But I couldn’t write about the show we saw, because (as of now) it’s only a temporary attraction, and Tripadvisor won’t list those. But, hey, I have my own blog, so I’ll review it here!

Magician Criss Angel was playing at the Luxor, and we thought it might be fun to see him live. To see if we could get half-price tickets for the show, we went out to the Strip to see what might be available. But before we got there, we were drawn in to the Houdini Magic Shop at the MGM Grand. One of the staff magician showed us a few tricks, and we asked him what he might have heard about the Criss Angel show. As politely as he could, he let us know word was out that it really sucks. For one thing, a large portion of the show is simply videos of Criss Angel performing, rather than him actually doing it. If we wanted to see him on TV, we can do that at home for free! (As it turns out, the Yelp reviews of the show are humorously scathing.)

So we asked what magic shows are out there which are good. Penn & Teller are great, but we’ve seen them once already, and were looking for something new. David Copperfield was getting mixed reviews, and he’s reported also making the audience watch old videos instead of putting on a live show. The Houdini Magic magician asked if we like close-up magic. Do we ever! He suggested we see the Vegas Magic Theatre at the Gold Coast Casino, where he’d be doing close-up magic for an hour before the show itself started, and tickets were only $15 at the door. It was an easy choice: for the price of a single ticket to one of the shows we had considered, the whole family could see the show together.

We arrived a little late, because as it’s easy to do, we underestimated the distance between casinos. But we were still in time to see some of the close-up magic, which was awesome. Our magician twisted a fork into odd positions, while audience members couldn’t bend it at all. Another magician encased Peter’s cell phone into an inflated balloon, and we never quite figured out how he did it.

The stage performance featured 3 acts with an encore. The first act was a whimsical, fun, and original performance by Trigg Watson, the same magician who’d given Peter a balloon case for his phone. Next we saw Matt Marcy, who was big on audience participation which resulted in Peter having his first time on stage with a magician. Marcy had a funny fake tech support call in the middle of his act, and magically made sure we all knew his website, which has its own jingle I can’t forget. After that, we saw juggler Michael Goudeau who opened by juggling…bean bags. Having seen his juggling club attempt similar stunts, Neil knew how hard it is. Goudeau had the, um, most exciting act of all. As he weebled and wobbled on  the edge of the tiny stage atop at 6-foot-unicycle, he juggled flaming pins close to the fabric curtains above. I desperately, desperately hoped he wouldn’t lose his balance or veer off the lip of the stage and flame the theatre. He didn’t, but I think we were all holding our collective breath. Then he did something which made me really glad we hadn’t gotten seats in the front. The show ended with an encore performance by Matt Marcy.

The whole thing was MC’d by the Ben Stone, who is the only regular part of the show, since the performers change each week. Here is a picture of him from Vegas News:

In between the acts, Stone belted out two songs, and did a magic trick himself. He was charming enough, but I can’t quite figure out what bugged me about him. I think it’s that he wore too much make-up for such an intimate venue, so he looked more like an elf than a human. It may have been deliberate to bring up the sense of a cabaret, but this wasn’t that kind of a show. The context here, at least to my American mind, was more like vaudeville or a classic variety show. After all, besides the billed magic, the show included Stone’s singing, the juggler, and an actor portraying an exasperated stage hand.

Well, I’m really glad we caught this show rather than one of the big acts. The close up magic was a real treat, and there wasn’t a single boring or dull moment the entire time. If I lived in Las Vegas, I might even go back and see the new acts another week. Unfortunately, the show is scheduled to end its run in March.

I’m not sure I agree. Effectively, I’ve already been in that time machine and the Vegas that was, was an adults-only place. Today’s Vegas is far more mainstream, and fun for people of all ages, tastes, and money.

I first saw Las Vegas in 1980, when my mother and I crossed the country from San Diego to western Massachusetts to visit my cousin (once removed) Louise. On the way back, I convinced my mother to stop over in Las Vegas. I wanted to see Caesars Palace, which was the epitome of glamor to my teenage self, in no small part because it had recently been featured in a TV movie starring my favorite actor, Omar Sharif. (Yeah, that was atypical about me, but it sure beat swooning over Leif Garrett).

