Lina Abascal is a writer and filmmaker born and raised in Los Angeles. She is the author of Never Be Alone Again: How Bloghouse United the Internet and the Dancefloor and she often contributes to the Los Angeles Times. She is the director of award winning short documentary Stud Country and is currently at work on a new film called Come to Brasil, which will premiere in 2026.
I love to tell people I love Las Vegas. I watch their face warp, their mouth pucker, as they try to figure out if I’m being sarcastic or they have misread me the entire time. To them, I am not a Vegas Person.
A Vegas Person is a betting man, someone with a lot of money to blow or worse, an insatiable level of thrill to seek on red and black. She’s a stand-on-the-tables club goer. A woman who doesn’t realize Herve Leger went out of style and only just came back. She has donned the bandage dress in earnest for over a decade. Someone who doesn’t just not know, but doesn’t care, that with the right plan, you could see the real New York, Rome, or Paris, for a comparable amount to a luxe Las Vegas trip at the hotels that imitate them.
In 2017 there was an NPR Hidden Brain episode about this. An academic researcher studying patterns of conspicuous consumption says members of a certain social class simply aren’t seen in Las Vegas. It’s new money, it’s low brow. So the best excuse people can find is that I must like it ironically, I’m there simply for research and to indulge my journalistic curiosities.
I couldn’t possibly be serious.
The archetype of the intellectual in Las Vegas—in town for more esoteric reasons than its face value offerings— is nothing new. In 1972, a group of graduate students from Yale and their professors went to Las Vegas to study its architecture, resulting in Learning from Las Vegas, a seminal modern architecture text. Two years later, Gregory Dunne, better known as Joan Didion’s husband, wrote the semi-fictionalized Vegas: A Memoir of a Dark Season, chronicling his exploits with gangsters and strippers instead of getting a divorce.
But that’s not why I’ve been at least three times a year for the past decade-plus. Sure, at first, I was drawn to the city in an ironic way. I had partied and stayed up late all over America, mostly at underground raves and alternative clubs. I was curious what the capital of Girl’s Night Out was all about. But soon, I came to embrace Vegas at face value.
Las Vegas is a mirror to America, albeit a fun house mirror. From certain angles, it can look bigger and better or warped and grim. If you stand in the right spot with some distance, you can see a perfect case study for what works commercially in America that year and why. It’s a place where rather than workshopping new concepts and trial and error-ing the novel like an Off Broadway show might, tried and true concepts are sold to the masses who have (on average, this number is up from last year) 3.4 days to explicitly indulge. Recognizable names and trusted intellectual property reign supreme. Everything is rehearsed to a tee, rinsed and repeated every day with world class precision. Every visitor can walk away feeling they’ve had a my-life-a-movie weekend.
I realize that if everyone’s life is a movie, no one’s is. Yet still, the on-demand debauchery and accessible luxury calls to me and makes me a believer for the night. It’s exactly what the town was built to provide and it delivers time and time again. I like the person I am in Las Vegas. Someone with something sparkly on, one too many garnishes in my drink, who knows it’s really not that deep. Someone not concerned with being cool, being the first, or the best. Far away enough from home to detach but close enough to make the call on a whim.
On other adventures—perhaps to locations that have inspired hotels in Las Vegas—I show up with my cultural Bingo card in hand. I’m bombarded with lists of the best restaurants, texts about what I simply can’t miss. After one trip, I create lists of my own, passing them to the next friend who visits, showing off how I do the city right, even better, than my peers or the travel influencers. The worry I may not return fundamentally changed and never get to go back lurches on the steps of the museum or bus to the ruins. It’s a challenge to avoid performing the role of the perfect traveler. With enough intention, I attempt to get there. But sometimes you don’t want to capital T travel, you want to escape.
That is when I choose Las Vegas. I’ve done the city in many ways. First, at 23 with no money, since, on a client’s dime and my own. I’ve flown Delta, I’ve flown Spirit. I’ve driven in a Prius and in a Range Rover. I’ve made it door to door in three hours and I’ve had my flight delayed 24. And every time, I have a good time. Because I am a Vegas Person in that I am someone who is dedicated to having A Good Time.
