Fathom founder Pavia Rosati offers some reflections from a pretty glamorous suite above a glittering sin city.
It was 112 degrees in Las Vegas this week, and I couldn’t have been happier to be here.
I came to town for Virtuoso Travel Week, the annual fabulous confab that gathers thousands of members from the luxury travel tribe — advisors, hoteliers, journalists, publicists, destination representatives, sales people. It’s a week of press conferences, industry data, and travel trends. (Boomers want to avoid overtourism, Gen X wants to give back to the community, Millennials and Gen Z will spend more on companies with environmentally friendly practices.) It’s also a week of coffee dates, run-ins in casino hallways, and waterfalls of champagne at parties that go on way past everyone’s bedtime.
A journalist pal from LA who also attends the conference once told me, “I hate this town. It’s tacky and it’s skeevy. The outfits are gross, and the behavior is embarrassing.”
“I agree,” I told him. “And that’s exactly why I love it.”
I’ve been coming to Vegas, mostly for work, sometimes not, since the late 1990s. I always found it dismal and depressing for all the reasons my friend noted. It was America at its worst.
But somewhere along the way, I changed my mind. You know that Tom Stoppard line, “Happiness is equilibrium. Shift your weight”? I shifted.
Las Vegas, I’ve come to realize, is the distillation of pure American id. When people come here, they drink too much, gamble recklessly, eat till they’re bursting, and have sex with people they probably shouldn’t be having sex with. They leave the superego at home. I not infrequently find myself standing in line at the 24-hour CVS next to a woman about whom all I can think is, sister, I’m seeing more of you than your gynecologist does. In short, Vegas is where gross behavior goes full throttle on full-frontal display.
But you know what? That girl at the CVS? She’s Melissa from accounting. She’s at her desk at 9:30 every day and never calls in sick. She sends her kids off to school with nutritious lunches. Her laundry is folded. She never runs out of toilet paper. When you mess up your expenses, she fixes them for you. In short, she’s reliable, steadfast, and unlikely to complain about much of anything.
And for four days a year, she comes to Las Vegas and is an absolute animal.
She lets her hair down and lets it all out. (All.) She does all the things she would never ever ever do in her real life. Then on Monday morning, she’s back at her desk, ready to get back to the grind and to being the good lady she always is. Because in Vegas, everything she did was okay.
Now when I see that obscenely dressed girl at the CVS, I just look at her and think, God bless. Live it up, Melissa.
I love Las Vegas because it’s all safe here. The whole city seems engineered to give us permission to be the debauched selves we can’t be anywhere else. Our basest instincts are not only allowed in Vegas, they’re encouraged. We can come here and lift the proverbial lid off the boiling pot. Don’t we all need that sometimes, no matter what causes us to boil?
For many years, the motto of Las Vegas was, “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”
I’d like to offer a subtle alternative. “Vegas. It doesn’t count.”
By the way, I’m typing this from a Fleur de Lis suite at the sparkling Fontainebleau Las Vegas, the newest casino resort on the Strip, where complimentary fruit plates arrive atop a discrete chamber of ice to keep the delicately sliced pink pineapple perfectly crisp.
When she escorted me to the 83rd floor, my butler Danielle Gilles told me my suite is just under 2000 square feet. As a point of comparison, the New York apartment I lived in for 16 years felt spacious at 330. Only that sweet New York apartment didn’t have a full-size billiards table, a bar loaded with top-shelf liquors, three large flat-screen TVs, just as many closets in the dressing room, amenities like gold razors and toothbrushes, and a bathtub that could fit a basketball player — and my suite does. My feet are resting on a marble coffee table and I’m munching a fat pile of fatter cashews, sipping coffee that I got from the VIP lounge, where I saw dear Danielle and reassured her that, “thank you, no, I didn’t require anything else this morning.” I’m blasting Earth Wind and Fire and Lizzo through the in-room speakers and, sadly, so very sadly, I don’t get to work like this every day.
Down the hall from me is the Empire Suite. It has four bedrooms, two living rooms, a fitness/massage/Peleton/sauna wing, and you can call it yours for a starting rate of $25,000 per night. If you do the math, that comes out to $2.50 per square foot, and isn’t that kind of a bargain?
All Fleur de Lis suite guests have access to The Poodle Room, Fontainebleau’s gorgeous and very discreet members’ club (“no photos or videos please”) on the top floor, where you’ll find the best 360-degree views the city has to offer, a 12-seat omakase restaurant, and a private party room decorated with Alexander Calder prints. The night I went for a press event, I took a picture with the club mascot, a tall white poodle. She yawned while we posed. She’s a diva.
Vegas, you see, is ridiculous.
People are smoking and chomping steak like they’ve never seen the inside of a doctor’s office. Things that shouldn’t be normal somehow are. Everything is bigger, louder, more expensive, more exaggerated. It’s awesome. And somehow, it’s contagious. I tried on a pair of hideous, oversized $1200 Gaultier jeans at The Webster boutique, and goddamn if they didn’t look amazing. (No, I didn’t.)
Vegas is also incredibly fun.
Last night, I went to The Cosmopolitan to catch The Party at Superfrico, the intimate new dinner-and-a-show cabaret from Spiegelworld, the entertainment company who also produce Absinthe at Caesar’s Palace, the awesomely bawdy, burlesque-meets-acrobatics romp I saw last year. Imagine how an NC-17 Cirque du Soleil troupe would behave after three too many tequilas, and you’ll start to get the Spiegelworld vibe. Among the performers at The Party was a chap in a pinstripe suit and a bowler hat called Mr. Pendleton. His thing is bubbles — forming them into dodecahedrons into which he blows smoke before spinning them around and setting them afloat. After him, a redhead in a red dress recruited a guy from the audience to help her act. She was playing a waltz on the kazoo, wearing bells — like the kind you’d see on a hotel’s front desk — that she had strapped over her boobs. The guy’s job was to provide the percussion to the tune. By ringing those bells.
Do you like Formula One? I knew nothing about it. I do now, after having been to Grand Prix Plaza, the seasonal, interactive experience at the home of Formula 1 Las Vegas Grand Prix, which will race November 20-22. Among the things I learned: There are ten teams. The drivers are short. They race all around the world for one night at a time. The steering “wheel” looks like a video game console. The sport attracts an eye-melting number of viewers and generates just as much money. And it’s fast, as I experienced on the video simulator that let me pretend I was doing laps around the track. I topped out at 220 mph. Slightly more realistic was joining a pit team and changing a tire (it took us seven seconds; our car would have lost), and later strapping on a neck brace and helmet to race go-karts on the actual F1 track. I only hit 112 mph, and I blame the pokey drivers in front of me for crashing out and slowing me down.
I didn’t make it to the Sphere, though I’ve been twice, for a U2 concert and the movie Postcards from Earth, both of which blew me away. I’ll be back for The Wizard of Oz at Sphere film experience. Those ruby slippers won’t know what hit them.
I realize that few places are as divisive as Las Vegas, this complicated city of extremes. I’m proof, having gone from Team Hate to Team Love somewhere along the way.
Maybe reading this has made you see the city from a different perspective. (Equilibrium, remember?) Or maybe, like Jeralyn, this has made you hate Vegas even more than you thought you did.
By the way, I spent the week totally sober.
Well, mostly. I’m not counting Sunday.
Editor’s note: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author — and perhaps, more broadly, the ethos of the times — but not necessarily of the Fathom team. (Some of whom are tired of the giant hangover that comes from unchecked desires and a disturbing reliance on over consumption.)