Roseanne makes herself at home

Maybe it's kismet that Roseanne Barr works and lives in Las Vegas because she and Vegas mainstay Debbie Reynolds have each gotten themselves into three famously busted marriages.

"Don't forget divorced," Roseanne says. "I haven't just been married. I've been divorced. I'm going for widow, but that never happens. Somehow I never seem to get what I really want there."

Roseanne, headlining at the Sahara and living in Summerlin, worked her way out of poverty but is fond of the Anna Nicole Smith method.

"If I was the widow of a billionaire like Warren Buffett -- he's getting ready to die -- if I could just marry him and get his money, man, I would clean everything up (in society). I would do what people with money should do if they had any conscience, which most of them don't. You could actually feed and clothe the people who need it.

"But those guys. They never want 55-year-old fat Jewish women who are bitter. They want 25-year-old blondes who are kind of nurses."

Yep, Roseanne is still Roseanne, a sharp-tongued class-conscious comedian. She even goes political while talking about prostitution. During a Monday interview with Dave Berns on KNPR-FM, 88.9, Roseanne congratulated a female caller for being a politically thoughtful hooker, merely because the caller said she was from Pahrump.

"Nobody lives in Pahrump who isn't a hooker," Roseanne tells me later. "Good for her! She's got a right to vote!"

Roseanne claims she has a good eye for spotting hookers, and from her assumptions, the "high-rents ones" in their 30s troll The Venetian, while "older, upper-class hookers" try the Bellagio.

"And the NASCAR hookers are all at the Sahara," she says with one of those awesome Roseanne smiles. NASCAR hookers, she explains, "have the regular heel, short-skirt thing. It's a little more like Macy's than Cavalli. You've gotta please your customer."

And then comes the serious: "It's a real good-paying job for a woman out here." Roseanne says earnestly. "It's an excellent job."

At 55, Roseanne is in a new phase. She's tried plastic surgery and Botox, but now she's letting her hair gray naturally.

"I'm into old women looking old, which I'm trying to do my part," she says. "I think it's the hippest thing you can do, is to just get old, shut up, die, get out of the way.

"If baby boomers would just die at 60, there'd be no poverty. All these measures they take, like transplanting hearts of young Indonesian children and going on Botox, just die!"

She doesn't want to keel over herself, though. She'd even consider being cryogenically frozen, but only if she still had money afterward.

"If I was gonna get cryogenically frozen only to awaken under poverty, I wouldn't want that. I imagine when I woke up, there wouldn't be any more Republicans. Aren't their days up?"

She's done a good job of raising non-Republicans. None of her five "socially aware" kids is in the GOP. I ask whether it would kill her if one of them switched to the right.

"They'd be disowned," she jokes. "I don't know if it would kill me. I think it would be symptomatic that they were on drugs. I would try to help them. I wouldn't give up on them if they were a Republican or a drug addict."

She says Vegas would have figured into a "Roseanne" reunion a while back, but she didn't get offered enough money, and it never happened. She regrets that.

She wanted to send the Conner family here, where someone would marry interracially, while other family members would struggle with alcohol and drug use, real problems. "Roseanne's" son DJ would fight in Iraq.

"That's who does go to Iraq. The Conner family. Certainly not the Clintons or the Bushes or any of them."

Clearly, her compassion is reserved largely for poor people, just as it was on "Roseanne," the best comedy ever. Riding the streets of Vegas keeps poor people on her mind.

"On the way down to the show, there's people that look like they're living under the bridge, right next to all that wealth. Then we go around the block and there's like eight more acres of huge things being built. It's very optimistic that they would keep building, even though they say the numbers are down. It's like gambling itself. The whole city is gambling on itself."

Doug Elfman's column appears on Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Contact him at 702-383-0391 or e-mail him at delfman@reviewjournal.com. He also blogs at reviewjournal.com/elfman.