Las Vegas is the most honest place in America
The beginning of a week in the desert for NBA Summer League
I’m writing to you from exactly 28,000 feet above the earth. I know this because there’s been a lot of turbulence, and the pilot just came over the intercom to tell us that he had dropped to a slightly lower altitude in hopes that the ride “gets smoother.” I used to be very scared of turbulence, but then I watched a bunch of videos that a commercial pilot posts on TikTok. His name is Steve Of The Skies or something (it’s not, but it should be), and I watched one of his TikToks called “Why No Pilots Are Scared of Turbulence.” Pilots aren’t scared of turbulence because turbulence is just like a bumpy road, so now, neither am I! Very brave.
I’m realizing that The Wilder Things is slowly becoming a transportation newsletter. I’ve written about trains and submersibles. I’ve written to you from the floor of an airport, a train, and now a plane to Las Vegas. I’ll try to get on a hovercraft at some point and send you an email from there, but in the meantime, I’ll tell you why I’m on a plane to a place that’s 1000-degrees in July.
I’m going to NBA Summer League.
I’ll do my best to send you Letters From Summer League, and we can pretend you’re all my parents and I’m away at camp. Even though I never went to sleep-away camp, because I was an anxious kid who was bad at spending the night anywhere besides my own room. Strangely enough, I grew up to be an anxious adult who prefers sleeping in her own bed. Funny how that works!
I am, however, very excited for this week-long adventure. (I don’t know if I’m allowed to tell you exactly what it is we’re doing for Meadowlark Media out here, so I will hold off on doing that until our Nebulous Project is off the ground.) Most people only go to Vegas for a few days at a time, but I’ve had the bizarre experience of spending many weeks in this sin-soaked desert, because I wrote about the Golden Knights in 2018 and went back for their first Stanley Cup appearance that same year.
I also contracted Covid at Gronk’s Beach Party™️ in 2022 at the Wynn. Put it on a t-shirt: “I Went to Gronk’s Beach Party and All I Got Was Covid.”
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
Through these trips, I’ve discovered that writing about Las Vegas is one of my favorite things to do. It’s a city that’s completely honest about what and who it is. Transparent.
Las Vegas is an alien playground for adults, a neon-frosted ridge of man-made mountains rising out of cracked earth in which it has no business being. There is not enough water. It is too hot. Everything is too big, expect for recreations of famously big things, like the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty, which are too small. Anybody who goes to party in Vegas can try on different versions of themselves and then leave each one behind when they board the flight home, usually hungover and somewhat ashamed. There is no artifice to the artifice — Vegas is the Barbie movie, if the Barbie movie were directed by Scorsese and was, in fact, simply Casino.
Vegas is also home to a lot of people. Reporting on the Knights was a fascinating way to immerse myself in the local community of a town built on tourism. I saw a side of Vegas that you don’t see on the Strip — lovely suburban streets, breweries, playgrounds for kids. There are Whole Foods, Trader Joes, office buildings, graveyards.
Neither Party Vegas nor Hometown Vegas are cosplaying versions of themselves. The whole place simply is. A study in contradictions plopped onto red clay.
And now, the NBA world has plopped itself here, too. Stay tuned.
Love,
Charlotte
P.S. Mom and Dad please send money for snacks
A "nebulous project" reference FROM the clouds! 🤌