Here are vignettes from a selection of my trips to Las Vegas. Presented in no particular order.
July 2015: Topless in Europe
I’m staying at the Wynn like I’m rich. I’m not, but I might as well be with the floor to ceiling windows and view of the Strip, perfect for the Fourth of July fireworks we’ll watch. It’s a King room for me, one of my best friends, and my boyfriend. But not in a sexy, freaky way. It’s earnest. The Wynn has the classiest energy of anywhere on the Strip. It has Jeff Koons sculptures just sitting there. The Carousel Bar in the lobby is beautiful, but be careful because my friend gets turned away for wearing a sheer skirt over a bodysuit, which is extremely un-Vegasy of them.
My boyfriend is no longer drinking, which may seem horrible for Vegas, but if you give a sober person a place where they can smoke a cigarette inside and the ability to valet their car for free anywhere, it isn’t so bad. It also means it’s easier for us to get off the Strip for things like Tacos El Gordo, where my girl almost gets in a fight while snagging us a seat to eat our as-good-as-in-Mexico tacos al pastor. There’s a location on the strip now. Get all of the salsas.
The Wynn has an adults-only Euro Pool where my best friend and I are allowed to tan topless. There’s even tables to play card games while submerged in the pool. Some fabulous leathery gays buy us a pitcher of sangria. Later, back in LA, I recount this perfect moment in front of her boyfriend, who is much less pleased by the details of her topless-in-public afternoon. It’s presented as evidence in their break up soon after. Not everyone understands Vegas. They should have never changed the slogan from What Happens Here, Stays Here. I feel guilty for outing her, but the right person would have understood.
December 2019: Acid Aquarium
It’s impossible to get a reservation at the Golden Steer but I snag the last one at 10:30pm. This dimly lit steakhouse boasts a reputation with the Rat Pack and each booth is named for a Vegas affiliated celebrity. We get the caesar, served tableside by our tuxedoed waiter, a rib eye to share, creamed spinach, and fries. We take Polaroid photos in the red leather booths and linger for so long that we end up getting invited by the staff to their watering hole for post shift drinks.
Me and my roommate are in town for a music festival thrown by Amazon with an amazing lineup but a very low attendance that I did some copywriting for. We went the night before and saw Gesaffelstein, Kacey Musgraves, and SOPHIE (RIP). But back at the dive bar with the old waiters from The Golden Steer, we make a grave error and decide to take acid from the dark web for the second night in a row. Acid doesn’t really work two days in a row. But I don’t know that yet. Suddenly, my friend and I are galavanting The Strip basked in neon like we’re in Enter the Void or something.
I end up texting some guy from a dating app who’s also in town—my first date after a bad breakup—and agreeing to hang. Only I don’t tell him I’m with my friend. We end up doing the date together, like the tuxedo job interview scene in Step Brothers. She asks him questions debating if he’s good enough for me. (He’s not). We end up at Mandalay Bay where he says he’s staying, though we suspect he got a room on Hotel Tonight that minute because he’s sharing a room with friends and delusionaly is feeling lucky. I’m on a mission to see the hotel’s shark tanks, he’s on a different mission with me, but only I succeed.
We finally make it back to our hotel. We’re staying at the SAHARA, formerly the SLS, an affordable option at the end of the Strip with some good restaurants and access to the monorail. The next morning, I wake up with Facebook friend requests from the entire staff of the Golden Steer and a cavernous hangover, occupying places within me I didn’t know could be fatigued.
We try to get breakfast at the Peppermill, a diner that resembles a 1970s coke den where the waitresses wear gowns. It’s one of my favorite places in all of Vegas, but this time, I forget that smoking is allowed indoors. In our state, that will make us vomit, so we opt for Denny’s, which is a humbling experience. We drive four and a half hours back to LA in complete silence. At home, we realize my friend has lost a toenail to the bender. “A canonical party girl experience,” I say, and we laugh until we cry.
