Deuce

Started: 2025-11-09 10:29:11

Submitted: 2025-11-09 21:23:03

Visibility: World-readable

Leaving the Strip: the Erotic Heritage Museum, a museum about the Mob, a neon boneyard; and zombie burlesque

Friday, the 31st of October, was Halloween; and it was only only the second vacation day I've taken since June. I spent much of the summer in chip bringup, and outside of the summer it didn't work to schedule family vacations around the kids' school schedule and Kiesa's available vacation hours after she accounted for other commitments.

I ate breakfast at an expensive Starbucks on the ground floor of the Park MGM hotel in Las Vegas, then returned to my room to figure out what my plan for the day was. (It turned out that the band Garbage, which I had seen the week before in San Francisco, was continuing their tour with a show in Las Vegas, so I could have seen them again; but I decided to see a different show instead.) This took long enough that I was ready to eat lunch before heading out; so I headed next door to Shake Shack.

I decided to come to Las Vegas without renting a car, to avoid the hassle of renting and parking (and driving); this was basically fine for wandering around the Strip itself, but made it somewhat harder to get off-strip, where many of the interesting attractions were. The local transit agency ran a bus 24/7 up and down the Strip called "The Deuce", with 10-15 minute headways while I was planning on being awake. Finding the nearest stop was easy enough (right across Las Vegas Boulevard, on the other side of a convenient pedestrian footbridge, in front of the MGM Grand). I bought a 24-hour pass from the ticket vending machine at the bus stop, then boarded the waiting bus; and then I discovered the downside of public transit on the Strip. Las Vegas Boulevard is a major thoroughfare but it's packed with cars and cross-traffic. The bus stopped frequently, which was good for service; but combined with long dwell times at every stop it crawled even slower than traffic.

Along the way I saw viewing stands built in front of the Bellagio for the F1 race in November, blocking the sidewalk view of their fountain; and the first ten stories of the under-construction guitar-shaped Hard Rock Hotel tower that will replace the Mirage, the rounded bottom of the guitar visible in the structure as it began to climb above the Strip.

I got off the bus in front of the Wynn. My walk off the strip took me past the phallic tower of the Trump International Hotel (Las Vegas), faced in a gaudy gold that reflected a bright golden light onto the shady sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. I took a picture of the tower but consider this a content warning in case you'd rather not see it.

My destination was the Erotic Heritage Museum, a half-mile off the Strip in a nondescript low building. Inside was a kind-of-random assortment of artifacts depicting various aspects of human sexuality. There were life-sized mannequins depicting presidents Trump and Clinton to illustrate their sex scandals, along with a Wall of Shame describing various (mostly conservative) political figures involved their own in sex scandals. There was a timeline of court cases and laws involving sex in the United States (though the panels I saw only went from about 1960 into the 1970s). There were discussions about abortion, and LGBT issues; and an entire wall with a nuanced discussion about trans people.

Much of the museum was art in various forms, both historic and modern, from cultures around the world. One of the first things I saw was a penis built out of $100,000 in pennies (please consider this NSFW, behind a link serving as a content warning). There were display cases full of objects clearly depicting penises. There was plastinated male external genitalia on display, with the skin removed to show the interior detail; and since I'm scheduled for a vasectomy in November this was especially interesting to me, to see the specific anatomy involved in the procedure. The whole thing was a fascinating (and often weird) look at human sexuality.

My next destination was in downtown Las Vegas, a few miles north. I walked back to Las Vegas Boulevard (past the Eye-of-Sauron-like golden glare of the Trump International Hotel) and waited for the next northbound Deuce bus on a hot and sunny sidewalk. The bus didn't seem to have a fixed schedule (which probably makes sense, given its operating environment) but the expected arrival times given by Google Maps didn't seem to match reality. At length a bus arrived, stopped at the curb long enough to drop off a few passengers and board the transit cop waiting at our stop, but it declined to board any of the score of passengers waiting at the stop before it drove away. The next bus arrived a few minutes later, and boarded half of the passengers crowding at the stop, before it too drove away.

I didn't feel like waiting for a third bus so I walked north along the Strip in search of alternate transportation. (I had a vague idea about finding a handy place to summon a Lyft, though I wasn't sure what such a place would look like.) Immediately north was the Wynn's hotel entrance, which featured a taxi rack with one group ahead of me. I stepped up to the front of the line and boarded a taxi to take me to the Mob Museum. It cost more than the bus but was much faster (and as soon as my driver dropped me off there were passengers waiting to board to go somewhere else).

The Mob Museum was located in an old civic building in Las Vegas and contained a bunch of exhibits tracing the rise of organized crime in the United States, starting in New York in the nineteenth century and expanding nation-wide in time for Prohibition. One of the artifacts displayed was anti-prohibition sheet music with the title "Where do they go when they row, row, row three miles from the shore", with an anecdote about a ship located three miles off the coast of Santa Monica, outside of the closest zone of state influence, until the authorities measured differently and raided the ship.

One of the weirder artifacts was a section of the brick wall from the warehouse where a gang in Chicago murdered their rivals, with bullet holes marked in the bricks. The warehouse had been demolished (in the 1960s?) and some guy from Vancouver, BC had bought the bricks and carefully reassembled the wall, before this museum acquired it.

The museum pivoted to Las Vegas with anecdotes about the state legislature legalizing gambling in the 1930s to draw people to the state during the Great Depression. At the same time the legislature reduced the residency period to grant a divorce to six weeks, which meant that Hollywood stars who wanted a divorce would travel to the state, live on a special ranch for six weeks, and then they could get a divorce. (I knew that Las Vegas is famous for quick weddings. I didn't realize it used to be famous for (relatively) quick divorces.)