There was little I could do in Las Vegas. When I walked into Caesars Palace with my mother, a security guard shooed me out of the casino, directing me to walk on a pathway on the edge that made sure I didn’t go near any of the games. We could and did walk around the front, where I posed with my mother in front of one of the Roman statues:

The drive-up entrance to the casino was far more modest than it is today:

As viewed from Caesars Palace, the rest of the Strip was far smaller and less impressive than it is today. There’s no Venitian, Wynn, or Encore. Tom Jones? Didn’t he do a Prince cover?

My mother and I (always budget travellers) stayed right on the strip in a modest motel called the Tam O’Shanter.

I didn’t see Las Vegas again until 2002 when Peter’s parents moved to nearby Henderson, Nevada. It was dramatically different. Not only was it fresher and glitzier than it had been, all three generations could go out and have a fun time together. We looked at the lions at the MGM Grand, watched the 3D M&M experience in a small mall that had sprung up on the Strip, and watched the pirates fight at Treasure Island. We rode the gondolas at the Venetian and saw street performers put on free shows underneath a video canopy at Fremont Street. Back at Caesar’s Palace, we could go shopping and I had my picture taken with Caesar, Mark Anthony, Hannibal, and Cleopatra. We often had to walk through casinos to get to the entertainment, but it was ok to have children as long as they were moving in a direction.

But I suppose I can see some of the appeal of old Vegas. It was a time when adults had no qualms about segregating some forms of entertainment and their children. These days, even entertainment that ought to be restricted just isn’t. Go into an R-rated movie and you’re more likely than not to find an 8-year-old munching popcorn next to you as the actors on screen simulate a steamy sex scene. My friends threw an adults-only Halloween party, and I walked in to find a couple handing their toddler around for adoration to people in bondage gear. Honestly, people, I love my kids, but I don’t love yours, and I sure as hell don’t want them asking me to help them pull up their pants while I’m trying to play a poker game. Children just weren’t in the scene in 1980 Las Vegas, and while that limited its pull, it almost certainly had its own appeal in just that aspect.

These days there’s very little children may only experience upon reaching a certain age, and that’s only because of legal restrictions, not societal ones. And even then, it’s not necessarily something to look forward to: I don’t even know if my children will smoke, drink, gamble, or watch strippers. But if you want an environment that doesn’t have children in it, you almost always have to choose a place that specializes in one of the above vices.

In any case, thanks to the grandparents willing to do some babysitting, Peter took me to enjoy the glamor of Caesars Palace that I couldn’t experience in 1980. We dressed up, and went to the high-limit area, where I watched him play a few hands of baccarat between a dour Chinese man with a suitcase full of $100 bills, and a young millionaire from Arkansas. It was a lovely sociable experience, and we spent some of Peter’s winnings in a casino bar with silhouetted dancers and showy bartenders. So if you want the adult fun, modern Las Vegas will give it to you, too. But it’s got something for everyone now.

So how did we get to this situation? I love entertainment, and it wasn’t all that long ago that I spent the summer of 2005 trying to take my kids out to a movie each week, only to find that there weren’t enough G and PG movies for each week of the summer! That may be part of the problem, but I could still see edgier movies on my own, and I did.

The article I linked to says “Hollywood always has insisted it offers inexpensive entertainment compared to concerts, sports events and other costlier options” but that’s no longer as much the case as it used to be.

For instance, this year, instead of going to movies, I took my son to see plays. Yes, live plays, instead of movies! Many of them were Shakespeare plays: three of them were free, with only the cost of getting there early enough to get a seat, and for two others, the ticket prices were less than movie tickets cost. We’re also blessed in this area with having a lot of small theatres that take advantage of the talent in the area. Typically, $40 will buy tickets for both me and Neil to see a 2- to 3- hour performance. This includes seeing the imaginative way the set designer and director use the space and the set, watching the actors cleverly deal with wardrobe problems and flubbed lines if they happen, and being able to talk to the actors after the show. One year, at the Pear Slices performance, I sat near the playwright for one of the sketches, who let me in on the meaning of an acronym in his speech, and the mother of one of the actors, who could give me a personal run-down of her professional career. You don’t get all that with a movie, even if you paid extra to watch it in 3D.

