Last week when I was in Las Vegas, I stayed at the Excalibur Hotel for the first but probably not the last time. Prior to this, I guess I was put off by the exterior decor, which is garish and which tends to make the whole place look like a colossal joke some very drunk architects played on their employers. Around 1993, during a period when a lot of ancient Vegas casinos were being imploded, one of the town's newspapers polled its readers on which hotel they'd like to see levelled. They meant for folks to vote for the old, dilapidated ones from the fifties and early sixties. Instead, the winner was the Excalibur, which was built in 1990.
But I picked it for a number of reasons. One was that it was cheap — $31 a night…which shows you how bad business is in that city. Usually, when you get a room that cheap, it either means it's in a flophouse or it's on fire or you have to share it with a live moose or something. As I was travelling alone, I didn't need any particular luxury.
Secondly, the Excalibur's basic rooms do not have bathtubs…just showers. This I like, having long endured the clumsiness I feel in those combos where you have to stand in a tub to take a shower. At check-in, the desk clerk asked me if I'd like a complimentary upgrade to a better quality room. I asked, "Does it have a combination bathtub and shower?" She said yes and I said, "I'd rather stick with the lower quality room." It was fine.
It was also (third reason:) perfectly situated. I had an invite to go see David Copperfield over at the MGM Grand, which is across the street from the Excalibur. And I was attending a convention at the Mandalay Bay, which is two hotels down from the Excalibur and connected by a walkway and a tram. Couldn't be easier.
Striding through the Excalibur, I kept seeing these signs offering Strip Poker…a game I have played in its basic form but once in my life. It was at a party when I was nineteen and the whole point of it was that there was one girl there who was dying to take her clothes off in front of everyone and somehow thought she needed a faux reason. So we played until Marla lost, which she accomplished by folding once with four-of-a-kind and once with a full house.
But that's not the kind of Strip Poker they're dealing at the Excalibur, which is probably a good thing. I've never played poker in Vegas but I've seen the kind of people who do. You wouldn't want most of them to take off their visors, let alone actual items of apparel. In the Excalibur version, they bring in a professional stripper and every time a player busts out, she takes off something.
Here are the rules. As you can see, they call for the dancer to remain "minimally though appropriately covered," which would apply to about half the women who shop at Trader Joe's in Los Angeles. And let me quote two other rules I find amusing…
- Although the dancer may converse with the customers, the dancer will not engage in any solicitous activities at any time.
- The dancer will dance and carry herself in an appropriate manner. Dances, physical movements and any other actions of an overtly sexual nature are forbidden.
It all strikes me as a perfect example of the inherent, quaint contradiction of Las Vegas. They want to offer you something naughty but it has to be "safe naughty" that can offend no one, cause no possible legal problem. I mean, you just know how this must have gone down. Someone came in one day and said, "Hey, you know the game that will get people excited? Strip poker!" And then someone else yelled, "Great! We'll combine gambling with sex. The only problem is that, well, you know…some of our poker players are pretty ugly." "No problem," said the first guy. "We'll bring in someone — a dancer or someone you'd like to see strip." And the boss proclaimed, "Okay, but we better protect ourselves. Get together with the lawyers and have them work out something so no one can get mad or sue."
And there you have it: Someone's actually figured out a way to strip most of the fun from Strip Poker.
I'll bet it won't last. And I'll also bet it won't make any money for them, either, which is not to say it couldn't. What they'd have to do is not get so corporate uptight with it…and also find a lady who looks exactly like Marla did in 1971. If they could, they just might have something.