A few weeks ago here, I was talking about the Silver Slipper, a long-defunct casino in Las Vegas where I won a few bucks shortly before it was rased in 1988. Let's take a look at a sign that they had in front of the place in, I'm guessing, 1966.
They're luring people in with "The Show That Made America Blush," Minsky's Burlesque. It promises a "stageful [sic] of exciting girls" and given that the show was free — "no cover" — I'm guessing a "stageful" was no more than four. They did three shows a night — at 10 PM, half past Midnight and 2-friggin'-thirty in the morning. Note that the sign does not say the show is dark (i.e., closed) any night of the week.
There still are free shows in Vegas but none for any price at that hour. The free shows are usually in lounges full of drunk people and feature one or two performers and maybe, if you're lucky, a live piano player, plus you're expected to spring for a drink or two.
Then you have the Silver Slipper's "World Famous Buffet" for $1.57 or if you stick around or are up for breakfast, you can get one for 59 cents. $1.57 in 1966 is roughly equivalent to $15.30 today. Today, the cheapest dinner buffet in town is $27 and they run as high as $84.99 a person. If today, you saw a buffet offered for $15.30, I think you'd stay far away, figuring it had to be, like, a steam table full of week-old Hamburger Helper and ramen noodles left over from the Korean War. But I'll bet you that in '66, they put out a decent spread. After all, it was there to lure you in, not gross you out.
So you could have gone there at 11 PM, eaten all you could eat, seen the 12:30 show and had two drinks for, let's say, $20 in today's money and that's including tips. (The cheapest non-lounge show currently in Vegas at the moment seems to be Jen Kramer's magic show at the Westgate — which I hear is excellent. It's $38.46 a seat, though it's not hard to find a two-for-the-price-of-one coupon. But that's with no buffet and the drinks are extra.) Or you could have hit the 2:30 AM show at the Slipper and stuck around after until they started serving the cheapo breakfast.
Either way, on your way out of the Silver Slipper, you could pick up a pair of free nylons. That would come in handy if you wanted to make your legs look better or you needed a stocking mask so you could rob a liquor store. Or both.
The Minsky's show probably wasn't very risqué and if it had an old pro comedian or two in it — Hank Henry or Irv Benson or Tommy "Moe" Raft — it was probably a darn good show. And it was free as long as you didn't cash your payroll check on the way in and blow it all on the roulette wheel on your way out. I'm sorry I wasn't around for those days.