September 2013: All Grown Up
The first time I ever go to Vegas it’s for my friend’s birthday. There’s seven of us in one suite with two beds and a couch. These mega rooms are at The Venetian and even split seven ways, it doesn’t feel cheap. I’ve been clubbing with a fake ID since I was 16, so going to Vegas legally seems very trad, very normie, which instead of turning me off, is actually novel. I love how 2000s buddy comedy the whole thing is. We could be at the wildest underground Bushwick or Oakland rave, but we’re here with the masses.
We go see Calvin Harris at Hakkasan, the megaclub within the MGM. I’m talking peak Calvin Harris, one year post Rihanna collaboration. I buy a tequila-soda that costs so much I wonder what currency the price is in. We joke that we got in because the biggest club rat we know is friends with the custodian. We’ve been running that joke so long I can’t remember how we actually got in, but we definitely didn’t pay. There’s so many ways to get in for free in Vegas. It’s one of the last bastions of ladies-pay-less. There’s hardly room to dance unless you have a table—we don’t—and the club is corny and cheesy and we know that, but we love it. We are cosplaying as girls and gays on a big night out, as if we don’t go out every night back home.
At this point in my life, I’m on my high horse about some previous party habits I no longer partake in and make a scene about not staying out all night the following night. I have a reservation for the 10 am guided tour at the Neon Museum. While I’m eating a caesar salad at Grand Lux Cafe, which is a Cheesecake Factory that has a Vegas-ified name, my friends are raging and end up coming home with matching tattoos that say “content.” I wish I could say I look back and admit I had a stick up my ass and missed out that night, but I have enough bad tattoos as is and The Neon Museum is a don’t miss. The guided tour breaks down the history of Vegas and its many entertainment and aesthetic trends, as told by the city’s neon signage. It’s a great intro to the city and its backstory that incites dreams of the Rat Pack era when dress codes were enforced and hotel lobbies weren’t full of gross men’s legs in shorts and sandals. It’s crazy to imagine how something could go from the pinnacle of luxury to something so messy, but that’s everything and the reason why I can access it now in the first place. I’m the one wearing a see-through pink plastic visor this entire trip.
July 2021: Covid Casino
My friend is stuck living in Las Vegas after moving there for a man he’s no longer with. It’s the throes of Covid lockdown but the city is opening up, at least more than LA. He takes a few days off work and I tell no one and drive to Encore, where he and I stay for the weekend secretly partying. It’s surprisingly cheap because it’s Covid and not everything is open, but we’re freshly vaxxed and don’t care. I wear a lot of neon, a super slicked back high ponytail, and we listen to a lot of Kim Petras.
We book the tasting menu at Nobu within Caesar’s Palace and pretend it’s our anniversary. There’s a couple of Nobu’s in Vegas and this one is supposedly the nicest, but it feels like it’s in the middle of a casino because it is. My friend stands up and makes a dramatic speech about his undying love for me and they bring us a dessert that says Happy Anniversary in chocolate sauce. I’m feeling fancy, exactly like the city wants me to, and I order champagne. We can’t finish the bottle by the time the meal ends so I Rihanna it and just walk out with the glass in hand, Covid mask on. Nobody notices and if they do, they don’t care. The customer is always right.
During the day, we peruse the many antique shops and thrift stores in the Arts District, Antique Alley Mall, Mid Mod Furniture, and the surrounding tchotchke shops. The offerings are better priced than LA, with plenty of mid-century and post modern pieces. After, my friend takes me off the Strip to go to the Thai restaurant that Anthony Bourdain loved, Lotus of Siam. Afterwards, we end up at some townie bar where things get a little weird with some couple that wants to swing with us, not understanding the gay BFF dynamic. We leave, cackling in the car, just before things get too weird.
June 2018: A Great Last Date
I have a job I hate at an ad agency and spend my days on Instagram dozing off. I’m DMing a man I have a few mutuals with in New York, so he’s not a murderer, but I don’t know much else. When he asks what I’m doing that weekend, I cheekily reply that I’m crying because I’m not at the Blink 182 residency in Vegas. To my delight, within two hours this exchange results in him booking us both flights and a hotel, to meet for the first time on a 24-hour date in Las Vegas to see the show.
