Viva Las Vegas

Sitting in the Barter Theater last weekend, my dad and I made a starling discovery about ourselves.

We were talking to this older gentleman in front of us during the intermission of "Shake, Rattle, and Roll," an Elvis tribute show (which is the glorified and PC way of saying Elvis impersonator). As he listed off the the shows he'd been to and how they compared to the one we were currently watching, Dad got ready to announce that we'd also seen one he mentioned.

Then he realized this was making our third Elvis show this year. We were horrified.

At the three shows we've attended (one with my immediate family and two with my grandparents), we'd spent most of them making fun of the Elvis impersonator groupies that apparently form a disturbing subculture. At one, there was even a merchandise booth run by old ladies who probably saw the real Elvis when they were teenagers. The merchandise, from a safe distance, appeared to be your usual tshirts, coffee cups, buttons, and pins emblazoned with the familiar face of the King of Rock-n-roll, but as you moved closer, it became freakily apparent that it wasn't Elvis Presley's face on the cheap goods. It was the face of the impersonator.

Now going to see one perform is one thing, but having a man pretending be another man pasted across your chest is just weird. But far weirder is how these ladies acted during the impersonator's performance. They yelled "we love you Stephen!" with the same adoration and fanaticism as real 50's Elvis fangirls. They even threw their granny panties on stage. No, I'm not kidding. They did.

They also racketed off the names of all the "Elvis Tribute Artists" who participated in the annual contest in Las Vegas and where their precious Stephen ranked among them. "Oh the one in Myrtle Beach? He's so full of himself! Barter Theater? He's got nothing on Stephen! Just a hack."

So as we stood in this tiny, historic theater, surrounded by people old enough to be my great, great grandparents, we became shockingly self-aware. I looked down at the Elvis emblazoned on my chest (at least it's the real one and not Stephen or Scot or Bruce!), the light up purse on my shoulder. I thought about the Jailhouse Rock poster hanging up at home and the purple Elvis guitar cd case in the living room. I thought about the three Elvis shows we attended.

But I also thought of all the times Dad and I spent heartily singing along to our favorite Elvis songs, complete with dramatic hand gestures and lip quivers, and the time my second grade teacher marched tie-dye Elvis shirt clad eight-year-old me down the hall to show another teacher who was a huge Elvis fan. And I thought about all the times my brother and I had watched these two Elvis biography videos to kill time in the van, his four year old lips singing every word.

And maybe we aren't the fans who cry at the Presley grave site at Graceland and maybe my undergarments stay on during Elvis tribute shows, and maybe I don't know the name of every impersonator that ever breathed, but maybe, just maybe, we are one of those people.