I have been through Las Vegas, NV, three times and never for very long. Some of you are right about two times for they involved trains. On December 31, 1979 I was on the Desert Wind coming home and in 1996 I stopped on a road trip to Utah and Colorado scenery to watch a good sized stack container train pass. On the latter trip I could see parts of The Strip from 15 on this 93-degree May day and thought it looked like a miniature golf monstrosity set in a big sand box.

Sandy was a cafeteria manager at an elementary school where I was Plant Manager. She was a self described good country girl, and in adding she was not afraid of calling them like she saw them I already have bought into some prejudice. That is not what is intended, however the passion has ramped up here and there on this overall collection.

Sandy and her husband did enjoy Las Vegas, and in one conversation talking about images and betrayals thereof she mentioned Don Rickles. The mantra for him is what a big pussycat he really, truly is but Sandy and company watched him at a Vegas show, during his forays into the audience, bring a couple to tears.

Recently there have been L. A. Times articles on authors trying to up the pioneering image in their respective books on Bing Crosby and Bob Hope while somehow re-proportioning images of womanizing, child abuse and other details not too friendly to the "cut your hair, put on some decent clothes and get away from that awful music" canon of yore.

The free paper "Los Angeles Jazz Scene" isn't quite as close to the New Yorker's Whitney Balliet as Down Beat in its prosaic reviews but its editor can be very interesting, writing in an endearingly rambling style found in many neighborhood promotions and reviews rags, commenting on politics and world events. She's not a Mamet but has wagged pen and finger at Democrats as well as---well, I am in a jazz band and our leader is casually Republican. Are there jazz politics? Another stereotype can be defused if not disarmed, just like that half diminished chord, life serves up another round of sub dominant surprise.

Sandy, who got along with people of many hues and ideas, once commented to me that Bill Cosby was not overly fond of white people and it [was] played down. In the L.A. Jazz Scene there was a writer named Vince Mendoza who played trombone and arranged. Years ago he wrote of an occasion where Cosby was playing in Vegas and a big band was there to open and play him on.

Cosby pointedly wanted the black players and no one else for the latter task. That qualification was filled by the great and in this case very singular James Moody, who played unaccompanied blues on the tenor sax while over a dozen other musicians could only display their many years of experience in the musical form known as "Tacet".

The big sand box, indeed, and the many worlds continue to slide.