photo of the week 6: the oldest form of theater…

Michael J. Fox once said, “The oldest form of theater is the dinner table.”*

Successful restaurateurs, not the least of whom is Steven Wynn, understand this.

About a year ago, I went to Las Vegas to poke around the blissfully over-air-conditioned, artificially-lit, and reality-suspending halls of excess there.  There exist, within one square mile, more restaurants with award-winning chefs than any other square mile in the world.

Having checked in hours before my dinner at Alex, I decided to toggle around the hotel.

The Wynn is truly wonderful.  Every corner is a vignette – some dramatic, some whimsical – every one so grand as to make you stop in your tracks, lost in wonder.  Perhaps, the most memorable one was the three-story high wall of windows, framed by goliath, drawn curtains, with a sweeping view of the patio of Parasols, a pool-side terrace café.

At the far end of the pool was an epic-sized white stone wall over which water fell at a mesmerizingly steady rate.

You couldn’t help but look at it as you passed by. You simply couldn’t resist.

This scene, which has appeared on my blog before, set the stage for five days of uninhibited excess.  I think it deserves its own page.

* Of course, the rest of that quote, which was referring to the ingenious use of the dinner table to tell a story, went, “It’s got five or six people, new show every night, same players. Good ensemble; the people have worked together a lot.”