Li: Leaving Las Vegas

Back to the dentist chair but this time not to get doped up on laughing gas to float down Leonard Cohen Lane (see Dear Heather). It was something else. A different sensitivity to a different type of cold.

“We’re turning into a Bubba society,” he said, surely poking an accusation in the direction of me, my paranoia, or maybe simply straight to the target: my ever-sensitive gums. “We frown upon anything remotely cultural.”

We frown upon the pain in my nerve endings.

Although I agreed with his sentiment, I wasn’t sure whether to take offense (or more to the point, just how much). He knew I wasn’t that keen on live theater (understatement). This had come up in previous discussions. I was especially hard on musicals, and not because of their stigma either. Hell, I had even liked a musical or two in my day. *Insert clip of me wide-eyed in a London theater, somehow captivated by one that so many others felt hit all the wrong notes: Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Aspects of Love. But in general? The experience of actors singing what they should be saying, and doing it live to the bizarre backdrop of some of the strangest choreography this side of West Side Story? Didn’t anyone else feel a bit awkward, here? *Insert clip of me in the audience at Andrew Lloyd Webber’s roller derby extravaganza, Starlight Express. Wait, was I some kind of Andrew Lloyd Webber groupie?

I’m not sure that I ever explained to my dentist the exact source of my aversion to live theater. Like the root of pain hidden somewhere in my teeth and gums, it was something broader, far deeper than anything I could hope to pinpoint or explain in an instant. Furthermore, perhaps that no matter how justified I, Bubba Gump, felt in declaring my angst at sitting through the live theater experience, maybe I knew part of it was on me. Some social stigma. Another demon exposed. Bottom line was I found it extremely difficult to get lost—really lost—in live theater like I could a film or book or even a TV show. *Insert clip of a Bubba on the couch, far gone in another episode of Lost.

But live theater? It seemed too hard to get into a different world beyond the audience’s coughing and sneezing and shifting, even their silence. It was rare, not impossible, but rare that I stopped thinking about the creaky floorboards of the stage and was fully engrossed in that other world brought to life by great actors and directors and sets.

Okay, maybe I was embarrassed by this affliction. At a minimum, it was anti-cultural and sad.

But I was not embarrassed about my passion for getting lost in other worlds of art. And yes, that even included, if truth be told, live theater too on occasions, real names’ll be proof (see The Iceman Cometh, Red, Endgame, M. Butterfly).

But i’m not thinking about live theater right now, I’m thinking of all places, Vegas, where I met a real life Vegas whore and a stranger—a desperately lost soul drinking himself to death, literally drinking himself to death. How absurd it is to watch a young man’s lights going out in a city where rivers of electricity flow without end.

This trip changed me. Big ol’ Bubba me. There was something so sickeningly real in that snapshot of love. A chance meeting in the dark of night at a dingy of intersection at the gates of hell. It is amazing to see just what can be buried in the shadow of a chance encounter. An encounter as fleeting as the reality of true love itself. Over in an instant. More than half the time, we can’t possibly even notice it.

It felt so real, this light bulb moment. This reality that true love can only ever hope to be something that is over in an instant thumps into view. The thump and the realization is sickening, as sharp and deep as an attack of Trigeminal Neuralgia. Doc, you gotta do something for the pain.

-G