Hella Good

Date: 2026-06-06

Submitted: 2026-06-23 22:57:51

Visibility: World-readable

A quick weekend trip to Las Vegas to meet up with family, visit an alternate-reality grocery store; and see No Doubt in the sphere

Last fall, after seeing the band Garbage in San Francisco and flying to Las Vegas to see Alanis Morissette, I thought about what important-to-me nineties band I wanted to see next to complete my teenage nostalgia. The obvious answer was No Doubt; like most of the rest of my generation I listened to saturation coverage of the radio singles, and bought the album Tragic Kingdom on CD. (I still have the CD, in a box in the garage, though I ripped all of my CDs decades ago and never looked back after my first iPod.) At the time I understood the band wasn't really playing together, but hoped they'd reunite for some sort of nostalgia tour, especially since there were enough people who had grown up on their music (like me) that were now old enough to have ample disposable income to support a reunion tour.

Then I learned that they were in fact staging a reunion — at the Sphere in Las Vegas in the spring. So of course I had to go.

It didn't take long to decide to meet my sister Bethany and her husband in Las Vegas to see the show. They brought their six-month-old, and brought my mother out for childcare during the show. I bought a fourth ticket for the show, intending to invite Calvin; and when I finally brought it up a few weeks before the show he agreed to come along.

I started a new job, returning to Google, the week before the Saturday night show, so I didn't have any extra vacation to burn. (I spent the first five months of the year accumulating vacation at the big-tech company that bought my startup but feeling unable to plan more than a week in advance because I didn't know what job I'd have. But I ended up with a busy June travel schedule inconveniently scheduled just as I'm starting a new job.) I picked flights to leave late enough that I could leave home on Friday after work, and ended up flying from SFO direct to Las Vegas on Frontier. (Since the last time I flew Frontier, while I was living in Colorado sometime in the early teens, the airline has completed their transformation into an ultra-low-cost carrier. On the plane they pushed the narrative that passengers "only paid for what they used", which is one way of looking at the unbundled service provided by low-cost carriers that's more charitable than "you now have to pay for things that used to be included".)

We ended up visiting Las Vegas on a hot early-summer weekend. When we arrived at the airport in Las Vegas and stepped out onto the curb at the terminal to catch a taxi to Park MGM, our hotel on the strip, it was still above ninety degrees outside (at at 23:00 local time), and the air stank of stale cigarette smoke. Just as soon as we stopped at the appropriately-numbered space at taxi rack an air-conditioned taxi arrived and drove us down Tropicana Ave to the strip, past a gas station that was probably expensive by local standards (I think it was something like $4.26/gallon) but seemed like a bargain in California, and the new construction at the corner of the Strip that will eventually hold the A's ballpark (so they no longer have to play home games in an undisclosed location). Park MGM was entirely smoke-free so that was nice. We got a room on the fourteenth floor of the hotel, one of the lower floors in the second bank of elevators, overlooking the hotel pool and the tram station.

On Saturday morning we met up with my mother and sister, both of whom had rooms on the other side of the hall, so I got to look down at the plaza in front of New York New York, built with scaled-down versions of the Chrysler Building and Empire State Building. (Just out of view to the right is the arena where, later that afternoon, the local hockey team was hosting one of its playoff games.)

We headed down to the hotel lobby and joined the waiting list for a table for breakfast. While we waited for our table I took Calvin on a quick walk outside and across the street to look at the mesh human figure in the plaza. (It was not yet 10:00 in the morning and the outside temperature was already above 90, portending a hot dry day in the desert.) I found the sculpture I had spotted from the hotel window above, a Marco Cochrane sculpture, just like R-Evolution at the Ferry Plaza in San Francisco. This sculpture, titled "Bliss Dancer" according to the plaque in the concrete in front of the sculpture, had the same wire mesh skin stretched over a visible frame, but the pose of the figure, caught mid-step standing on one leg, was considerably more dynamic than the quiet mountain pose of R-Evolution, and I wondered what work the artist had done to make the sculpture stand up on one imbalanced leg.

I took Calvin into New York New York to see how the casino/resort/hotel had emulated a New York city village, with real shops and restaurants squeezed into carefully-constructed buildings on the ground, in between fake cobblestone streets, all permeated with the stench of stale cigarette smoke having been passed through multiple ineffective layers of HVAC filtering. We walked past the casino floor, then turned around to walk through Park MGM's casino floor (better-lit, smoke-free, carpeted with a nice shade of green, but still emanating a sense of quiet desperation behind the clanging slot machines and their bright flashing lights).

