It wasn't until the cab ride back to the MGM that I learned that Ghost Bar at the Palms has a policy of no dancing and signs in the club that announce it. Ghost bar is a must see place on a warm fall night because they have an outdoor patio on the 54th floor that overlooks all of Vegas. At one block of the balcony they have a clear window below you where you look straight down to the ground floor. It is a terrifying experience for a moment but then you just switch to dancing.

I was dancing with Kari, a 5 foot 10 blond 23 year old who just started working for one of PTCs largest VARs on friday only to find herself at a conference in Vegas on Monday with me dragging her all around Vegas as a companion for the evening. We were having a blast dancing on the window to the ground, tempting fate, and worrying the bouncer assigned to the balcony. So how did I meet Kari?

I landed at 3:00 in Vegas time. The Red Sox had an early game at 5 on the east coast so I met with Brian, a 40 year old father of three, ChannelWave sales manager at the MGM sports book. We had to go to the kick-off reception at 7 which should have been plenty of time if the Sox and Yankees didn't decide to have a second major nailbiter in two nights with a 14 inning game that lasted until almost eight o'clock. I had to leave the game in thirteenth to get to the kickoff dinner.

The sox did win finally. I learned about it from other people while chatting and networking. I still don't know how they won.

So I was at the networking kick-off launch and I scanned the room to see if there were any potential partners in crime. I saw Kari and was immediately certain that she was the most beautiful woman in the room. So I figured I would hatch a plan some way to meet her.

I sat down with Brian because you can't eat the lobster tails without a table and three napkins. We were eating and reviewing my earlier escape from a South African transplant to Canada who was trying to explain that it is impossible for people in this part of the world to understand how difficult and different it is to live where there is a culture where people don't value life. People who don't value their life, their neighbor's life, or a purported enemy life are capable of destroying a civilized country and do it quickly.

I pointed Kari out to Brian as the one person worth meeting in the room. I also pointed out where some key business contacts were.o because Brian had never met any of the people at PTC.

While we were talking near Kari a woman in her forties started chatting with me. I learned from her that her company had brought about eight people and one of them was Kari. So my plan was to infiltrate this little company and meet the one person I wanted to meet.

Already having an introduction into their inner circle I approached Aaron, one of the sales reps by asking him whether he was up for causing trouble. Aaron was a former special forces guy who had served in Mogadishu, Somalia, and a whole host of other places for eight years before deciding that 30 thousand dollars a year to risk your life isn't a good value. He had a medallion in his wallet and an air force wings tattoo to prove he was really special forces. He showed the tatto on his chest once he was plenty drunk.

Eventually I networked to Kari. It was funny to me because I was with Brian and we were talking about all sorts of goofy subjects like his daughter's soccer team and raising kids. Kelly from PTC came over and Aaron and her talked about whether she would go dancing on tables at Coyote Ugly.

So Kari, Brian, Aaron, and me all went together to Coyote Ugly expecting Kelly to folow as soon as she was done setting-up the partner pavillions. On the way we passed a band called “speed kittty” that was a bunch of women singing old rock tunes like “I love rock and roll” and “Sweet child of mine”. I also did a handspring and Kari told the story of a gymnastics tournament she was at that was cancelled because one girl had done a vault, landed hard on her foot and shattered her shinbone that then went through the skin and splattered the other gymnasts with blood. On the bridge to New York New York Aaron tool a picture of us all close together and Kari mentioned that it could be quite incriminating if her boyfriend saw her with two strange men.

Coyote Ugly wasn't that hot of a place. It was filled with about two hundred guys and six women. The woman hired to go on stage had jet black hair and a well engineered boob job. She wore a top the highlighter her breasts and showed her stomach down to her hips. She would recruit women from the audience to dance on stage with her. At one point she got into a fight with a man who was smoking in the front a threaghtened to pour a glass of water on him if he didn't stop blowing smoke at her. Then she sprayed the water at the audience and the bartending waitresses sprayed the audience using the water taps.

Aaron wandered off to recruit women to dance on stage. When I went to look for him he had found a woman from New Jersey that he was working. I took a couple photos of him on his digital camera.

Brian was getting tired so he took off to sleep and I was getting tired of the scene at Coyote Ugly. Kari didn't want to stay out past midnight. So I asked Kari if she wanted to find something more interesting to do. We took off looking for something fun.

Out on the strip we grabbed a cab driver and asked him if the stratosphere roller coaster was still open. It turned out that it was open until one so we rode with him to the Stratosphere. On the way I asked him where good clubs were on a Monday night. The two good ones according to him were the Ghost Bar at The Palms and The Foundation room at Mandalay Bay.

At the stratosphere we went on the big drop ride. It overlooks the strip as you go on a full ten seconds of free fall. The photo of me that they try to sell you made it look like I was about to get punched in the face.

Then we went to the roller coaster but we didn't have tickets. They let us on for free because we attempted to pay at the ride and that was a pain for them. The roller caoster was a slow ricketly ride but the view of Vegas was still great.

I figured that Kari would want to go to sleep since I had already gotten her to go beyond her planned curfew but she must have gotten filled with adrenaline. So we took a cab to the Palms to go to Ghost Bar. On the way we passed a drug bust in progress in the low building part of Vegas.

At Ghost bar the weather was perfect for dancing outside in front of a sub-woofer that kept rarttling. whike we demonstrated how to dance in the sky. Kari was so excited to be having so much fun dancing that she didn't seem to want the evening to end. “This is the best”, “I love this so much”, “This was so woth the cover charge”.

I know that John Gray has covered this subject in great detail but I was glowing because I was doing a good job of keeping her happy. It was a great feeling.

We kept getting stopped by the bouncer for doing silly things like jumping up and down on the window and sticking our heads through gaps in the window to look out into the city. At one point a couple asked us if we were married.

We retired to a set of couches after getting chastised again for standing on the couches and looking over the edge into the Vegas skyline. We looked into the many little homes and pondered what was happening in all of them. Some must had had domestic violence., some children being read a bed time story. Kari said in some there must be people making love. Kari figured our little partnership to wander the city worked well for both of us because I kept creepy guys from hitting on her - strangely I was excluded from this class of guy - and she kept prostitutes from propositioning me.

It was getting past three so we went downstairs and they music had switched from techno to retro with songs like Stairway to Heaven playing to scare the crowd out. We took our cab back to the MGM. When we got to the elevator bank we bumped into Aaron who had a hooker's arm hooked under his arm. He let us know that she was falling down and fell right into him and she staggered off back into the casino floor maze. Aaron was showing the pictures in his camera of all the fun he had had with the woman from New Jersey and her friend. They had done karaoke, gone dancing, kissed. He kept saying that he was a salesman and that meant he was sure he was going to close the deal. We left him behind and as we walked to the elevator bank he stumbled into the two hookers that were sitting in the two pay phone booths to chat with them.

Kari got off the elevator at the 25th floor and I got off at the 26th. It was a good enough ending and as I walked into the eery green glow of my empty MGM room I thought to myself “mission accomplished.”