Las Vegas As It Turns Out Is a Great Place for an Artist Retreat

Las Vegas, as it turns out, is not a bad place for a mini artist retreat. Especially if you don’t really drink, gamble or go in for showgirls. I didn’t know this when I decided to go along for a weekend of my husband’s week-long work trip in the “entertainment capital”. Having watched the documentary of its creation, our main off-hours agenda was to catch the fabulous Cirque du Soleil’s Beatles show “Love.”

I hadn’t thought the rest through very well. We got off the plane Friday night and stepped into 93 degree heat and a huge taxi line filled with future casino workers, twenty-something partiers, and senior-age gamblers to wait for a taxi. The air-conditioned vehicle, in turn, deposited us into another line to check at our hotel.

After one walk through of the casino and a look out of our 21st floor room onto the desert valley, I opted to stay above the fray for the majority of my time in the city. There of course is a whole other Vegas besides the Strip but I didn’t rent a car for such a short stay. Turns out, however, you can do a lot of reading and writing by a pool. I tore through “Wild” the memoir of hiking The Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed, filled a notebook with my own scribbles, and got a new tan to boot. And “Love” was fantastic: beautiful sets, breathtaking movements, great audio and The Beatles catalog only seems to get better with time.

Within You Without You/Tomorrow Never Knows (Love version)

Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream
It is not dying, it is not dying

We were talking about the space between us all
And the people who hide themselves behind a wall of illusion
Never glimpse the truth, then it’s far too late, when they pass away
We were talking about the love we all could share
When we find it, to try our best to hold it there with our love
With our love, we could save the world, if they only knew

Try to realise it’s all within yourself
No one else can make you change
And to see you’re really only very small
And life flows on within you and without you

— John Lennon, Paul McCartney & George Harrison

Deborah Crooks

Deborah Crooks (www.DeborahCrooks.com) is a writer, performing songwriter and recording artist based in San Francisco whose lyric driven and soul-wise music has drawn comparison to Lucinda Williams, Chrissie Hynde and Natalie Merchant.

Singing about faith, love and loss, her lyrics are honed by a lifetime of writing and world travel while her music draws on folk, rock, Americana and the blues. She released her first EP “5 Acres” in 2003 produced by Roberta Donnay, which caught the attention of Rocker Girl Magazine, selecting it for the RockerGirl Discoveries Cd. In 2007, she teamed up with local producer Ben Bernstein to complete “Turn It All Red” Ep, followed by 2008’s “Adding Water to the Ashes” CD, and a second full-length CD “2010. She’s currently working on a third CD to be released in 2013.

Deborah’s many performance credits include an appearance at the 2006 Millennium Music Conference, the RockerGirl Magazine Music Convention, IndieGrrl, at several of the Annual Invasion of the GoGirls at SXSW in Austin, TX, the Harmony Festival and 2009’s California Music Fest, MacWorld 2010, Far West Fest and many other venues and events. She toured the Northwest as part “Indie Abundance Music, Money & Mindfulness” (2009) with two other Bay Area artists, and followed up with “The Great Idea Tour of the Southwest in March 2010 with Jean Mazzei.