We meet at our hotel, the Park MGM around 8pm. The room is fine, a little ‘80s, but it works. Almost as soon as we land, we get the news that Travis Barker has broken a finger and the concert is cancelled. I can’t decide how much to care, because I’m here for the story either way. This guy is in the restaurant business so he has a list of cool off-the-beaten path things to do. I’m impressed.
We start at a Japanese izakaya spot off the Strip called Raku, eating a dozen rounds of bites at an unassuming bar. Already away from the kerfuffle of the big hotels, we take a cab to The Golden Tiki, a 24-hour tiki bar with a day-glo starry ceiling. There’s a bench shaped like a giant pink clam shell and shrunken heads modeled after celebrities from Pee Wee to Elvira and Hunter S. Thompson. Then we move to Dino’s Lounge, a dive bar with a biker crowd who’s in for karaoke night. There’s a giant neon sign outside boasting it as “the last neighborhood bar in Las Vegas.” I ask my date to take a photo of me in front of it and he obliges, but he doesn’t know my angles. I’m short so you have to get really low.
I’m not sure if things are going well or they’re just not going horribly, but the late night and neon lights and spontaneity of it all has me thinking this whole thing could be a great beginning to a romantic story. I check myself before I project too much on the adventure. I come to Vegas to exist in only that moment. We kiss a little but nothing else. I never see him again and steal the best parts of his itinerary as my own.
February 2023: Menthol Mission
I have a fancy dinner booked in LA but my then boyfriend (this is a different guy, keep up) tells me what he wants for his birthday is a suitcase full of menthol cigarettes, which were recently banned in California, so I cancel the reservation and we drive to Las Vegas. The drive isn’t bad if you do it right, not on a Friday or Sunday and not rush hour.
We stay at the new Virgin Hotel off the strip, which means it’s much less of a shit show, easier to park, and we can bring our dog. She sprints down the red carpeted hallways, staring back every ten rooms before I encourage her to keep going. She pees a little bit but I don’t tell anyone. We spring for an upgrade and end up in a suite with a separate living room. As he’s calling up tobacco shops with discount rates to place mass orders, I scramble to curate a sober-friendly birthday plan. My training has prepared me for this.
In the afternoon, we head to the Atomic Museum, a Smithsonian affiliated institution focused on the history of the atomic bomb and the history of nuclear testing in the nearby desert. He loves it. I’m proud of myself. It’s the menthols more than me, but I have officially turned him into a Vegas person.
At night, we head to a magic show called The Mentalist in a rinky dink theater hidden within Planet Hollywood. It’s been running for nearly two decades and has available seats the same day. The guy is guessing things people wrote on pieces of paper across the room. He’s using mind control to just barely avoid putting a drill through his head. I’m not suspending belief for the sake of a good last minute plan, but legitimately wowed. I love thinking about how a blip of a city in the middle of an inhospitable desert is the world capital for bizarre entertainment like this. Good for him.
For dinner, we eat at Thomas Keller’s Bouchon in the Venetian. It’s high quality but doesn’t scratch the ostentatious when-in-Vegas itch many visitors have, so it’s never crowded and always has same day reservations. We gobble the free baguette, get a few oysters, and split chicken liver mousse and steak frites. Annual menthol sourcing in Vegas becomes our routine and we get the same dinner every time. We always get two desserts.
August 2023: Alien on Assignment
I am heartbroken and my close friend’s father just passed. The impact of these situations is nowhere near even, but we share the desire to disassociate and spend multiple nights per week together, ruminating and drinking martinis. We call it our Alien Summer. I’m on a work trip reporting on an avant garde circus troupe for a magazine nobody reads that pays me more than the ones everyone reads and I ask her to come along.
On the drive, my car, a hybrid, runs out of gas and out of battery. We’re in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a prayer. “Every good night begins with a struggle,” was a mantra my only ex-friend, the birthday boy responsible for my first Vegas trip, used to always say. He was wrong about a lot but that remains true. We make it to a station, only to then get a parking ticket for driving 105 the rest of the way. “In Nevada, we can send you straight to jail for that,” the sassy cop says. Something about that makes us laugh, like okay, try me. It would just make for a more ridiculous story. The time we ended up in rural Nevada jail. But I do have work to do.