The same rule applies to concerts and sports events: there’s a lot of concerts and sports events that price out under the $10 movie ticket price. The summer is often full of free concerts, and you can often find free tickets for our minor league baseball team, the San Jose Giants, and if you can’t, the tickets are only $9 each.

But more than anything, what’s killing the movie theatre is the quality of home video. We have a Blu-Ray Disc player, and, frankly, most of the movies I’m interested in going to are gone from the theatres before I can find the time to see them, especially since I know I can watch them at home. If I want to watch an R-rated movie with my husband, we don’t need to hire a babysitter: we can just wait until the kids go to bed and pop it in. And last year, Peter splurged on getting us a TV with 3D, and we could all watch Despicable Me in 3D in our own home, with our own popcorn and drinks. We’d watched it before in 2D in the movie theatre, and the accumulated tickets for all of us cost us more than the DVD set of the movie, which we can now watch in 2- or 3D whenever we want.

I don’t know if movie theatres will become extinct. We did like the sense of occasion in formally going out and see the movie (the most excellent The Muppets, BTW). And the movie theatre where we saw it, Camera Cinema 12, is a fun movie theatre to go to. The manager often dresses up like one of the characters in a currently-showing film, and as I was getting more popcorn, I glimpsed him dressed up as Sherlock Holmes. If you go past the theatre on the opening night for a movie that’s gotten a lot of buzz, you may also find cosplayers dressed up as movie characters. And if you buy your tickets in bulk, it’s only $6 for a seat (but still extra for 3D). But it’s hard to beat having a much wider movie selection (any disc on hand) with the comfort of staying home; and the going-out alternatives have stayed steady in their prices, as movie tickets have gotten costlier, making the latter less of an entertainment deal.

One of the highlights for us was making candy skulls, because while I’d heard about them, I’d never seen one. When we managed to find free seats at one of the tables, the docent brought us solid sugar skulls, which we were welcome to decorate as we wished with colored frosting, beads, and buttons. Here are ours:

After we’d explored some of the other events (which included making paper flowers, getting stickers from catrinas, and seeing a mariachi band), we went out to coffee. As we passed the basilica which is next to the museum, I noticed they advertised a Day of the Dead exhibit of their own. Peter and Neil weren’t into it, but Kelly and I were curious.

Inside a small hall of the basilica were 5 or 6 big shrines, each with photographs of (presumably) dead people. They were surrounded by colorful skulls, which weren’t only sugar skulls, but also ceramic or plastic. There were plates of fruit or cookies, and in one case, a bottle of tequila, set out, as well as pots of marigolds. In one case, a jaunty skeleton in a suit and hat stood next to a shrine. And all of it was an explosion of color: there were crosses, candles, shiny beads, and scattered flowers, so dense and profuse that you couldn’t focus on any one thing.

Helpfully, the basilica had also set up a plaque explaining the Day of the Dead from the Catholic perspective. It goes back to indigenous pre-Catholic traditions, when the Mexican natives believed the dead would come back to visit during a month between July and August. The Catholic church moved the festival to All Souls’ Day (November 2), and the basilica lets people set up shrines like the ones we saw, and some of the local Catholic churches will hold a special All Soul’s Day mass at a cemetery.

Not surprisingly, Kelly was inspired. I asked one of the docents at the art museum where I could get sugar skulls. He said the museum had made all the skulls for the event themselves with a special mold, but perhaps I could find them at one of our local Mexican grocery stores.

Today, I went to the Mexican grocery store closest to me, which I had nervously been avoiding on the fearful (and wrong) assumption that I needed to speak Spanish to shop there. It was great store, with otherwise hard-to-find groceries at great prices (whole Tilapia for $2/lb.; tamarind sherbert; fresh oxtail; Oaxacan cheese!) But the Day of the Dead was not what this store was about. I asked one of the grocers about them, who said they didn’t sell them, but maybe I could find them at Lucky’s (a local American grocery chain.) Hmm. I did find some pastries behind a dancing skeleton sticker which I presumed to be pastries meant to be placed on a Day of the Dead shrine, but I could be wrong:

And in the households section, among all the veladora candles, I found 3 different designs, each in honor of of “Saint Death.”

