Jay Leno!

Last night we went to see Jay Leno at Route 66 Casino. Here are my observations:

1. What must he have though of Albuquerque? He gets to the airport, hops on I-25, transfers to I-40 and drives 20 miles out of the city. That's all he saw! Oh dear. He did make some comments like he thought that's all of the city.

2. Route 66 Casino is new, and in that sense, nice, but it IS a tacky Indian casino on a New Mexico reservation. It has a buffet called The Hungry Cowboy.

3. The auditorium is really nice. It's huge and has big comfy seats with drink holders and so much space you can walk back and forth in the aisles without having to disrupt the people sitting. This was good for the girl two rows up who left her seat at least 10 times. The nice thing is that they have two gigantic screens on either side of the stage so if your view is blocked by an old lady with a large hair helmet, you can still see.
The funny thing was that about 2/3 of the way into the show, Leno notices these screens and says, "Oh! There's screens. I didn't know those were there. I was wondering why half the people weren't looking at me. It's like, `I'll LISTEN to you, but I WON'T look at you!'"

4. One time Mark got a nice leather jacket stolen from him at the karaoke bar at Route 66. Then the security people treated him like crap. So he contacted a manager, who is really nice to him now. So when we got there, we planned to have dinner before the show. But of course, this place is so far from anything else that once you get there, you're stuck. The line for The Hungry Cowboy buffet was hundreds of people long, and they all have to wait for tables to clear out. It could take hours. But the nice man took us right in and let us take cuts in front of everyone. I felt bad, but at the same time I didn't because I was starving.

5. Leaving the casino was awful. Basically, there's this tiny frontage road out of the casino that you take for a while. Then you have to cross traffic onto a bridge and take that for a while before getting on I-40. Well, for some reason, traffic would sit still in the parking lot for minutes on end. Unfortunately, we were parked in an exit row, which meant the traffic was backed up all the way down the row. And it didn't move for 5 minutes straight. When it did, Mark just forced his way out and this lady honked and got really mad, but clearly nobody was going to just be nice and let us in. To the right of us was another car trying to back out that had been there since way before we were, so I signaled to them to pull out too, and we'd let them in. They were really grateful, but then someone across from them started backing out at the same time and almost hit them. Finally, all three of us got into the line, probably pissing off many people behind us, and after only about 45 minutes longer, we made it onto the freeway! Yippee. Remind me to never go there again.