I’ve never been much of a bar guy. I visited a few in college, but I was a single hop man most of the time. One and done and then not very often.
The only times I went for a drink in Vegas was with some friends, John and Karen. The Sands had a bar at the top of the hotel that offered ten cent Manhattans. This was in 72 and 73. John and I liked them, so that’s why we went.
Other than the Manhattans, I never went anywhere in Vegas just to get a drink until last weekend with my boys. Sutton took us to a tiki bar to get exotic cocktails. We could have gotten them anywhere, but this place was special for him. The experience turned out to be great. Google tells me there are five traditional tiki bars in Vegas: Frankie’s Tiki Room, Red Dwarf, Glitter Gulch Tiki, Stray Pirate and The Golden Tiki. Sutton chose Frankie’s because he’d been there before and liked the vibe.
Sutton’s a chatter and he met a man, Steve, while standing at the bar. Steve’s a local and Sutton chatted him up while buying a round for our crew. He chose the place, so he did the buying. They had a list of exotic drinks with cool sounding names: Bearded Clam, Rummy Bear, Malibu Express, Tonga Reefer, Kahiki Kai, Wild Watusi, Green Gasser, Fink Bomb and Rib Tickler. High Octane drinkers could opt for Frankie’s Rum Runner, the Scorpion, or the Jet Pilot. I’m more of a traditionalist so I had a Mai Tai. All are rum based concoctions.
Once we had our drinks the five of us started to chat. Rum loosens lips. When we organized the trip, I asked Sutton to do some research so the five of us could sing karaoke together. He identified a couple places, but we hadn’t gone.
As we explored our options, I suggested that we could sing on the street in downtown Vegas as a part of our next stop. I thought Sutton could bang out a beat on a trash container or lamppost. We’d just sing. And then, right on cue, he started banging out a beat on the table in the bar. He started singing and buy the time he hit the third word, the five of us were singing “Hooked on a Feeling”.
We weren’t only good, all the attention from the patrons turned to us. Several took out their phones and started recording. The normal hum of the bar stopped, and my boys and I could have been singing in the Colosseum at Caesars Palace. We were that good.
Hooked on a Feeling (Rerecorded)
Before we left, Sutton’s new friend, Steve, took our picture. We shared a few words with him and headed downtown. We never sang again. We were one and done.
The next night, we tried a different tiki bar, The Golden Tiki. Two bars in two nights was a first for me. And there he was again. Steve, the same man, in a completely different place, smiling like we were old friends. After hundreds of visits to Vegas without ever stepping into a bar, I went twice in two days, and the same stranger crossed our path both times. It was surprising and somehow perfect. It was a little Vegas magic woven into Brady’s first trip. A moment we’ll all remember, not because it was planned, but because it felt like the universe decided to give us a story.
When I returned to Florida, I asked my friend AL to help me compute the odds of having such an adventure. I expected a billion or more to one, but he said it was more like 400 – 1.
TBC