As it would happen, just on Friday, Neil and I had watched Engineering an Empire: the Aztecs, and I couldn’t help but notice the similarities. While the program reported how the Aztecs had managed to build not only large temples, but also cement causeways in a lake and on swampy land, as well as how they developed an ingenious aqueduct, it couldn’t help but note that the Aztecs were into blood. They were really, really into death and blood. And from what I know of modern Mexico, the conquistadors (who weren’t really the most pacifistic people themselves) didn’t quite manage to stamp it out.

The Day of the Dead celebrates death in a way modern Christianity really doesn’t. It ends up being beautiful and colorful and shiny, much like the Aztecs must have seen it. And the Santa Muerte candle had a prayer on it on the back (in English and Spanish) which doesn’t actually make any reference to God or Jesus, and it sounds like a nasty way to punish your enemies. Is Santa Muerte an Aztec goddess revived in faux Catholic guise? In any case, Peter told me she’s popular with the drug smugglers of Mexico, who may themselves be the modern version of the ancient Aztec race.

This gringa will never really know, but I’m glad I got to make sugar skulls this year.

Understandably, Neil wasn’t the only one in our crowd interested in seeing the house. I quickly collected Bill Gosper; the Ziegler-Hunts boys and their father; and Bill’s friend Peter Aiken-Forderer, who lives nearby and used to go trick-or-treating there as a child.

Here’s the veranda of the house, and Dale explaining the design of the circular house to us.

There’s a garden of hexagons on the stairs leading down to the yard.

The garden and yard are full of fantastic mathematical sculptures like this.

And this optical illusion.

And this groovy op-art that’ll make your eyeballs spin.

Here’s Kelly in front of an optical illusion.

An ingenious Serpinski triangle made with golf balls.

Stars and circles and spheres and triangles.

And that was just the outside!

After showing us around, Dale led us in through a centrally hinged door which Peter A. had said always had the neighborhood kids talking.

The inside was filled with old fashioned toys and games. We took a tour circling around the inside until we got to the top. Then we circled back around to the bottom where Dale and his wife Margot treated the kids to sodas and snacks, and let them play with the video games in the game room.

As it turns out, Dale is also the world’s authority on gambling chips, and has written the ultimate guide about them for collectors. He showed us some of those treasures as well.

He was also too modest to tell us that he’s written and published the best books you can find for learning about tesselations. I only found this out when I was looking for such a book for Neil, and found out we had met the author!

Then again, having seen the bar of tesslating lizards, I shouldn’t have been surprised:

We wondered how the movie would handle the beaver scene, but no worries–it never showed up, nor did David, the sometimes comic character of a guy who just loved to sing religious songs all the time. Uncas is like a footnote (who conveniently dies, never having come close to Cora.) Now it’s Hawkeye, his father’s white trapper buddy, who’s caught Cora’s eye. Hawkeye is played by Daniel Day Lewis with a thick Irish brogue, and it’s no wonder he’s hooked up with Cora, cuz she’s clearly a Celtic type, too, her pale white skin giving no hint of her mom’s heritage, which is never mentioned. Duncan, who was the old school European-type hero giving a foil to the Native’s survival skills, gets murdered horribly in this film (his final end coming thanks to a merciful arrow from the Irish Hawkeye.) It’s awful! Neil and I screamed at the end, as every supporting character died and Hawkeye and Cora go off into the sunset. But based on other reviews, if you never, ever read the book, it’s a great movie.

I felt the same with The Count of Monte Cristo. Peter and I saw the movie when it first came out and we loved it. Then, years later, I read the book with Neil, and found it full of twists and turns, and magic, betrayal and intrigue. The movie I once loved was a pale, lame thing in comparison, especially since the Count runs off with his first love (who has never aged in the 20+ years he was imprisoned and gone) instead of his Turkish slave, who is a no-show, like so many of the other spectacular elements of the novel.

