Sunday, November 02, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

100TH BIRTHDAY: Centennial celebration plans grow

Ideas as wild and diverse as city's history pour in from everywhere

If Las Vegas' 100th birthday bash is a bust, it won't be for a lack of ideas.

Everyone, it seems, has a plan for the city's centennial celebration in 2005.

Dog fanciers have proposed a commemorative dog show, "The Centennial Bitch." Others want to expose their civic pride with "Sintennial," a touring topless show. A pair of locals want to help Las Vegas mark the occasion by deploying the world's largest disco ball, big enough to illuminate the entire valley.

If one entrepreneur has his way, the celebration won't come off without official Las Vegas centennial commemorative hunks of cheese molded into the shapes of Las Vegas icons. The Stratosphere in Gouda, perhaps.

As many as 30 suggestions a day reach the office of Centennial Project Manager Stacy Allsbrook. Each is reviewed and passed along to the Las Vegas Centennial Committee's work groups for further consideration and refinement.

"Everyone wants a piece of Las Vegas and its centennial," Allsbrook said.

And that includes composers.

Las Vegan Marie Frances has written lyrics and music for not one, but two, full-length centennial-related musicals: "The Happiest Mayor," a retelling of Mayor Oscar Goodman's life (in the election scene an opposing candidate for mayor proposes doing away with buffets); and "Celebration," a three-hour panoramic tour of the city's history.

Another composer wants to stage "Sin City," which also promises to soft shoe and sing its way through the city's first 100 years.

There are proposals for enough centennial merchandise to fill a gift shop.

Centennial playing cards and rifles and historical books of varying degrees of accuracy are being looked at. And a horticulturist has volunteered to create, through genetic alterations, a hybrid Las Vegas centennial flower.

"It says so much about Las Vegas," Allsbrook said of the eclectic ideas piling up on her desk in the city's Department of Leisure Services.

In UNLV historian Hal Rothman's estimation, it says Las Vegas continues to be many things to many people, a hunk of shapely cheese to the perfect place to hang a massive disco ball.

"Las Vegas inspires a broader range of emotions than other places," said Rothman, who has been contacted by a number of entrepreneurs from around the world with centennial pitches. "Everywhere else has a more or less fixed identity."

That's partially an upshot of the city's shifting image, the latest example being its move from family-friendly vacation destination to what-happens-here-stays-here adult playground.

"We are never one thing," Rothman said. "We are whatever we need to be next to get people here."

Las Vegas aims to involve as many ethnic, religious and civic groups as possible in centennial events. Officials said they also hope to educate residents on Southern Nevada's history, traditions and culture through the celebration.

People move to Las Vegas from every corner of the country, and even after they've been here several years they still say they're from somewhere else, Goodman said. "After the centennial, I want people to say, 'I'm from Las Vegas.' "

Another aim of the celebration is to attract tourists. This is, after all, Las Vegas.

To that end the City Council on Wednesday approved a deal with Clear Channel Communications, allowing the entertainment company to seek out corporate sponsors for concerts, Las Vegas-themed touring productions and televised celebrations of the city's centennial.

The shows would serve, in part, as a marketing platform for the city. Officials hope the corporate sponsorships will also underwrite the cost of local events.

"Hopefully we'll have the largest birthday party in the world," Goodman said.

That will, of course, require the world's largest birthday cake, assembled along Fremont Street sometime during the centennial. The current record is 58 tons. Allsbrook said, "We're shooting to beat that."

The Centennial Committee hasn't rendered verdicts on all the proposals. In fact, the public is being encouraged to submit more ideas.

Some aspects of the year-long celebration that will begin as the city rings in New Year's 2005 and crescendo on May 15, are taking shape.

The committee has settled on the slogan "We Did It Our Way," a play on the title of the Paul Anka song made famous by Frank Sinatra. A songwriter has already submitted modified centennial lyrics for the tune.

Among the activities currently planned for the centennial is the celebration of 100 weddings for 100 couples flown in from around the country.

"We're still kicking around the idea if we want to wrap up the year with 100 divorces -- that's also a part of our history," said Dale Erquiaga, an advertising executive at R&R Partners and chairman of the Centennial Committee's cultural group.

There will be a dramatic re-creation of the May 15, 1905, land auction that marked the birth of modern Las Vegas. The auction of 110 acres between Stewart and Garces avenues and Main and Fifth streets coincided with completion of the rail line linking Southern California and Salt Lake City.

The committee hopes to resurrect Elks Helldorado Days, an old West celebration that began in the 1930s and continued until 1998. It featured parades, rodeos and beard growing contests that spawned protests from local barbers in the early years.

There will be performances by an interfaith choir with representatives from all religious group in the valley. The Nevada Ballet and Las Vegas Philharmonic hope to commission original works for the centennial.

Pending Federal Aviation Administration approval, there will be an air parade of 100 aircraft over the Strip.

Internationally, the Indian Film Academy, which hands out India's equivalent of the Oscar, wants to hold its annual awards show in Las Vegas during the centennial.

A Parisian photographer has requested permission to stage a sanctioned Las Vegas centennial themed art show in Paris.

Another artist has suggested Las Vegas commission a sculpture of one of its citizens, not a famous figure, but someone selected through a contest as being representative of the city.

"The interest is across the board," Erquiaga said. "Absolutely everybody gets it right away, that Las Vegas is a place worth celebrating."

As he helps sift through the proposals, Erquiaga is looking for ideas with historical elements that capture "the sense that is Las Vegas."

"Quite honestly, some of the things I look for are at the point where kitsch meets culture," he said. "We're both. There's a kitsch side to Las Vegas, and there's also the appetite for the arts here, and it's our job to put it all on display."

Which just might make a place in the celebration for cheese molded into the shapes of Las Vegas icons.

"If they could explain why they chose cheese as a medium I'd embrace it," he said.