sarah vowell should marry me,

nobody at work has heard of this american life. this scares me a little. where am i? everything is so comfortable here that it's almost uncomfortable. you'd think i'd be used to alienation by now...

harvey fierstein sums things up pretty well in this interview on his last night of Hairspray at the Luxor:

"It's an interesting place you got here," he says in the most distinctive voice since Jimmy Durante. "I have not been mentally bored in Las Vegas. I may be culturally dying ...," he says, dissolving into his seismic laugh.

You're thinking, "Oh, those snooty New York-types." But Fierstein's sojourn included a visit to the Clark County Museum, so if you live here and he beat you there, don't rush to snap judgments.

Anyway, Fierstein likes the table made from dice in the museum's 1930s house, and he is taking some kitschy dice artwork home with him. He is otherwise disappointed with his antique-hunting here after visiting "every junk shop in this town."

Living in Henderson during his "Hairspray" run, he found "certainly a separation of money here" compared to New York, and a "homogenization of neighborhoods here that is a little strange but not unlike what I see in L.A."

He found it odd that no one talks politics. "Our thieving president was here (last Monday) and nobody that I know talked about it at all."