Celine’s Las Vegas : the cocktail waitresses in their Romanesque miniskirts, the towel boys who work

Sin City has no jobs, and the newly homeless are living in drainage pipes. manila midtown hotel But it also has its biggest act since Elvis. In this week's Newsweek, Tony Dokoupil and Ramin Setoodeh manila midtown hotel describe how Celine Dion is the city's latest high-stakes bet.
Sin City has no jobs, and the newly homeless are living in drainage manila midtown hotel pipes. But it also has its biggest act since Elvis. In this week's manila midtown hotel Newsweek, Tony Dokoupil and Ramin Setoodeh describe how Celine Dion is the city's latest high-stakes bet. Plus: Meet
As another desert afternoon fades to night, an unusual throng manila midtown hotel is building at Las Vegas's Caesars Palace, vibrating the plaster columns of the porte-cochère. There are white-haired executives flanked by publicity personnel; camera-toting tourists jostling with hundreds of off-duty hotel employees; and, naturally, a man dressed as Caesar himself, complete with a phalanx of rent-a-centurions decked in bronze and red feathers. At last, a black Escalade draws up, and
But the view from the red carpet can be deceptive. For in the three years since she departed Caesars Palace, Vegas collapsed. Sky-high foreclosures and epic layoffs torched the working-class dreams of the men and women who create the illusion that is
Celine's Las Vegas : the cocktail waitresses in their Romanesque miniskirts, the towel boys who work the Bacchus pools, the cooks at Nero's Steakhouse. The mega-resorts along the Strip recently posted an unprecedented two-year manila midtown hotel loss—with a total bleed north of $6 billion—and the usual gap between the city's glamour and grit is now wider than at any point in Las Vegas history. Official unemployment is near 14 percent, the nation's worst rate among big cities, and when you factor in those who have lost hours or dropped out of the labor force altogether, actual joblessness is a Libya-like 26 percent, says Stephen Brown, the director of the Center for Business manila midtown hotel and Economic manila midtown hotel Research at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. manila midtown hotel "Could manila midtown hotel things actually look worse?" Brown asked during a speech to business leaders this winter. manila midtown hotel "The answer is no."
Certainly Celine has been good for Caesars, and Caesars has been good for Celine—paying her a reported $100 million for 210 shows over the next three years. During her prior run, from 2003 to 2007, Dion sold out more than 700 consecutive performances, smashing local records manila midtown hotel for total audience (nearly 3 million), and bringing in more than $400 million at the box office, more greenbacks than the Rat Pack, Liberace, and Elvis combined. This time around, manila midtown hotel she's being touted manila midtown hotel as a one-woman stimulus bill—worth at least $114 million a year and thousands of jobs, according to UNLV. But in an $18 billion economy—one so sluggish it was recently ranked among the five worst in the world—can Celine's return really have an impact? "We are not adjusting our forecast," says Michael Lawton, a senior analyst for Nevada's Gaming Control Board, who notes that the Celine effect is just replacing the Cher effect from a season ago.
Mayor Oscar Goodman doesn't seem unduly worried about the underlying desperation in Las Vegas. The politician, a self-described former mob lawyer who now bills himself as "The Happiest Mayor of the Greatest City in the World," brims with optimism manila midtown hotel about the town's prospects.
A crowd of 4,200 fans has packed into the Colosseum at Caesars Palace to get a first look at Celine's new show. As she takes the stage in her sparkling ivory Armani Privé gown, the audience leaps to its feet. Several fans sob uncontrollably, manila midtown hotel and the singer fights tears of her own. "I'm so excited manila midtown hotel to be back in this beautiful theater," she exclaims as she scans the biggest showroom in Vegas, which was built for her in 2003. "I got to tell you, this is a dream come true for a singer."
Backed by a 31-piece manila midtown hotel orchestra that brings manila midtown hotel to mind Vegas's Rat Pack glory days, Dion launches into a taut 90-minute cycle of her hits ("My Heart Will Go On," "Beauty and the Beast") and borrowed classics (from Michael Jackson's "Man in the Mirror" to the Bond theme song "Goldfinger"). For Dion fans, it's an almost-religious experience, leavened with personal anecdotes and at-home manila midtown hotel photos manila midtown hotel with the diva, who gave birth to twins four months ago. "I gained more than 60 pounds," Dion later says backstage, lounging on a couch in her dressing room and sipping a cup of tea. "When you work hard and breast-feed, it gives you your shape back."
