YESCO, the century-old sign company, was responsible for the Vegas Vickie restoration. YESCO designed or installed many of the city’s most iconic signs, including the Stardust starburst, the Circus Circus neon clown, and the electric guitar outside the old Hard Rock Cafe on Paradise Road.

“Derek Stevens and his brother, Greg, had the vision to see the value in Vickie and found a way to integrate her into the design of Circa,” says Rick Juleen, YESCO’s vice president of business development. “Because of the Neon Museum, there’s a lot more focus on these historical neon signs and the importance of preserving them. There is a little bit of a renaissance going on right now with neon in general, around the country and around the world.”

Turning a superstar sign into a supermodel was no easy task. With metal work, new paint, and new neon glass tubing, the naturally weathered 40-year-old sign got an extreme makeover. The result? Vegas Vickie is now an Instagram star. “She’s having a selfie moment right now,” Juleen says. “She’s kind of like a museum piece. You can get very close to her and see all the details from a bunch of different angles. She looks great.”

Because Vegas Vickie was designed and built to be outside and viewed from a distance, the sign had to undergo some extensive work to make her look “as good, if not better than she was in the 1980s,” Juleen explains. “She was in fairly good shape, but it was an intense process.” To get there, the first order of business for Juleen and his team was to pore over historic images in an effort to match her original colors and other tiny details. That led YESCO to create a scaled, painted mock-up to share with Circa brass. Once they got the thumbs-up to proceed with the remodel, workers stripped the sign down to its bare metal, sanded it down, pounded out dents and hand-painted the metal skin. Meanwhile, the glass shop was busy shaping the new neon, and engineers were swapping out her hydraulic leg kick with a cleaner, smoother and quieter motor-powered mechanical system.

Next up was the biggest challenge of all: moving Vegas Vickie from the warehouse into the building. The heavy, 20-by-25-foot tall cowgirl was brought to the casino in one piece and lifted into place using a crane before Circa’s walls went up. The casino was then essentially built around her.

“We had to get her in before they put the doors on,” says Juleen. “I get asked all the time how much she weighs and I say, ‘You know, Vickie and YESCO have an agreement that we don’t talk about her weight.’ She’s a big lady, though.”