Vegas Cliches We Love To Hate--Or Can't Deny

Discussion Highlights:

Dayvid Figler is a lawyer and long-time Las Vegas resident: Las Vegas is a place for everyone. Clichés can work here. People call us superficial, but we have a very deep superficiality, a nuanced, layered superficiality worthy of discourse and discussion. Does Elvis have a place in one of those layers, I can’t deny it but I also don’t have to like it.

Abbi Whitaker with the Abbi Agency is working with Reno to enhance its image: For Reno, there was a little bit of the misconceptions that people had given us that had never even been here. For a long time, Reno was letting people tell its story who had never even set foot in our community or our city.

Lissa Townsend Rodgers is a writer with Vegas Seven Magazine: We have great world-class musicians here. They go do side gigs, other projects. You can catch really interesting cultural things in smaller areas. You just have to know where to look. I think that’s what people miss about Vegas culture is… it’s all here, you just have to know where to look.

Kristen DeSilva was born and raised in Las Vegas. Currently, she works in marketing for Lev Restaurant Group: My aunt may have given me a bucket of nickels to pay for lunch here or there but other than that I didn’t have a uniquely ‘Vegas’ experience growing up.

Scott Roeben runs the blog vitalvegas.com: To me, it really all turns back to this amazing informal tagline that the city has. To a person… it doesn’t matter what language they speak, if they speak no English at all, they’re still going to be able to say that phrase about ‘what happens here, stays here.’ That’s the probably the biggest reoccurring one and that is probably the least true.

You could do 10 years of PR for the city in a very specific way and that messaging and you get one movie like “Hangover” and that’s what the city is to people because that’s had such an effect and such a far reach. People come to town and they’re trying to have sex on the High Roller. They’re doing things they would never do in their hometown. They would never imagine. They feel free to do it here. That to me is one of the biggest ones.

The power of that message is kind of one of the things that has made Las Vegas what it is, but the other side of that coin is people come to town really expecting – anything goes. They think prostitution is legal on the Strip. They think you can pretty much get any kind of drug you want from any kind of concierge or host at your nightclub, which these are obviously just not true.