We ate breakfast at Primrose in the hotel lobby, then followed it up with a second breakfast at Eatly (I had a pastry; others had crepes).

Outside Area 15 were a series of weird art projects sitting out in the hot desert sun: a car with chainsaws welded to the front bumper (which seemed impractical in an obvious Mad Max homage), a portal with sparkling triangles of colored glass, a tetrahedron covered in circular mirrors. The biggest, sprawled on its back in the plaza in the middle of the parking lot in front of the building, was a vaguely-humanoid robot figure with the dedication:

Mechan 9 is dedicated to the Iron Giant, R2-D2 & C-3PO, Data, Bender Johnny 5, Optimus Prime & the Autobots & all the other robots who have helped show us that you don't have to be human to have humanity.

Inside Area 15 were a variety of entertainment attractions but we spent all of our time at one: Omega Mart, an "immersive experience" that opened with something that looked like a grocery store. We "could buy anything we could pick up", and the store was full of weird satirical parallel-universe products. The cleaning-products aisle had bottle of a fake cleaning product that looked kind of like a horse with a spray bottle head. (The container itself didn't hold anything, but the spray bottle head was real.) For June, Pride Month, they had a "Rainbow Wash" with a "highly performative formula" that "works hard so you don't have to".

Most of the products were branded by Omega Mart and looked like they had been created specifically for the installation, as the product of the sort of warped mind (complimentary) that might write for The Onion. There were boxes of breakfast cereal that looked like they might actually be edible but were covered in warped slogans. (I don't think I saw anything advertising itself as "the expendable part of this complete breakfast" but that's about the right tone.) The produce aisle had plush parallel-universe vegetables planted firmly in the uncanny valley. A few of the products looked like they might actually outside of Omega Mart (including a pad of sticky notes in a ramen noodle wrapper that I found at Cliff's Variety in the Castro on my first trip out of the house after getting the COVID-19 vaccine in 2021).

The back wall of the store had portals leading to the parallel-universe American southwest town of Nine Monoliths, home to a sinister factory creating the products to be sold in Omega Mart; and the corporate head office filled with computer consoles to investigate the mystery of the town.

Some of the rooms were just filled with random art: a room where lasers shined through mist and breaking the beam with one's hand meant playing a note; and an infinity room covered in mirrors and giant heads that looked like they had been rendered with low-resolution 1990s computer graphics.

At one point, while wandering through Nine Monoliths, we found ourselves watching an actor in an elaborate alien headdress hyping up the crowd to prepare for the "migration of the monolith", which involved a diversion featuring a quartet of strongmen performers who looked like shirtless Chippendales dancers wearing Daft Punk helmets carrying oversized barbells. (It was Las Vegas, so a choreographed stunt show was inevitable.) They performed acrobatic stunts that included lifting each other and standing on each other's shoulders. The audience's applause was enough to bring out the "guardians", masked robed figures who twirled and danced while another actor handed out glowing orbs on sticks to random members of the audience, including Calvin.

At the right moment more dancers appeared wearing the inflatable glowing costume of the leviathan. The figure in the alien headdress called for us to "follow the leviathan!" from Nine Monoliths to the factory floor, lead by the members of the audience carrying the glowing orbs. The leviathan danced around the factory then disappeared backstage.

I picked up story cards from the store's front desk (which cost an extra $3, which seemed like a weird price for something that we'd already paid to enter) that let us pursue a short quest as "employees" of Omega Mart. The cards let us "boop" them on readers throughout the installation to pursue a quest uncovering a mystery in the shadowy corporation that runs Omega Mart. This was the weakest part of the experience; the quest was an exercise in running around between specific places (most of which were already occupied by someone else, so one had to wait); but I scanned everything in the right order and unlocked the last story event, to turn over the company's secrets to a group of internal dissidents. By comparison our last immersive experience, Atlas 9 in Kansas City, had a more expansive and less-linear (and more interesting) story to unlock. The story mode was still adequately entertaining; and the whole experience was a fun afternoon indoors in the air conditioning in the otherwise-hot summer afternoon.

