In Las Vegas every young woman is on stage. She learns to walk, to strut, not in her parents’ living room but on the kaleidoscope carpets of Vegas hotels. Back then they were the classics: Flamingo, Tropicana, MGM and Caesars, always Caesars, the crown jewel resort set smack in the middle of the Strip. There my high school friends and I would spend our Friday nights, underage and uncaring but for our destination: the nearly forgotten Forum shops in back. This was 1979 and shopping in Vegas was more an afterthought than a main activity. We’d play in the grownup world of sultry dresses and barely-there lingerie (giggle), pretending to be showgirls, yes, but really anything, anyone we wanted to be.

Afterwards we’d walk through the casino, our hips swaying in unison as we’d seen on Charlie’s Angels. Around us a thousand twinkling, streaming lights illuminated our path in a world where nighttime never sets. Slots rang, winners cheered, losers cursed their luck. But we stared only straight ahead or at each other, ignoring the coveting looks thrown our way like flowers at our feet. We’d breathe in the heavy air-conditioned air laced with cigarette smoke and the scent of soiled money changing hands, and felt powerful, untouched.

What made it particularly potent was I was born a plain Jane in a city built on lust. I was too tall in first grade, had cat-eye glasses by second, and by the third, had the unlucky combination of straight hair and crooked teeth. Some relief came at 15 when I ditched the specs, and my braces came off to reveal an attractiveness of sorts. That and a slender, curvy body (thank you, puberty!) got me through high school, and eventually, onto our school’s drill team. I practically slept in the purple velvet dress and white go-go boots that was our uniform, reveling in the acceptance and friendship from the other Vegas girls. Suddenly it was good to be tall and able to kick the sky.

Soon after graduation I married my high school sweetheart and left the desert to join him in New England; he left for most of the year to go out to sea in a steel gray submarine, then left me altogether after almost eleven years of what I’d mistaken for a happy marriage.

Las Vegas continued to grow without me. On the news I heard about grand openings along the ever-stretching Strip, each new hotel bigger than the other, trying to out-shoulder, outshine its neighbor.

Over the years I’ve discovered gray hairs and hid them, added an extra twenty pounds and covered them up with untucked shirts, and added many fab friends to my Christmas card list. My new husband and I bought a house without stairs, settled down and fell deep into a routine.

Now I’m back in Vegas, just for the weekend, back in Caesars, always Caesars, breathing in the familiar heavy air. I walk and I feel my spine unwind from nearly twenty years in L.A., hunkered over at work, at home, bending to others’ needs. I head through the casino that is different and yet the same: the streaming lights, the never-ending bells, cheers, cries. I was made here, born here on a hot day in July when the sun was at its zenith. I walk, hips swaying, uncaring that the glances are less these days, the coveting gone if it was ever there at all. It doesn’t matter what they do or do not see. I am here, I am home, and I see myself again.