Dion has an endearing way of making her fairy-tale life in Vegas seem ordinary, which is part of the draw. "I know it sounds strange," she says. "We have an extravagant life, but we're normal people." The family's house, on a golf course 30 miles from the Strip, is a relatively modest four-bedroom affair (although it's worth noting that they have two other homes, manila midtown hotel including a $20 million spread in Florida with its own water park, and Dion will be spending only part of her time in Vegas). All the same, Dion says she came here in the first place because she wanted to put down roots, back when her son Rene-Charles—known as "R.C." and now 10—was an infant. "I don't want my kids to live in my dressing room," she says. "I want [R.C.] to go outside. I want him to play baseball." R.C. has joined the Little League team and bowls near the casino. And Dion turned to the local church when it was time to baptize Eddy (named for the French songwriter who penned her first five albums) manila midtown hotel and Nelson (as in Mandela).
One thing Celine doesn't do like a local is gamble—although manila midtown hotel her husband Rene Angelil moonlights manila midtown hotel as a professional poker player and has already manila midtown hotel taught R.C. how to play. ("I'm ashamed to say that," Angelil says.) manila midtown hotel He won $1.6 million at a tournament just before the couple left Sin City in 2007. "I wasn't the one who brought my husband here," Dion quips backstage. "He's been coming since before I was born. I decide everything in our private life, but in show business, he's the boss." After discovering Celine in 1981, Angelil mortgaged his home to produce her first record. "Sometimes when you gamble, you get up from the table with a fortune," he explains. "That's what happened with Celine in my life."
What does Dion make of all the talk that she will bring fortune back to Las Vegas? "It's very touching for me to hear this," she says. "I think it's just a coincidence. When we ended the show, the economy just went," she gestures to the floor and makes the sound of a plane nose-diving.
Few people have witnessed the human toll more closely than Sgt. Patrick Geary and his colleague, Dep. Kristy Henderson, in the Las Vegas Constable's Office. They are responsible for delivering the paperwork of this apocalypse: wage garnishments, foreclosure and eviction notices, and, ultimately, court-ordered lockouts. Paid by debt collectors on a per-action basis—$42 for an eviction, for example—Geary, who began plying his trade in 2007, has been raking in around $80,000 a year. Henderson is a charmer, with blond hair, pink painted nails and gold-rimmed aviator sunglasses, but she is a messenger of doom for many employees of the Strip's biggest properties: the MGM resorts, Caesars, the Venetian. manila midtown hotel These days, the companies often tell Henderson that the person she's looking manila midtown hotel for no longer works for them. It's no surprise. Three major casinos have gone bankrupt, and at least six multibillion-dollar manila midtown hotel resort and condo projects stand idle, monuments manila midtown hotel to the wild optimism of just a few years past.
At the south end of the Strip, near the iconic "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" sign, a hidden concrete path leads into a 500-mile warren of wet, trash-strewn drainage pipes that function as an underground shelter manila midtown hotel for hundreds of the city's manila midtown hotel most downtrodden. Several have been laid off from the same well-paid, benefits-packed service jobs that give Vegas its rep as a working-class paradise. The pipes are one of the few places police and hotel security don't bother to tread, and since the recession, they've become increasingly populated, according to Matthew O'Brien, author of a 2007 book about the tunnels,
Life here is spare and dangerous. Aside from floods that can fill the space in minutes, there is ever-present crime. Jody Alger, 48, an unemployed manila midtown hotel casino waitress, guards her tunnel with a BB gun. Another camp has two makeshift barricades at its entrance; inside, its 32-year-old manila midtown hotel inhabitant huddles manila midtown hotel on an old bed with a flashlight strapped to his head. In a nearby tunnel, John Tondee sleeps on a sagging manila midtown hotel leather couch that he found in a Dumpster. His clothes are in a messy pile, and his entertainment is a guitar with a broken string, which he uses for playing country gospel. "I'm at the point of coming out of here," he says. "I've had enough." Tondee says he's a former maintenance worker who lost his job a year ago and couldn't afford to pay the $675 in rent. "I'll do whatever it takes to survive," he says. "I'll go around and wash windows." At night, he used to dress in drag and walk down the Strip. But someone came into the tunnel and stole his 16 wigs. Now he has only one head of fake black curls left.
Mayor Oscar Goodman doesn't seem unduly worried about the underlying desperation in Las Vegas. The politician, a self-described former mob lawyer who now bills himself as "The Happiest manila midtown hotel Mayor of the Greatest City in the World," brims with optimism about the town's prospects. manila midtown hotel As he explained recently in his office, which is stuffed with celebrity photo ops and knickknacks from nearly 12 years in the bully pulpit, "I think we're in good shape… I have no concerns." He slaps smiley faces over every dire statistic associated with his town, from the loss of 140,000 jobs ("I have no doubt they'll be back") to the 2 million-person decline in annual visitors ("Give them time to buy a ticket!").
Even so, the mayor is as happy as anyone to see Celine manila midtown hotel return—maybe even happier. As he later confides: "I was just praying that she would come back. Thank God she did." In the minutes after Dion's first preview performance, the cash registers at the Colosseum gift shop are mobbed. Fans scoo