We’re eating smashburgers and drinking martinis at Pier 17 Yacht Club, a nautical themed speakeasy outside of Absinthe at Caesars Palace. It’s a variety show by Spiegelworld, the circus troupe I’m writing about, that’s been running in Vegas for over a decade. It’s full of undoubtedly impressive acrobatic acts and humor that leans dick jokey, but more than anything, I’m mostly wowed by our server’s stories about his past life as an actor on daytime soap operas. He tells us the random extra consonant on his nametag is a residual choice from when he changed his name for the screen actors guild. Showbiz, baby.
The next day, we see one of the first performances of Disco Show, an immersive theater experience based on Studio 54 and then eat at Diner Ross, a 1970s themed diner with elaborate cocktails and disco fries next to the theater within the LINQ hotel. My friend is convinced it’s called that because it sounds like Diana Ross and I tell her that can’t be true. We ask the server and she’s right.
The next morning, we have brunch at Winnie & Ethel's, a diner off the Strip that makes everything from scratch. I’ve planned a visit to the Showgirl Museum because my friend loves costume design and we both have a penchant for camp. The museum is inside a private residence in a suburb off the Strip, owned and operated by a 60-something queen of a costume designer and former performer named Grant. At first, he plays hardball, asking how much time we have. An hour, we say. My 16 pound dog is in my arms because we had to check out of the hotel and I had nowhere else to leave her. I’m worried if I put her down, she may pee on a costume. “The tour takes three,” he says. So we stay for three.
July 2025: Never Have I Ever
I’m sitting at the third to last seat at the giant beautiful bar at Delilah within the Wynn. My best friend is next to me, the one I went to the Euro pool with a decade ago. She just had a baby. I’m in town to write about the Showgirl Costume museum I learned about the summer before and she’s in town as part of the production team on the Beyonce Cowboy Carter tour. Just two working girls.
Delilah is owned by a hospitality group I would otherwise associate with bottle service types, but they really get it right here. It’s a dinner-and-a-show concept with a live band. There’s pigs-in-blankets on the menu but we are trying to be classy so we split a rib eye and crab cake. The singer hits the Mariah Carey whistle tone and my friend and I are wowed, hooting and hollering. There may not be a lot of originality, but there’s a lot of talent in this town and I will always appreciate talent.
There’s one empty seat at the bar, the last open one in the building, and a good looking guy is approaching it. Instantly, my friend and I start to play one of our favorite games, one primed for Las Vegas people watching, and start guessing what we think his backstory is. It’s a white guy with a chain and a fresh haircut, so I guess he’s maybe an entourage member of some musician. My friend thinks it’s more scammer riches, real estate or maybe a crypto scam. He sits next to us and begins ordering a drink.
Then he turns. “Is it crazy to order the caviar service by myself?” he asks. Naturally, we encourage him to ball out. When in Rome. We start chatting and get the answer to our original question, a very fulfilling part of the game that rarely happens. He’s in medical device sales and real estate, splitting time between Los Angeles, Houston, and Miami. We were both close in our own way. He looks late-20s, but for some reason, is committed to a lie that he is older than both of us, who are in our mid-30s. He says he’s in his mid-40s, though he butchers the math on his fake birth year when he rattles it off. It only makes us feel older. Like the old gals at the bar he’s flirting with as a bit. We push back playfully but ultimately go along with it.
He asks if we’re married. Neither of us are, though it isn’t as simple of an answer as it sounds when it comes out. Or maybe it is. Then he asks if either of us have been proposed to. I sip my martini—vodka with blue cheese olives but not dirty. I start thinking about how if things had gone the way I wanted, or thought I wanted, I’d probably be married three times by now. I’ve always fantasized about getting married in Las Vegas so I find myself there quickly. My grandma eloped to Vegas when she was 18. Too young to go to bars, they had pizza and root beer in their hotel room afterwards. He turned out to be an asshole but I always thought it was the most romantic thing in the world. Instead of a day where you are the princess and center of attention, to instead opt for somewhere where hundreds of people are doing the exact same thing as you. It’s so mundane the love has to be the exciting part. “Not yet,” I tell him. He offers me a chicken finger.