Sunday, May 02, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

NORM: Mirage benefit to honor star chef

Ryan Seacrest on the town Friday night. Enrique Iglesias to perform at benefit. Paula Abdul to help honor chef Puck.

Enrique Iglesias has agreed to perform at the sold-out May 15 Alzheimer's benefit at The Mirage honoring star chef Wolfgang Puck.

In what figures to be the culinary event of the year, nine super chefs will prepare a five-course, $1,500-a-plate dinner for 550 to benefit Larry Ruvo's eighth annual "Keep Memory Alive" fund-raiser for a new Alzheimer's hospice.

Puck is being honored for donating his restaurants and staff for the first seven benefits, which raised more than $7 million.

The chef lineup: Paul Bocuse, Daniel Boulud, Alain Ducasse, Thomas Keller, Nobu Matsuhisa, Charlie Palmer, David Robins, Alessandro Stratta and Charlie Trotter.

Providing celebrity star power will be the cast of NBC's "Las Vegas"; "American Idol" judges Paula Abdul, Randy Jackson and Simon Cowell; Ben Affleck; Mark Wahlberg; Fred Durst; and Angie Dickinson.

Donna Baldwin credited her co-chairman, Harry Morton of the Hard Rock Hotel, for landing Iglesias, who agreed to a gratis performance.

Growing pains

The long road for aspiring Las Vegas headliners has its painful experiences.

For Harrah's afternoon headliner Mac King, honored as the magician of the year on Saturday at the Academy of Magical Arts awards banquet in Los Angeles, it occurred in a lounge in Charlotte, N.C., about 20 years ago.

King was five minutes into his comedy magic show, performing a rope trick with scissors, when he saw the tip of his thumb fly onto a table in the audience.

For a few seconds, he thought it was a thumbnail, until blood started gushing. He tried to scotch tape it, to no avail.

"Normally at this part of the show, I get a woman to volunteer from the audience. But under these circumstances, I thought it would be better if I got a nurse."

Luckily, a nurse was in the house and went to King's aid.

"She took charge. She yelled to the bar to send up a first-aid kit and a shot of vodka."

King, a teetotaler, braced himself for his first blast of vodka, but the nurse instead plunged his thumb in the shot glass.

"It was like a Tex Avery cartoon; I felt like I had smoke coming out of my ears," said King, who finished the first show with a heavily bandaged thumb.

His wife insisted on a trip to the hospital to get stitches. King insisted that he had to finish the second show.

Upon completing the second show, King and his wife were heading for a hospital when an audience member followed them to the door, saying he loved the first show so much he stayed for the second.

He was disappointed, though, he told King, that the thumb trick wasn't included in the second show.

"He thought it was part of the show," said King.

Sightings

Leonardo DiCaprio, at the K-I fights at the Bellagio on Friday and later lighting up the scene at Light nightclub (Bellagio). ... "American Idol" host Ryan Seacrest at N9NE Steakhouse (Palms) on Friday. ... At ghostbar (Palms) on Friday: Actress Ashley Judd, Mike Tyson, ultimate fighter Tito Ortiz, Michael Andretti and Seacrest. ... Christine Todd Whitman, former chief of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, at the Las Vegas Convention Center on Friday for a speech to one of the cleanest industries, the car wash convention. ... Muhammad Ali, drawing a cartoon of an Ali-Joe Frazier fight on napkin linen with a magic marker for Nate Bynum, UNLV associate professor of theater, during a meeting Friday in the Bellagio villas. Bynum is a family friend.

The Punch Line

"A psychiatrist is a fellow who asks you a lot of expensive questions your wife asks for nothing."-- Joey Adams

Norm Clarke can be reached at 383-0244 or norm@reviewjournal.com.