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Vegas Cliches We Love To Hate--Or Can't Deny

Julie Jacobson/AP

People travel from all over the world to come to Nevada most are here to see the glittering lights of the Las Vegas Strip. 

But thanks to movies from "Viva Las Vegas" to the "Hangover," people who visit here are usually bringing with them a whole host of cliches about the city and the state. 

It’s those clichés, those stereotypes. The things you hear from relatives and friends back home in Alabama or Maine or California or wherever you come from.

You roll your eyes and shake your head.

Today we’re dedicating the program to the things we know and the things we hear about Nevada. Las Vegas, Reno and all things in between.

Discussion Highlights:

Dayvid Figler is a lawyer and long-time Las Vegas resident:

Las Vegas is a place for everyone. Clichés can work here. People call us superficial, but we have a very deep superficiality, a nuanced, layered superficiality worthy of discourse and discussion. Does Elvis have a place in one of those layers, I can’t deny it but I also don’t have to like it.

Las Vegas is the melting pot of the United States, which is the melting pot of the world. So you are going to get all kinds of characters. I have friends whose mothers were showgirls – that’s a real thing! And I have friends whose mothers were chemists and I have friends whose mothers were ever other occupation.

This is Las Vegas, right? We’re a newer city. People get to view us any way they want and as former Mayor Oscar Goodman once said, ‘The perception is way more important than the reality to make this town work.’

Our city actually on some level benefits and profits from those stereotypes and superficiality and cliché making.

Abbi Whitaker with the Abbi Agency is working with Reno to enhance its image:

“Reno 911” probably didn’t do us any favors because that show was phenomenally successful and it really painted us in a bit of a trashy light. We’re not the largest trailer park in the United States. We don’t all wear fanny packs to dinner. We’re not all meth heads.

For Reno, there was a little bit of the misconceptions that people had given us that had never even been here. For a long time, Reno was letting people tell its story who had never even set foot in our community or our city.

I think what we’ve tried to do as a city is take our city back and take control of that. And focus on all of the amazing things that are different here than Vegas. We’re not just the trashy, dirty little sister of Vegas.

Lissa Townsend Rodgers is a writer with Vegas Seven Magazine:

We also have an interesting culture that is born out of these Strip shows. We have these Cirque performers. We have an interesting theater scene because these people are working on more interesting projects when they’re not doing Strip shows.

We have great world-class musicians here. They go do side gigs, other projects. You can catch really interesting cultural things in smaller areas. You just have to know where to look. I think that’s what people miss about Vegas culture is… it’s all here, you just have to know where to look.

Kristen DeSilva was born and raised in Las Vegas. Currently, she works in marketing for Lev Restaurant Group;

My specific experience in this city is a total cliché. I eat prime rib three times a week and party all the time, but that also could be because I’m in my 20s.

But growing up here, I don’t think it had a major influence compared to any other city. I should also clarify that I grew up in Summerlin specifically. I lived there for 18 years before I moved downtown. I went to regular public schools, same problem all the schools have oversized classes, but altogether it was a normal growing up experience. My aunt may have given me a bucket of nickels to pay for lunch here or there but other than that I didn’t have a uniquely ‘Vegas’ experience growing up.

Scott Roeben runs the blog vitalvegas.com

To me, it really all turns back to this amazing informal tagline that the city has. To a person… it doesn’t matter what language they speak, if they speak no English at all, they’re still going to be able to say that phrase about ‘what happens here, stays here.’ That’s the probably the biggest reoccurring one and that is probably the least true.

You could do 10 years of PR for the city in a very specific way and that messaging and you get one movie like “Hangover” and that’s what the city is to people because that’s had such an effect and such a far reach. People come to town and they’re trying to have sex on the High Roller. They’re doing things they would never do in their hometown. They would never imagine. They feel free to do it here. That to me is one of the biggest ones.

The power of that message is kind of one of the things that has made Las Vegas what it is, but the other side of that coin is people come to town really expecting – anything goes. They think prostitution is legal on the Strip. They think you can pretty much get any kind of drug you want from any kind of concierge or host at your nightclub, which these are obviously just not true.  

Natalie Cullen, online editor:  This segment idea came out of the new video by Las Vegas band The Killers. The video features some of the most famous clichés about “Vegas.” Even saying that word, without the “Las” bothers me.

But that’s what a lot of people think “Vegas!”

However, like our last caller 11-year-old Juliette said so eloquently – she likes life here because she lives near a park and goes to the library. I know what she’s talking about. I’ve lived here for more than 20 years and I’m raising my kids here. I have a very normal middle-class life – baseball practice, dance rehearsal, homework, birthday parties with jump houses, piano class. The only thing unusual compared to my friends ‘back home’ is that I can go to a celebrity restaurant in 20 minutes. And I once attended a party in a high-roller suite, and Wesley Snipes was there.

So, while the clichés are fun to think about and funny to hear from friends and family, all of us know many are just myths.

None of my friends are down-on-their luck gamblers, gold-digging cocktail waitress or washed-up lounge singers. They’re mostly give-their-shirts-off-their-backs community builders who count themselves immensely lucky to have found this oasis in the Mojave Desert – even in the summer. 

 

Dayvid Figler, lawyer;  Lissa Townsend Rodgers, writer, Vegas Seven Magazine;   Abbi Whitaker, the Abbi Agency;  Kristen Drew DeSilva, marketing, Lev Restaurant Group; Scott Roeben, vitalvegas.com 

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Joe Schoenmann joined Nevada Public Radio in 2014. He works with a talented team of producers at State of Nevada who explore the casino industry, sports, politics, public health and everything in between.