America's Second Most Wanted

The Mob Museum will host an exclusive screening of Whitey, a documentary about  the Boston mobster who inspired the Jack Nicholson character in The Departed, Tuesday and Wednesday, August 12 and 13. The $20 admission includes popcorn and a beverage (museum members get 10% off). After being an FBI informant, "Whitey" Bolger spent years on the run and became the number two man on the FBI's Most Wanted List...right behind Osama bin Laden. 

Off-Strip: The Railroad Pass

The Railroad Pass first won me over when I discovered a flyer in town for a $25 room night. Located just this side of Boulder City and surrounded by stark but scenic mountain views, it's always an affordable stop for a last night on your trip to Vegas, especially if you'd like to get a slight head start on your trip back South or East. Inside, the casino has plenty of slots, $5 blackjack, and even a $1 minimum craps table. Heck, I couldn't resist stopping in and racking up a $4 win rolling the bones. Speaking of bargains, they also have a $1 hot dog special on the marquee.

Aside from its virtues as a casino hotel, the Railroad Pass also offers a small museum, the Heritage Room, with photos and memorabilia from the casino's history, as well as artifacts from the area's mining days and the construction of nearby Hoover Dam. Originally opened in 1931, it claims to the nation's oldest continuously-operated casino; photos along the walls document its original construction and several incarnations after subsequent renovations. The Vegas history buff in me can't resist.

Old Mormon Fort State Park

It may be the only state park in the United States that is actually within someone's city limits: The Old Mormon Fort State Park at the intersection of North Las Vegas and East Washington. It includes remnants of the original adobe structure built by Mormon missionaries in 1855 during their short-lived tenure in the valley. Hours are 8 a.m.-4:30 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday, and admission is only $1, with kids 12 and under getting in free.

Summer Song

The Fremont Street Experience has unveiled the acts who will be playing its free summer concert series on the heels of Three Doors Down's visit on June 14th, and they're some doozies. July 18, the Summerland Tour stop features Everclear, Soul Asylum, Eve 6 and Spacehog. Holey moley, time to dust off my copy of Whatever: The 90's Box Set. On August 15, rock legends Deep Purple will usher out the season.

Pasties for Posterity

The sign catches your eye as you're about to pass the Emergency Arts building at 520 Fremont: This way to the Burlesque Hall of Fame. Set inside a nook adjacent to The Beat Coffee House, this museum's permanent exhibition, Spectacular, Erotic, and Slightly Shocking: A Timeline of the History of Burlesque, displays photographs, posters, memorabilia and wardrobe items (some signed by the performers themselves). Turn the corner and you'll find a poster advertising a mother-daughter act headlining John Waters starlet Liz Renay (of Blackenstein fame). If you're into more serious history, there are displays on women of color in burlesque, and dancer associates of Jack Ruby who testified in the wake of the JFK assassination. This temple to the ecdysiast arts deserves your support, and as luck would have it, the Burlesque Hall of Fame 2014 Weekender is coming to The Orleans June 5-8, featuring the 57th Annual Striptease Reunion and the 24th Miss Exotic World Pageant. Your chance to mingle with the "Titans of Tease," as past years' souvenir programs have put it. Meanwhile, drop a bill in the donation box or visit the gift shop.

Saturday: They Play Real Good for Free!

Memorial Day Weekend celebrations kick off in a big way on Saturday, with no less than three free concerts for Vegas celebrants. The Cannery hosts its Summer of Fun Kick-Off at 4 p.m. featuring Kathy Young, The Tokens, Bill Pinkney's Original Drifters, The Happenings, and Izon Eden. The latest offering from the Clark County Ampitheater free summer jazz concerts, The Sax Pack featuring Jeff Kashiwa, Steve Cole and Marcus Anderson, gets under way at 7 p.m. Finally, The Fremont Street Experience presents a free show by pop duo Karmin, at 9:10 p.m. Max out your musical mojo and try to catch 'em all! I dare you!

