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By Cintra Wilson

Sept. 15, 1999 | When I'm in Las Vegas, I like to torture myself with the entertainment, because I'm not much of a gambler. To truly gamble, you have to get a big-wave-wipeout thrill from losing; I just get sad and darkly nauseated if I stick $60 into a slot machine and it doesn't give me anything back. I do have an astonishingly high tolerance for the worst types of theater, however, and will often pay top dollar for a long, slow squirm that would cause most people to feign an aneurysm to escape.

I get a great thrill out of the isolated, schizophrenic weirdness of Las Vegas as Vegas and how it has devolved and grown baroquely inward into its own dementia, building elaborate castles out of its own wacked-out socioeconomic feces. I love to walk through Caesars Palace and see that there is a legitimate "pornography convention," filled with lurid, toothy blond freaks of sexual entertainment with 58KK breast implants the size of watermelons clad in rubber hologram pantsuits, calmly talking to the local news about sales and marketing. I love the 68-year-old cocktail waitresses in their artificial braided hair-cones, their macramé networks of varicose veins and the way the fat from their shoulder blades hangs over the back of their strapless mini-togas.

I love the whole idea of topless showgirls in preposterous chandelier hats, which is why I made my friends come with me to see "Splash" at the Riviera. "Splash" seems to be the last of the great Vegas multi-pronged variety horrors: topless choreographed hat slags, underwater mermaids, motorcycle stunts and lip-synching pop imitators. An extravaganza! With tits!

Sure enough, as soon as the curtains parted, there were two topless ladies in sequined aquatic G-strings lesbianically gyrating in a murky water tank, and topless showgirls in makeup so exaggerated they looked like over-sexed rodeo clowns, doing their strange ostrich prances up and down small flights of stairs without moving their heads or necks. Out of the approximately 20 women on the stage, exactly two sets of breasts were real, the others strangely pneumatic, tinted and professional looking, like sports equipment.

Cintra Wilson Cintra Wilson's column appears every other Wednesday in People + Archives

The best part of the whole show was the death-defying motorcycle stunt, wherein four guys in leather jumpsuits and pancake makeup riding minibikes drove inside of a relatively tiny, stationary 14-foot-diameter mesh metal ball and chased each other around and around upside down and sideways –- super fast like mosquitoes in a light bulb. It was fantastic, it really gave you the sense that you were about to see a horrible accident, live.

The Michael Jackson lip-syncher was talc-covered and contour-pencilled to look as freakishly kabuki as the real thing; the Janet Jackson double had various adhesive dreadlock formations that made her head look like an ornamental cast-iron fence. There was an especially unbelievable "Don't Cry For Me Argentina" number during which an epileptically wiggling Madonna-cum-Evita Peron in ice-blue Cleopatra eye makeup repeatedly threw her skirt over her head to reveal her black thong. But all in all, the pop-icon impersonators are the lowest, most pitiable link on the Vegas entertainment food chain. The saddest thing was seeing "Oliver," the lovely brown dancing boy -- best known for being one of the real Madonna's back-up dancers and having an affair with her on one of her concert tours -- dancing alongside the fake Vegas Madonna, ostensibly pretending to be his former self.

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