In late September, I spent 48 hours in Las Vegas with two college friends, one of whom was getting married soon. But it wasn’t so much of a bachelorette weekend as it was a cosplay of one; none of us had been to Vegas as adults, and we mostly just wanted to see what it would be like to go from our regimented lives in New York to the real center of American hedonism, where every 30-something woman could stay at an Italy-themed hotel, consume whatever her heart desired, and unleash the super cool chill fun-loving girl within. To structure the weekend, we committed to two tentpole events in particular: a visit to the Sphere, and a 10p.m. performance of, yes, the Channing Tatum-directed male revue known as Magic Mike Live.
In retrospect, this was a bit of genius programming, in that the appeal of both of these curiosities was almost entirely oppositional. To us, the Sphere represented the brave new frontier of screenified sensation. Having sadly missed The Backstreet Boys on tour there, we settled instead for tickets to the “immersive 4D” production of The Wizard of Oz that was augmented by AI, which seemed appropriate: here we were at the true American capital of artifice, preparing ourselves to huff pure and all-encompassing pixel magic...
