meaning the Twitter puts a blue check on it to indicate it really belongs to a celebrity or notable person. These were three responses from BaddGarrett:

1. @Kevin_Nealon does not have a check 2. Enough ppl here know me IRL. 3. I don't want a ck, too many hassles. So, believe what you want

I honestly don't care who people think I am. I don't do the ego thing. This is for fun, to test drive material, sharpen skills and PR.

Who wants the checkmark and the associated assholes that come with it. I can achieve evrything I want here without it

The correct answer, of course, would have been, "Oh, I'm not really him."

At one point, BaddGarrett about family to Lyle: "I kid abt my ex, but she's really a wonderful lady & we're still friends. You have to for the kids too."

So, OK, let's posit that this woman was pretending to be the actor in some instances on Twitter. Oddly, in others she was not. Both Las Vegas Sun ace John Katsilometes and the PR team at the Tropicana had asked and were told forthright that she was just a fan, and the Trop folks told me as late as last Friday in a public Tweet -- BEFORE the ruckus began -- that they considered @BaddGarrett to be a great advocate for the show.

When I confronted the woman about the Keith Lyle direct messages in my interviews, her answers were all over the place. First she claimed she never led him to think she was the real star, then she said she didn't want to disappoint him by saying she wasn't, then she admitted she had "used bad judgment" and that "it snowballed and I didn't know what to do."

The question is, does any of this make this woman a stalker? Does it make her physically dangerous? Here, again, matters are more complicated than they appear. This woman pleaded guilty in 2006 to stalking a cop in her hometown, and she explains the details of what she did quite openly on the podcast. She says she learned her lesson, would never do that again. But Garrett knew and mentioned that, so clearly that influenced his alert as to whether she was dangerous to him.

That's understandable. So I asked her this set of questions:

Friess: Have you ever had any personal contact with Brad Garrett?

Alleged Stalker: No.

Friess: Never met him?

Alleged Stalker: Never met him.

Friess: Never seen him in person?

Alleged Stalker: Never seen him in person.

Friess: Have you ever been to Las Vegas?

Alleged Stalker: Never been to Las Vegas.

Friess: So when Brad says you’ve been taking photos of him and his family and his children, where did you get those pictures from?

Alleged Stalker: I got them off Google. Off blogs, websites, Twitpics people take and post on Twitter. That’s it. I have no way of getting any other pictures of Brad.

I asked the alleged stalker to show me her credit card statements to prove where she's been. This got weird, too, as what she showed me were charges up until June 25, often more than one a day. She claims in the interview that after that she using all cash, but that's also coincidentally the same weekend the Garrett show opened in Vegas. What she provided didn't prove anything regarding her whereabouts in the time period during which Garrett says she might have attended the show.

I totally understand why Garrett is unnerved. But as inconsistent and strange as this woman's version of events is -- and you must listen to the interviews and see for yourself -- I've also never heard of a dangerous stalker who gives interviews to reporters or provides her phone number and address to them. The most likely scenario here is that this is a woman with a bit of a fantasy life and celebrity fascination who got carried away.

As you know, Robin Leach has taken great umbrage at my decision to examine this thing more closely, to question his decision to attack this woman so viciously and publicly and to try to tease out what made sense and what didn't. I forget sometimes that Robin isn't just some colleague but someone who enjoys celebrity himself. I'm not even sure he'd deny he has an obvious bias toward believing what longtime celebrity friends tell him.

This may be precisely where my background as a classically trained reporter clashes with his approach: People are innocent of crime until proven guilty. For powerful journalists to publicly declare someone a criminal without there even being any charges trips a switch in me. That's not what we're supposed to do.

If Garrett had wanted to avoid publicity over this, he could have dealt with it privately or quietly through the authorities. Instead, according to Leach, he asked Leach to trumpet the problem all over the place. Once that happened, following up by analyzing what is going on and trying to make sense of inconsistencies on every side of this debacle was a journalistic duty.

