Vegas

Dave had a conference in Las Vegas on post-traumatic stress disorders during the last week of February.  I joined him on Thursday, March 2.  Besides posing with the omnipresent slot machines, we squeezed into a packed Coliseum at Caesar's Palace for a concert of Reba McEntire and Brooks & Dunn.

I loved the country music.  I was also fascinated with the culture represented by the singers and their audience.  It was rural, southern, and patriotic. Reba told about her childhood growing up on a ranch in Oklahoma with a father who was a rodeo star.  She sang a ballad about a Tennessee girl who went to New York City and came back home to marry.  The girl caroused in a bar the night before her marriage and ran off with a guy she met there.  "You can take the girl out of the honky-tonk but you can't take the honky-tonk out of the girl."  During the final song, flags waved, red/white/blue confetti fell from the ceiling, and military vets marched onto the stage.

Country music tells stories, mostly about love and loss.  I thought of the Eyring ballad, "Aragon gypsy girl," passed down through generations from England.  It tells the same sort of "love and loss" tale as the country ballads.  They both have British folk tunes in their DNA--the Scots-Irish settled Appalachia, and the hill billy music of Appalachia morphed into "country".  

Dave's and my seats were so high that we couldn't see the videos projected above the stage!  It was like the night we came late to a Deer Valley outdoor concert and sat at the top of the hill next to the garbage cans, but this time we paid $250 for two tickets. It was still worth it.  Maybe we finally found where all those Trump voters came from.

Dave and I spent one evening at the Coliseum and the other in the Spring Valley Hospital emergency room.  I had a pain in my upper leg which Dave was afraid was a blood clot.  I assured him it was nothing more than one too many "pain in the butt" experiences at work...  The doctors agreed.