vegas, baby! (later)

i’m kinda impressed with how smooth it all got changed…

…it was like we do this all the time – but we don’t. seriously.

we had (past tense) a vegas trip planned for the week after my birfmas. while it was cool for me to go back to place i’ve always dug (been a decade exactly since my last visit) and return to ufc-land (she grew up there and hasn’t been back in a few years herself) one of the main reasons we were going was for me to attempt to re-kindle an old friendship with comedian eddie griffin.

somewhere back in the missing years there’s talk of this – i met him at an ACL after party where i was drinking with mike mills (R.E.M.’s bass player) and we hit it off. i ended up making some calls and getting him some comedy club gigs to warm up for, ironically, a stint in vegas he had arranged so a casino would cover all his expenses AND pay him to be in vegas for a week when the real reason he was going was to see ed junior (his oldest) who had gone off to college at UNLV…

…that’s a smooth, crafty motherfucker.

during this period i ended up losing my star tickets gig for completely unrelated reasons so he pointed out i had no reason NOT to hang out with him and the cast and crew (which included, among others, harry dean stanton, luke wilson, and my date to ed’s last austin show, eva mendes). we parted on good terms when he headed back to la la land and i got to back to my unemployed reality. my phone died soon after and i lost his contact info and that was kinda the end of that…until we were planning a vegas trip and saw he was at the rio. since the ufc prides herself in giving me “experiences” for my birthday since i always buy my own stuff she got us vip tickets, which includes a meet & greet with the man himself. maybe he’ll remember me, maybe not – time will tell.

although it almost didn’t get to.

we got a call from vegas.com where we’d booked out ed tickets letting us know that due to him having some surgery our show was cancelled. we checked and saw the NEXT week was still on, so we flipped our flight (which cost an extra $120) and our room (which went down $75, cushioning the flight sting a bit) and we changed our reservation to his show the last night we were in town (give extra recovery time just in case) and so it’s on…again…a week later. hoping ME might join us, and anybody else that wants to. holler at me if you need info…