Ok, the Party was, the birthday wasn’t. How would one describe Suzie Lederer? If you’ve seen her flitting around the card room when she’s on shift, you haven’t even gotten close to the whole picture. If you’ve seen her at a party, you haven’t even gotten close to the whole picture. She’s a tapestry of life, soft hearted, warm to a point of coming across like fresh, hot bread coming out of the oven on a cold, winter morning in Montana, and champagne comes in second for bubbly and light when she’s got that mischievous little smirk on her face, business as usual when it’s time to work, crazy as hell when it’s time to party…and that’s only a few threads of the tapestry. I’ve known her a lot of years and after listening to her tales, watching her walk the walk, and being in her company as an employee in Aruba, Bellagio, and the Mirage, she’s really one of a kind. What’s not to like?

The party was at the Rox Night Club, apparently an old Strip joint, as evidenced by the pole upstairs, embedded in the small, raised dance floor. But to my surprise, I didn’t find Pam or one of the girls I expected to find swinging around the pole, instead I found one of my favorite poker people, Mori Eskandani.

This one is taken using the mirror as the medium. Just a little twist to picture taking that can be fun. The only thing wrong with it is that they are all SMOKING!

Obviously, the rest of these are all random. I missed people that came in later in the night because I didn’t stay late. Most of these people are known to me, some of them aren’t. It was kind of like a ‘who’s who’ of the Mirage/Bellagio poker room scene, employees and players alike.

Sure as hell there’s a lot of red background in most of these pictures. It’s the semi-private, half moon shaped booths in that part of the club. Don’t forget that it used to be a Strip Joint…red is supposed to be…what? A turn on? I can’t help but go off into a brain spin and wonder if they clean – with a disinfectant water type of thing – those booths and chairs out every night after the customers go home, in all strip joints. If you slide into a booth, after a guy that just had a lap dance, and hit something wet it must mean he left happy. *sick sense of humor* Then I often wonder at myself for even thinking about those things…Kee-Rist!

This was my drink of choice:

Talk about dark, the whole section around the booths was fright night dark. How these pictures came out as well as they did is still a mystery to me. I couldn’t see most of my victims…er…ahhh subjects through the view finder and had to rely on the camera’s sensing. Nice!

Here’s the pole dancer, with the woman he’s going to give a lap dance to later:

Here’s the star of our show, as we were in the parking lot – I was getting ready to go home, what were they getting ready to do? Carmen told me to make sure I got a picture of Suzie’s shirt. Yup!

If I ever, ever even think about putting this many pictures up in one post, I hope someone either buys me a lot of wine and sits through my insanity with me as they talk me out of doing it, or takes me up to Calico Basin for a hike and drives away and leaves me, forcing me to find my own transportation back to town…because this is unreal. And do you know why there aren’t more pictures? Because I went home early. And I did invite everyone to attend in a blog post back about two weeks ago, so maybe a million more people showed after I left. Damn it! this post has taken a week, even after getting the image manager fixed. G’nite Suzie’s party!