The Nutty Exhibitionist

Jerry Lewis is coming to South Point for three nights starting May 30, but if you can't wait that long to get your fill of the funnyman, an exhibition of his photographs is on display at UNLV's Marjorie Barrick Museum through August 16. The photographs ... impressionistic captures of lights at night ... are accompanied by classic Lewis film and theater posters, while two video monitors on opposite ends of the hall run documentaries on his life and career. To put the cherry on top, the museum is running a Jerry Lewis Film Festival with a new title each Thursday night at 6 p.m., starting with The Nutty Professor this Thursday (May 15) and wrapping up with Frank Tashlin's classic Martin & Lewis satire, Artists and Models, on September 11. Like all the best things in life, it's all free.

The Shuttered Womb

While my keen if not morbid interest in Vegas's abandoned landmarks is familiar to any of my regular readers, I take no joy in noting that the Erotic Heritage Museum has closed its doors, reportedly as the result of a dispute between the proprietor and his landlord. True, its location on Industrial Drive, which is more or less lined with strip clubs, might not have been a boon to attendance either. However, one part of the collection is still available for browsing by whoever might happen to drive by: The owner hung several vintage adult movie posters on the exterior wall, on the side facing Deja Vu Showgirls.

Wizards' Wonderland

For a guy with an hour or two to kill, the better part of a roll of quarters left over from buying the Sunday papers, and a mild case of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, there may have been better places to stop off than the Pinball Hall of Fame at 1610 East Tropicana. But darn it, I was going to pry at least one free game out of that Captain Fantastic machine or I was going to go bust trying.

Behind the unprepossessing storefront is a veritable shrine to the silver ball, with machines dating back to the dawn of pinball (wooden rails! analog digit counters!) through the age of Playboy and Xenon and Son of Pin-Bot, to contemporaries like James Cameron's Avatar machine with obligatory 3-D back.

As with any museum, a lot of hard work and love goes into maintaining these classics in playable condition. It's the ultimate hands-on interactive museum; you can play these puppies. Not just pinball, either; there are classic arcade games too...not just video games from the 80's but real penny-arcade favorites like claw games and boxing robots. And what kid can resist playing with Peppy the Musical Clown? I know, me neither.

All this is the work of volunteers, and all the quarters are donated to the Salvation Army, which to date has received more than half a million dollars in donations. If most of the players are as rusty as I was, I can believe it. I did finally manage to claim my free game off of that annoying Elton John, but I might have been better off sticking with a classic like the 1960-vintage Flipper! game, the first steel-rail machine and the first to offer free balls. Designed for locales where awarding free games was illegal (!), it makes it insanely easy to win extra balls, although if you're me that quarter will eventually run out.

In the Neon Boneyard with the Electrical Dead

You've seen it in movies a million times: that big lot out in the desert where all the old neon signs from the abandoned and demolished casinos go to die. In the last year, the Neon Boneyard Park on N. Las Vegas Boulevard, just north of Downtown, has finally been opened to the public. We decided to check it out on a recent visit, and as luck would have it, while we were inquiring about ticket prices, one of the swell folk at Zappos.com walked up to us and said, "Hey, our group had a couple of extra tickets. Want 'em?" Bless the good folk at Zappos.com; we will hear from them again.

Even the vistor center is recycled: It was salvaged from the La Concha Hotel, an Atomic Age design by noted architect Paul Revere Williams. Nice selection of Vegas-themed books in the gift shop, too.

Our docent Denice with the first neon sign in Downtown Las Vegas, for the Golden Nugget.

Lettering from the Moulin Rouge, the first integrated club in Vegas, which flourished briefly in 1955 until annoyed mobsters forced its closure to forestall competition. Designer Betty Willis studied old French manuscripts to come up with the perfect font. (You might recognize another of her designs: the "Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas" sign.)

The original sign for Binion's Horseshoe, one-time home of the World Series of Poker.

There's statuary, too, like this finely detailed vintage pool player, down to the fingernails and mullet.

Once the coolest thing on the Strip, this fearsome skull-and-crossbones adorned the sign at Treasure Island, until its owners foolishly revamped it into TI and replaced it with yet another generic Jumbotron. Now it spends eternity on its back silently screaming at the sky: "WHY?!?!"

Space Age sign for the Stardust, which for a while was accompanied by a giant mushroom cloud.

Finally, an especially sad one for me: the sorely missed Sahara. We may go back sometime to visit it at night; the tickets only cost a couple dollars more...but the signs light up.