Kah-nee-ta
By Milt Abel | August 13, 2010
Kahneeta
This past Wednesday I worked at Kahneeta High Desert Resort and Casino. An Indian -excuse me, Native America, casino about a three hour’s drive from my front door. These casino have become a bit of a growth market for us non-famous entertainers, and famous ones too, for that matter. All these Indian casinos: It’s like they’re taking back the United States a nickel at a time. It’s a perverse guilt, the white man’s allowing gambling on tribal lands. ‘Yeah, we took everything from the people that were already living here, but to show there’s no hard feelings, we’ll give it back -but it we have to make a game out of it.’
I always open with a joke about Indian Casinos when I work at them…
“All these Indian Casinos… Is it corrupting the Native American culture? Changing it? I wanted to find out. I was working one Indian Casino and I went up two native American boys, I think their names were Flying Dice and Always Doubles Down…”
here’s a video of me performing that joke a few years back
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPnXub-iZxY
This was a slightly different trip because I brought my youngest daughter with me. She said, “If I stay home all I’m going to do is watch TV. Let me come with you.” So I did. So she came with me on my two day tour: Wednesday 8/11 at Kahneeta, and Thursday at Wildhorse Resort and Casino in Pendleton, Oregon; where she sat in our hotel room and watched TV. Totally different than watching it home because… someone else cleans up the room after you leave. And that’s nice.
It turns out there was quite a difference between to the two casino resorts. If I was spending my own money (instead of working and getting paid to be there) I’d go to Kahneeta in a New York minute over going to the Wildhorse. The Wildhorse has a better showroom and stage for their midweek comedy show, but as far as going somewhere to get away and relax, Kahneeta has the upper hand, hands down.
Every time I’ve stayed at Kahneeta I’ve had a room containing a balcony that looked over a vast panorama or an Oergon high desert valley and rocky cliffs and hills. At night, after my show, my daughter went out on the balcony and looked at more stars than I’ve seen in years. The desert night sky was incredibly clear and we played our favorite game of trying to spot satellites; slow and steady moving stars that don’t have the telltale blinking lights of planes. Crickets and cicadas and Sputnik; peaceful fun.
Earlier in the afternoon there was a tribal dance demonstration on the grounds just off our balcony. Rhythmic drums playing on the edge of earshot made me think of the corny musician joke that I had to pretend I made up as my daughter and I first distinguished the sound: “You hear those drums? We’re safe as longs as the drums are playing. If they stop, that’s not good.” “Because that’s when they attack?” “No. Then come a bass solo, and we don’t want to be around for that.”
Topics: comedy | please add Comments »
Baton Rouge
By Milt Abel | July 31, 2010
My red-eye flight from Portland to Houston began boarding at 11:45PM which meant for residents of our destination, with the two hour time-zone change, it was quarter till two in the morning. When they had exhausted the invitations to board for various frequent-flyer statuses, and started into row numbers, a large, sleepy man approached and confessed in a texas drawl, “I was sound asleep over there. I almost missed the flight.” I was so tempted to say, “You did, this flight’s going to Hong Kong.” But I know lots of people who are grumpy when they first get up, and he was big, and it would be my luck to end up siting next to him for the four-hour flight. So I offered something neutral, “I wonder about people I see sleeping, what flight they are on. But you made you this one.” It’d seem a prudent idea, if you are going to nod off before a flight, to safety-pin a note to your jacket that tells passerby’s your destination. A shipping invoice. Imagine seeing a twenty-something young man sprawled across some airport seats with ‘Las Vegas’ written on a piece of paper taped to his forehead; although that might be confusing, coming across more as warning rather than a wish to be roused. “That young man has already been there.”
My seat-mate ended up being a very lithe and tall woman who could have easily been traveling between modeling shoots. She was dressed in causally elegant clothes and carried herself with a grace that invited prolonged looks. Of course, when you’re crammed into a middle seat in coach, graceful movement is a thing of the past, any kind of movement is a thing of the past. She quickly fell asleep and started listing toward me and my aisle seat.
As she inched further and further toward crossing her nodding head into my space I started thinking about one of the lesser story-lines from the Gary Cooper classic film, Sergeant York. Before he joins the army and goes overseas and mows down Germans he has to overcome some personal obstacles, one literal obstacle is an old stump that sits in a field he’s plowing. Every turning of the crop causes him to till around it, rather than plowing straight and easier lines, and when he finally goes through the immense difficulty of removing that obstacle we know he’s got his ducks in a row and is ready to go shoot the Huns -who in this movie are displayed almost as antiseptically as shooting arcade ducks. You should see that movie and then watch HBO’s Band of Brothers or it’s other WWII mini-series The Pacific, and see how vividly we now portray the gritty carnage of war; it’ll engender a few more pacifists.
But I thought of that stump in Sergeant York’s field because my neighbor’s leaning was become more and more of a problem and if I had just gone to the trouble to stop it early on, my life would be easier. She wasn’t physically touching me, partly because I had leaned away, but I was getting crammed, and if she started drooling I was within the splash zone. You see all these movies where an attractive girl ends up sleeping on a shoulder of a strange man and they end up being lovers, but the reality of a stranger leaning into an already minimal space isn’t so glamourous, no matter how cute she is. I was caught in my own gritty mini-mini series.
I began to wonder how far her encroachment would go. By the time we touched down would we resemble Michelangelo’s Pieta? Me, Mary Magdaline carved in grave sorrow and loss, cradling her reclined body across the folds of my lap. It never got that far, she snorted a couple times and jerked herself back across the line every time. I fell asleep myself. And I know I snore. I know that crossed over the line.
The flight connected on to Baton Rouge where I had a one-night show with the Stand-up Dads. The audience was charming -it’s true what they say about the south, some of the nicest people you’ll ever meet. You just have to to the south to meet them. To hot and humid for me. I’d prefer they cross over into my space.
Topics: comedy, humor, travel | please add Comments »
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