It’s terrible! I don’t know if I even want to see the movie version of The Red Badge of Courage or The Virginian. The movies may be loved, but do they even come close to the book?

It makes me wish producers wouldn’t touch books, and just stick to scripts. For instance, you rarely hear of classic plays being butchered in performance: we saw Death of a Salesman at the teeny Pear Theatre, and it was terrific –and we could read parts of the play the next day and recognize them. We also saw Bridge on the River Kwai as an interlude in our studies of World War II, and it was a great movie–I hope it wasn’t based on a book, because I’d hate to think which would have been better.

One of the exhibits which has come and stayed are the Kapla bricks, which are little more than short flat pieces of wood, which the museum visitors use to make the most creative constructions. We saw them as a new exhibit in 2006, when Neil’s imaginative friend Ryan joined us and created a castle with a bridge. Since then, the Kapla bricks have moved next a small maze in a room with the Planetarium, and they’re always a hit with my children:

Neil was also eager to see the choice of puzzles in the museum store, and he ended up buying himself a quite inscrutable Chinese puzzle box.

I am always in awe of the view from the museum, which never fails to amaze:

A few days later, I set the children up with an art lesson about Joan Miro. We all came up with impressive Miro-inspired art, all in our own styles. As a conjunct to it, I planned to show the children two Miro paintings I’d seen at the Stanford art museum.

Unfortunately, when we got there, the Miro paintings had been rotated out of the 20th-century art exhibit. Alas! However, I had had the children do another lesson on Alexander Calder the day before (and we have two stabiles and a mobile to show for it). And as it turned out, the museum had an Alexander Calder mobile on display: you can see “The Chariot” here behind the children:

Kelly was very exited to see an authentic art piece based on what she’d learned. She wasn’t as thrilled with the Robert Arneson heads, though I always find them whimsical.

The downstairs special exhibit often includes an activity, so I took the children there to see if there was one with the current exhibit. But the exhibit was very very delicate calligraphy, with no activity (and honestly, a note which seemed to imply breathing near the calligraphy was seriously discouraged). So we had the most fun in the museum store, which had samples you could play with, and with the soft pink upside down Q in the courtyard. The soft pink Q, by the way, is by the very same artist who created one of our family’s favorite pieces of art, the giant diaper pin.

So this museum visit didn’t have all I expected, but it was good, and the Stanford art museum is always worthwhile, even if it doesn’t always have its Miro on display.

The event turned out to include a lot more than time in the presence of Tim Gunn.

We had to spend $100 on Liz Claiborne or Juicy Couture clothes in order to actually meet Tim Gunn close up. Now I’m not a Liz Claiborne or Juicy Couture type of person, so I was pessimistic about finding such clothes in time. As it turned out, it took a good hour to get to Valley Fair (normally a 20 minute drive), because every other fashionista within 300 miles was eager to see the style guru too.

We did arrive in time before the show, and found the mall buzzing with events. MAC cosmetics had set up a booth with professional make-up artists, and I received a wonderful update of my look–for free. There was someone else offering hair consultations down the row, but I didn’t want to miss out of having a good view of Tim Gunn, so Peter and I scouted for a place to stand. (I also hadn’t called in quick enough to get seating for the event.) We found a place on the balcony overlooking the stage, next to a pair of fashionistas who’d driven down from Sacramento, and bought some Liz Claiborne at Macy’s that morning so they could meet him in person.

Of course, Tim Gunn was great. The show featured models wearing clothes from the selected lines. It wasn’t just a clothes show: Tim Gunn commented on each look and pointed out how it was put together, and how it could be adapted for different occassions.

Peter and I got some great ideas for looks. And both we and the Sacramento fashionistas were looking at Juicy in a new way: clearly, the line has expanded beyond short shorts with the word JUICY written on the butt. For instance, this look convinced Peter I should get myself some high-heeled brown boots and try on skinny jeans:

After the show, Tim Gunn took questions from the audience, and we learned that not only was Season 6 of Project Runway completed, so was the season which followed. He encouraged others in the audience to get into the fashion industry. I think it’s fair to say he’s a fashion and good taste evangelist.