In an old courtroom in the building (which had been used for a series of Senate hearings on organized crime in Las Vegas, which eventually drove the mob out of the city) I walked into a talk in progress by a guy named Frank Calabrese, Jr., who talked about his involvement in organized crime in the 1990s, and in providing the evidence to convict his father.

Much of the rest of the museum centered on gambling in Las Vegas, including the rise and fall of various casino-hotels and the rise of the current mega-casino-resort-hotels. In an old safe in a side room was a slot machine dressed up as a one-armed bandit. The description noted that players had to pull the arm with the pistol to play the slots.

I wrapped up the museum (exiting via the gift shop, as one does) and walked a few blocks south to Fremont Street, at the core of downtown Las Vegas. This was the Vegas version of an outdoor pedestrian mall: several blocks of gaudy casinos under a barrel vault covered in an animated LED screen, with pervasive outdoor smoking. There were people promenading up and down the street dressed in Halloween costumes, and a sign announcing a costume contest later in the evening. There were two tiers of zip lines above the street (a lower, shorter one offering a seated position; and a higher, longer one offering a prone position for a better view).

I walked one block down Fremont Street and decided I had seen enough. It felt like an outdoor version of a casino floor, without the benefit of climate control. (The sun had just set on a hot, dry day; and it was still warm at ground level under the canopy.) I left Fremont Street and walked to the Neon Museum, located a half-mile north of downtown in a stunning mid-century modern concrete shell that used to hold a motel lobby.

I timed my arrival at the Neon Museum to arrive at the beginning of their evening session, shortly after sunset. The museum collected neon and illuminated signs from Las Vegas and was set up like a neon boneyard, where neon companies would store old signs they weren't currently using to cannibalize them for parts or repurpose them later. They had restored a bunch of the signs into working order; others sat, decayed and derelict, in a pile behind the signs on display.

I walked into the neon boneyard at dusk. I followed the gravel path through the desert between the neon relics, with an audio tour provided by a website via a QR code displayed in the lobby. I strolled down the path between the signs, listening to the short descriptions of their history and context. One of the largest signs along the path was the Moulin Rouge, the first Black-owned casino in Las Vegas, in an era where discrimination ruled in the white-only casinos.

Many of the signs were from derelict casinos from the Strip and elsewhere in Las Vegas. There were a surprising number of signs from roadside motels that embraced neon signs as part of their marketing. (I didn't see any "[No] Vacancy" signs, which are a simple but surprisingly effective (and common) use of neon.) Other signs came from casinos that still existed, in some fashion or another, but had rebranded or renovated and replaced their signs.

After dark was a great time to visit the neon boneyard because most of the signs were lit up so I could see the signs as they were originally intended to be displayed; though they were packed together more densely even than the monument to neon that is the Las Vegas Strip.

Walking through the neon boneyard I got to see the signs up close and personal, closer than they were designed to be seen. This let me see the details of the construction of the sign. One sign was close enough that I could see the more-energy-efficient helical lighting element inside the light bulbs installed as pixels inside a sign. (The bulbs that are out in this picture were flickering on and off in a pattern, making the sign sparkle.)

A recent addition to the collection was a neon sign from the Tropicana when it was demolished last year to make room for a planned sports stadium to house the team formerly known as the Oakland A's if they ever move to Las Vegas. (The A's are now playing home games out of a minor-league stadium in Sacramento, but wherever they appear they are just referred to as the "Athletics", no city specified, leading to the joke that they're the "Undisclosed Location A's".)

As I was leaving the Neon Museum I saw a sign with a QR code to scan to summon a taxi, which seemed like it was worth a shot (in part as an experiment to see if I could get where I wanted to go with regular taxis not Lyft). A taxi showed up in a few minutes and whisked me back onto I-15 and then to Planet Hollywood on the Strip, with a bit of commentary about F1 messing up traffic by routing itself down Las Vegas Boulevard. I ate tacos for supper at a place in the "Miracle Mile" indoor mall called Tacotarian, then found the theater for the show I picked, Zombie Burlesque, which seemed like the right thing for Halloween.

The setup for the show, shown in a grainy video, was that the 1950s nuclear tests in Nevada created a group of zombies who were reasonably docile as long as they were fed regularly. Our host was a zombie, indicated by his zombie makeup and slightly disheveled tuxedo. One of the first scenes had a long segment about zombies eating all of their human victims, involving a large dildo, which set the campy irreverent tone for the show. It was a burlesque show so some of the performances involved dancing and stripping their zombie costumes until they were topless except for pasties. (One of the male performers also showed up in a very small thong and pasties with long tassels.)

One scene was a zombie ballet featuring two ballet dancers performing to an instrumental song that tickled at my memory until I realized that it was an all-strings arrangement of the song Zombie by the Cranberries. There were also acrobatics: one cast member performed a balancing act involving a meter-long board on top of a hollow cylindrical roller on top of a platform on the stage, which then escalated to stacking multiple rolling cylinders on top of each other (set up so their rotational axes were perpendicular to each other), which was impressive (and a bit nerve-wracking until he finished the stunt and dismounted to the relative safety of the platform elevated above the stage). One of the performances was a contortionist who bent herself into pretzel-like shapes, bending all the way backwards to drink out of a glass placed behind her. The show was filled with dumb jokes and a recreation of "The Newlywed's Game" with a couple from the audience playing against the zombies on the stage (who answered "brains" to each of the questions).

After the show the first song to play on the PA as the audience was filing out of the theater was Jonathan Colton's "Re: Your Brains".

The whole thing was ridiculous but also a lot of fun; it was a great way to wrap up Halloween in Las Vegas.

I have more photos of my day in Las Vegas (some NSFW) at Photos on 2025-10-31.