Escaping Sin City, but not all the sin

Another business trip, another American Babylon.

I don't apply that title to Vegas with indignation. While on the trip, I wrote to my daughter that "90% of this place is awful. 10% is fantastic," and there's much of that awful 90% that is enticing to me (hint: the parts that don't involve booze, snort or poker), so enticing that I wrote to another friend, "Hate it here (except for the food) because it becomes strictly a question of willpower, not one of immediate availability, compelling attractiveness AND willpower."

But I will say that I did a little better on this trip than I did at my last Vegas convention.

Last time, I spent a couple of late nights wandering the Strip, sort of hoping, I think, to "accidentally" come across some kind of trouble, if it threw itself in my path. No, I didn't end up at the Bunny Ranch or Crazy Horse, but on the open casino floors of both Planet Hollywood (in the area called--surprise!--the Pleasure Pit) and Bellagio, I came across undie-clothed damsels poledancing on platforms hoisted above the slot machines. The arrangement was to a strip club what the Swimsuit Issue is to Playboy: No outright nudity, but fleshy gyrations a-plenty. So I lingered a while, until my rationalizing slowly waned, and I left.

This time, oogling was more or less limited to legwatching, and --relative to the abundant opportunities-- that was fairly bridled, as I would most often avoid The Second Glance with the crude-but-effective mental mantra, "Sure, they're nice, but my three children didn't enter the world from between them." Nevertheless, I admit to having cast many glances and several stares at the Carnevino hostess on my last night there -- maybe as a last, carnal hurrah indulgence-for-mediocre-behavior before flying out the next morning?

Spoiler alert

Here are some movies to steer your wife clear of, if there are any burrs under the nuptial saddle and your wife is either smart enough or paranoid enough to make or imagine, respectively, some connections:

The Duchess with Keira Knightley. And not just because she's attractive (albeit anorexically waifish), which always creates awkwardness in a date night flick. I'll venture that most of us aren't over-the-top miscreants like this guy, but the stuff about not really talking, about the wife being a prisoner in her own home, etc. Ironically, she'd picked out the film hoping for an Austen-esque romantic picker-upper. Didn't quite fit the bill. It's a minefield, my friend, a Technicolor minefield.

The Stepford Wives, either version. Ugh.

The Story of Us, the Bruce Willis/Michelle Pfeiffer opus that effectively bans the phrase, "Hey, all couples go through this..." from your toolbox.