Las Vegas: Introduction: Overview

I recently read an interview with Yoko Ono, who had agreed, along with the surviving Beatles and Olivia Harrison, to allow Cirque du Soleil to create a show in Las Vegas around songs by the Fab Four. After traveling there to see the premiere of Love last July, she remarked that she had always been biased against Vegas in the past but that her perception had changed, saying that “it’s going to be the future city.”

Having been a regular visitor to Las Vegas since I was a child, I find myself constantly trying to convince skeptics about the virtues of this ever-changing fantasy land. Far from being the mobster haunt of the Rat Pack years, the cuddly family vacation destination it tried to become in the 1980s or the smoky underground of the ’90s, today it is an exemplar of in-your-face luxury. And nobody does it better. If you haven’t seen Vegas in the past six months, you haven’t seen Vegas at all. Today, it’s all about having fun 24/7, whatever that means for you.