Lonnie Hammargren, top center, sings as a Dixieland Jazz band plays Saturday during a processional at his "Awake Wake." The former lieutenant governor hosted his own funeral on Saturday. Photo by John Locher.

When the wake for former Lt. Gov. Lonnie Hammargren ended Saturday and the New Orleans-style processional began, 76-year-old Cecelia Alston wasted little time.

Along with nearby showgirls, she danced to the jazz in the Community Lutheran Church parking lot, in her pale beige silk dress and high stiletto heels.

"Isn't it great he (Hammargren) is alive for his own funeral?" the mother of five said, not even breathing hard as she continued the steps that drew an audience.

So went a scene from the "Awake Wake" that the 69-year-old Hammargren, a retired neurosurgeon, had planned for weeks.

Hammargren, who beams when someone describes him as "eccentric," is perhaps best known for connecting three houses near Tropicana and Sandhill avenues to create a 14,000-square-foot home/museum that holds a planetarium and observatory, and thousands of artifacts.

The mile-long procession from Community Lutheran to his home included Star Wars characters and men on horseback dressed as the Buffalo Soldiers, African Americans who helped blaze the trails of the Wild West.

Then hundreds of those who took part in the procession walked up the grand entrance staircase that Liberace used at the Riviera.

They also played one of Liberace's pianos and sat in a roller coaster that used to be atop the Stratosphere.

And they stared at a huge reproduction of the Apollo Space Shuttle, and life-size replicas of a dinosaur and Leonardo DaVinci's flying machine. They also drank and ate in rooms Hammargren saved from the Showboat casino.

After becoming more aware of his own mortality in October -- he needed six bypasses to correct a heart condition -- Hammargren said he wanted to see the friends and family whom he would want at his funeral while he was still alive.

And so he did.

During the eulogy, Dr. Al Capanna told of how Hammargren once took him to his basement to show him a machine gun that still worked. He became a tad edgy, he said, because the gun was pointed right at him.

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman sent in a memorial video that suggested that somehow Hammargren's DNA would match that of Anna Nicole Smith's daughter.

During the procession, artist John Pacheco remembered how Hammargren once dove off a boat and swam five miles to Belize because the reefs wouldn't allow the boat to dock.

"The doctor badly needed a drink," Pacheco recalled.

Family and friends weren't the only ones to show up. So did Alston, a complete stranger who walked and danced the entire mile of the procession in her high heel shoes.

"I read in the paper about Dr. Hammargren having this," said Alston, who moved recently to Las Vegas from Maryland. "I called and asked if I could come and he graciously said yes.

"When you're going on 77, you want to have fun. I think this is just fantastic. But I shouldn't be surprised. This is Las Vegas, after all."