Who knows? If Garrett has a criminal case to file, we may some day know more. If not, odds are good this is where this will end.

A Babe-Shaped Hole in Robin's Badd Tale

On his blog and Twitter feed this weekend, Robin Leach has reported the following:

* Brad Garrett has a stalker
* Brad Garrett is very upset about his stalker
* Brad Garrett's stalker is someone who Tweets at @BaddGarrett

He's so sure of it, he's called the Tweeter all sorts of awful names and wished jail and worse on the poor soul who has been doing an obvious and loving parody feed of the "Everybody Loves Raymond" actor.

Leach's stated timeline is already perplexing. Robin spoke to the comic yesterday, at which time he was, according to Robin's own Tweets, the first to show Garrett the Tweets in the @BaddGarrett feed. In that same discussion, Garrett told him:

“Two days ago, I triggered the legal machinery to really go after this person. He’s even called ticket brokers about my new Comedy Club shows at the Tropicana. He’s sent out dozens of fake Twitter messages pretending to be me and saying things I’d never say. But he’s fooling everybody into thinking it’s really me.”

Beyond Garrett's ability to travel back in time two days and get cops to probe something he didn't know about until yesterday -- totally cool, man! -- there's something else that blows Leach's harrumphing way out of the water.

The Tweeter behind @BaddGarrett EXCLUSIVELY!!! told me today... she's a she.

A woman.

That makes it really, really hard to be the same person who Garrett called a "he" several times in the Leach interview and who the comedian claims has "called ticket brokers about my new Comedy Club shows at the Tropicana."

Have any of you heard Garrett? He sounds a heckuva lot more like Harvey Fierstein than Margaret Ray. That's a really tough voice for a lady to even attempt, no?

At the very least, Leach must admit we may be talking about two different people. Garrett may have a stalking problem, but the real-world things that Garrett says are happening can't quite be coming from this Tweeter.

Sorry, old chap.

P.S. Looks like Robin's got a "stalker" of his own now. Ut-oh.

The Silly Triangle Of Robin, Brad & Badd

Robin Leach is going apeshit on his blog and Twitter feed on behalf of comic Brad Garrett because there's a fellow who uses the Twitter name @BaddGarrett who the Vegas headliner "exclusively" told Leach was upsetting him.

According to Leach, Garrett is getting the cops involved because he says the Tweeter has also been impersonating him by calling "ticket brokers about my new Comedy Club shows at the Tropicana" and sending "out dozens of fake Twitter messages pretending to be me and saying things I’d never say. ... He behaves as if he is me and has Twitter conversations with people as if he was me, and they all think it is me. It is not me." Garrett refers to the whole thing as "stalking" and told Leach that his "stalker" may even have pictures of his family.

The only problem is that Robin wrote in his own Twitter feed that Garrett didn't even know what @BaddGarrett had written until Robin showed it to him yesterday:



Uh, Robin? How would the real Brad Garrett know to say, "He behaves as if he is me and has Twitter conversations with people as if he was me" if he didn't know UNTIL THAT VERY CONVERSATION what might be being said in @BaddGarrett's Tweets? How could say "he’s had his lawyer go to the District Attorney’s Office and criminal detectives to hunt down the impostor" if he didn't even know what the Tweets said until YOU SHOWED THEM TO HIM?

Best case scenario: Garrett does have some sort of stalker or impersonator and he decided on the spot when Robin showed him a few select Tweets from @BaddGarrett that the Tweeter and the stalker were the same thing. And somehow Robin didn't think to say, "Well, Brad, how do you know this Twitter guy is the same guy?"

But wait. There's more.

Y'see, the day before Garrett complained to Leach, I publicly asked the official Tweeter for the Tropicana Hotel-Casino whether @BaddGarrett was actually the comic. I doubted it, but I figured asking would be worthwhile. And this is what @TropLV wrote:


In other words, the publicists for the Trop knew this Tweeter wasn't their headliner but they were HAPPY that @BaddGarrett was out there as an "advocate" for #BGCC, which is a hashtag for the Brad Garrett Comedy Club.