We emerged after four hours in Omega Mart into the oppressive heat of the Las Vegas summer and caught a Lyft to Lotus of Siam, where Bethany had made reservations for an early dinner and would be meeting us along with the rest of the group. Or at least, she had made reservations at a Lotus of Siam, which we only discovered when I showed up ahead of everyone and the host didn't have the reservation on the list. It turned out her reservation was for the Red Rock location, on the outskirts of town, not either of the locations near the Strip. It was early enough that I was able to get our name on the wait list; and by the time the rest of the group arrived our table was almost ready.

After dinner we got a ride back to the Park MGM to drop off my mother and my baby cousin; then caught a taxi to the Sphere to see No Doubt.

We arrived at the Sphere at dusk, as the setting sun glanced off the high clouds. The air had cooled down from the triple-digit afternoon high to still-scorching nineties. We bought t-shirts at one of the many the merch counters inside the venue, then lingered on the concourse outside the tunnel leading to our seats to people-watch. There were people (mostly women), mostly around my age, who had dressed up for the show in checkerboard pants or skirts, referencing the band's visual styling from the nineties.

I selected tickets seated in the 100 level, one-third of the way up the stadium-style seats, out from under the overhang of the seats ahead of us so we could see most of the close enough that we could see the band performing on stage.

Once we were seated I got a group selfie of us waiting to see the show.

The show started with the title track "Tragic Kingdom", presented with a vertiginous animation of the band on a rickety roller-coaster on the wrap-around screen behind the stage. At times it felt like the entire Sphere was tilting down the tracks behind the animated band, and we were about to be dumped out of our seats; then I focused on the (unmoving) stage where the band was actually performing and ignored the screen and it all felt better.

Each song had its own unique visualization. (One had a giant hand-drawn animation of Gwen Stefani in a short skirt, big boots, and a crop-top with "Gwen" written on it in giant letters, striding towards the audience like she was going to break through the screen and stomp her way through the pit in front of the stage and climb the seats filled with adoring fans.)

At several points during the show Gwen looked out into the audience as the camera focused on people in the audience holding signs in the general-admission pit in front of the stage. The sings said things encouraging Gwen to invite them on stage for a hug (apparently this was a thing that people knew they should do), and she picked out several people several different times, who seemed ecstatic to climb on stage and meet their hero.

The band focused on songs from their 1995 break-out album Tragic Kingdom (which was fine with me, because that's their album that I listen to the most, and their songs from the album got the best reaction from the audience). But the album is written as a break-up album by lead singer Gwen Stefani from the band's bass player Tony Kanal. The show's intermission videos, played between each of the four sets, lampshaded the album's origins and the awkward tension between the band's members when they had to play the songs live every night; even now, more than thirty years later.

Most of the intermission videos featured recent interviews with the band members talking about their experience in the band, and in particular the reaction to Tragic Kingdom. The songs, they said, came from an authentic place and struck a chord with audiences. That audience was present in the Sphere to see them play the songs again.

The band played "Don't Speak" at the end of the third set. The visuals started with a hot air balloon floating over an orange orchard, then descended into the orchard for the rest of the song. The entire audience in the Sphere rose to their feet for the song, singing along with Gwen on stage. It was the song we had all come here to see, live in person. It was an emotional cathartic communal experience with 20,000 other people there to see the same thing at the same time.

Guitar player Tom Dumont spent most of the song playing an electric guitar on a strap over his shoulder, but for the classical guitar in the song's bridge, as the golden light shone through the orchard on the screen behind the band and oranges fell from the trees in a riot of color, a stage hand brought out an acoustic guitar mounted on a post, mounted at the proper jaunty angle. Tom walked up to the acoustic guitar and played the critical riff in the bridge, then picked up his electric guitar again for the rest of the song.

The band returned for a fourth and final set, playing "Just a Girl" as the penultimate song. This song also had the crowd on their feet singing along to the line "I'm just a girl in the world".

The band wrapped up the show with "Sunday Morning"; and then they took their final bows as the entire Sphere cheered them on, and they left the stage for the last time.

We left the Sphere and headed back to our hotel (via the pedestrian bridge to the Venetian, then a taxi down the Strip from the hotel). We'd seen a great live performance of one of my favorite bands, that was significant music to at least the people in my generation (and I think Calvin also had a good time). We left Las Vegas to fly home the next day, wrapping up a quick weekend trip; this time I managed to leave the city before I got tired of the glitter of this fake place that shouldn't exist in the desert.