Both Neil and Kelly were getting antsy–and Neil needed to be at Stanford for a Mandelbrot competition later that day, so we went home without checking out the many other events of the Westfield Style tour. We did, however, pop into Macy’s, where I did buy myself skinny pants and and big sweater. It wasn’t the right brands, but it was enough to get myself a gift bag from the mall which included coupons, snacks, and some cosmetics. And we saw Tim Gunn schmoozing up close with his fans who’d made the prerequisite purchases.

Maybe Peter and I can meet him in person some day. In the meantime, we’ll just have to aspire to quality, taste, and style in our appearance.

Here’s the spoiler, so you don’t waste time on the movie. Inexplicably, every single one of the candidates gets into Oxford’s History department, whether they wanted to or not, thanks to the help of one eccentric gay teacher who trains them to spontaneously act out vignettes in French, and a new school teacher who teaches them to just make stuff up on essays, cuz that’s the sort of stuff that’ll impress the admissions board at Oxford.

Once they’ve matriculated to Oxford, everyone abruptly comes out with his homesexuality. The ignorant stuffy headmaster comes to his senses and reinstates the eccentric gay teacher, whom he’d sacked for fondling the boys, even though none of them really minded. The new teacher (who is, of course, now openly gay) takes a joy ride with the eccentric gay teacher, whereupon they have an accident and one of them dies. The only character who may not have been gay dies when he grows up and gets shot in an Army regiment which hasn’t existed since 1968.

The end. It just reminded me that all English men are gay, even if they’re straight, just as all Italian men are straight, even if they’re gay. Is that really so? Anyway, you might like the early 80s songs, if you’re into that sort of thing.

I originally planned to take the children to the De Young Museum today; and another homeschool parent had told me about a free hands-on science day as CSU-Hayward; but in the end, I decided what I would rather do this weekend than on any other is to visit the Charles M. Schulz Museum again with my family.

Better known to us at the Snoopy Museum, it honors the work of cartoonist Charles M. Schulz, which is mostly his work on the Peanuts cartoon strip. It’s a small museum, but very comfortable: you can read selected (rotating strips) from the cartoon in a gallery, look at Peanuts-themed art work, romp and play with Peanuts themes in a garden area, or make your own attempts at cartooning and art (and watch Peanuts cartoons) in a special room upstairs. I figured the fact that, today the Schulz Museum had a real astronaut appearing in honor of Snoopy’s association with NASA, would make up for skipping out on a science day at CSU-Hayward.

We arrived barely in time to catch the presentation. The visiting astronaut, Dan Tani, spoke about his 4 months in the International (that is, Russian & American) Space Station, and showed the dramatic pictures he’d taken of Earth while in space. The audience’s questions were remarkably good: for instance, they prompted Tani to recount that when his American colleague on the station returned to earth, a malfunction during the descent caused the shuttle to speed down, and she survived 9Gs of force. We also got a better idea of how big the space station is, what it looks like inside, and what it’s like to live and work inside it.

When Tani went out to personally meet and greet the museum visitors, we checked out the Snoopy in Space exhibit. Kelly and I couldn’t resist the chance to dress up in astronaut gear and pretend we were astronauts in a space shuttle ourselves:

Just before it was time for him to leave, the long line to see Tani shortened, and I grabbed my family for a chance to meet him. He was just as personable and outgoing as he’d been on stage, even after chatting with strangers for an hour. Neil told him one of his father’s friends had helped design the “spheres” on the station, and Tani tried to get Kelly to come out of her shy attack for the picture I wanted to take of his and the children (to no avail.)

Kelly was full of excitement about seeing Snoopy and meeting an astronaut, so we went outside to the garden, where Neil tried to share a cookie with Snoopy while Kelly was distracted by Woodstock.

Then we went upstairs, where the art project of the day was creating a zoetrope. Neil made one that was pretty impressive, and hopefully he’ll turn it into an animation and put it up on his own web site.

So it was a perfect activity: fun, family-friendly, and interesting and informative. We love the Snoopy Museum.