Good Show!

Dennis scored Pammy and me some free tickets to Mariah Carey's show for Sunday evening.  Neither Pammy nor I are huge fans, but free entertainment is free entertainment.  The theme of the show was a performance of her eighteen #1 hits, sung chronologically.  That was good news for me since I don't remember liking any of her songs since 1997 and don't think she's had more than a handful of hits in the past fifteen years.

Since Pam has confessed her fear of driving outside of her suburban southwest Vegas surroundings, it has fallen to me do the metro driving when Dennis isn't around.  (He was working the show this evening and couldn't take us.)  For the record, I'd like to say that I did a fabulous job navigating I-15 and the backroads of the strip and getting us where we needed to park.  No problemo.

The Colosseum at Caesar's Palace isn't a bad little venue.  Not too big, but not too small.  As with the rest of Vegas, the people watching is top notch.  There were the extremely tall, middle-aged farm boys in striped polo shirts and red heels.  Dennis tells me they made out in the third row the whole night.  There was the Chinese tour group with lanterns on their shirts....that is, lanterns with hundreds of actual bulbs.  Those dudes were bright, literally.  There were lots of ladies in party dresses.  Since some of them were so silly looking, I might dare to call them prom dresses.  I powdered my nose for Ms. Mariah, but that was about as far as I went.

Mariah started 20 minutes late, but when the show was ready to start, it started in a hurry.  Lights went down and the curtain went up in a quick 20 seconds.  The girls behind me immediately began to scream and swoon.  "Oh my God, I love her....I've been waiting for this my whole life....I'm crying you guys!  I can't stop crying!"  And on and on it went...for the whole night...much to Pammy's irritation.  It didn't bother me so much.  I must have been in one of my rare moods in which I tolerate tween behavior.

Dennis says that of all the shows he has worked, the Mariah Carey crowd is the rowdiest.  Tons of screaming and crying fans (of both sexes) and a lot of coming and going of the crowd did make for a rambunctious audience.  There was a serious security breach when a Jesus freak ran up on stage and asked Mariah to read a prayer.  It took security a surprisingly long amount of time to rescue her, but to her credit she did well with the guy.  She read the prayer and thanked him for it, all the while keeping a sharp lookout for when someone was going to appear to help her.  Like I said, she had a while to wait. 

Pam insists that Mariah was off-key for much of the night, but I thought she sang really well.  I'd forgotten just how many of her songs I like, and as a performer she didn't fail to amuse.  For one thing, she can't really walk.  Like a Barbie doll with feet too small to support her body, Mariah needed a handler for most of the show whenever she walked more than twenty feet.  She was wheeled in for the bulk of her songs and carried out after others.  A combination of some tight dresses and  high heels meant that the rest of the time she had to waddle about slowly on her own.  We all held our breath waiting for her to fall.

The greatest shock of the evening occurred at the very end when I looked at the screaming and swooning tweens behind Pam and me.  Turns out they weren't overheated teenagers; they were incredibly immature adult women.  Thank goodness I was deceived for the whole show.  Had I known how old they were I would have been ticked over the distracting ruckus they were kicking up.

At any rate, for an evening that started out with me not knowing if I even really wanted to go or not, I ended up being happy that I did.  Good show!