I don't know about any impersonations offline, but @BaddGarrett is and always has been a somewhat obvious parody Twitter feed. How Robin Leach didn't instinctively know that is truly baffling, but his Las Vegas Weekly colleague John Katsilometes himself wrote today (2nd item) that he's known it was a parody for weeks. A parody is not an impersonation, especially when the person doing the parodying acknowledges he's not the actual person whenever he's asked.

Parody Twitter feeds have a long history, at least long for the life of Twitter, anyhow. @NotSteveJobs, @BPGlobalPR and @ATT_Wireless_PR are three that I follow and giggle at. The last two are even less opaque than @BaddGarrett; if that really were the comedian, it surely would have been spelled correctly.

Many, many stars and notables have taken easy measures to clarify for the public which Twitter feeds are theirs -- including @Robin_Leach! Why did Robin not give his pal Brad the 411 on how to set up a "verified account" on Twitter the way he or @ActuallyNPH or @The_Real_Shaq did. Problem solved!

Instead, Robin's opted to be the voice of hysteria for Garrett, calling out @BaddGarrett on Twitter as a "fraud" who is "headed for the slammer! Good riddance to anybody this sick, twisted and mean!" Yes, those are actual excerpts of Robin's Tweets.

See, I reserve "sick, twisted and mean" to people who commit actual, usually violent, crimes. Making loving fun of a famous person in a manner that isn't even original hardly rises to that level. Robin Tweeted: "You have tricked & deceived people into thinking you are him." Who? Somebody -- anybody! -- step up and say, "Yes, he told me he was the real guy and I've been damaged by this horrifying experience." This is something that Robin Leach believes we need to tie up our court system with? Seriously? I wonder how nutso Robin would get if someone poisoned his cat.

@BaddGarrett, whoever he is, has altered his bio to clarify for the truly joke-impaired what he's up to:


That really ought to be where the matter stops. At least via Twitter, the author of that feed has not broken any law. If he happens to also be calling people claiming to be Garrett, then maybe there's something there. But someone would have to prove that and right now there doesn't seem to be any evidence.

Is Brad Garrett REALLY at the Trop?

That's a rhetorical question, of course. I know the "Everybody Loves Raymond" star is headlining his own comedy club at the Tropicana because there's a billboard in front of the property and not just the compliant media but even credible, discriminating entertainment observers have raved about it.

But tonight I'm heading over to check it out for myself, and I needed to know what time the shows start. So, because I'm just that kooky, I went to the Tropicana's website. And here's the front page as I found it:


Huh. No Robbie Barone here. Let's try the "Nightlife & Entertainment" tab, shall we?


Not there, neither. Hey! Let's try that "VIEW SHOWS" tab there.


Nada. I know! I'll try the "Calendar of Events" link on the Nightlife & Entertainment tab!


Sigh. Nope.

As it happens, a couple minutes after I posted this, for whatever reason, the site's splash page started to rotate four images. It wasn't doing that earlier, I swear. And the fourth splash page is this:


So for a moment I felt a little dumb for picking on them. Except then I tried to click on the image, to go somewhere -- anywhere! -- for more information. And there's no place to go. There's no place to buy tickets. The rest of this post remained what you would find if you tried what I tried.

A good tip for selling stuff is giving people a way to buy it.

That's embarrassing. As the kids say, OMFG, WTF? The last time I saw a property treat one of its marquee show offerings like thi, it was Planet Hollywood vis-a-vis the Steve Wyrick show and we all know how that turned out.

I did finally find the show times. It's 8 p.m. tonight. I Googled "Brad Garrett Tropicana" and the first link was to a three-week old Trop press release. It was in there somewhere. I'm looking forward to the show, truly. And I'm hoping the Trop's website isn't the only funny joke.