That Guy in Vegas Sure Gets Out More

Eight o’clock on Friday night, with a Sunday column due three hours ago. Mom, in town for her annual visit, is waiting for me at home. I’ve just eaten another Friday night hamburger in the office cafeteria. My colleagues have left to drink beer and laugh at a going-away party for a friend.

Even all that would be OK if I just had a column idea, instead of a head emptier than Saddam Hussein’s dance card.

Then someone mentions the electronic photo that former Times colleague Tom Gorman had sent us earlier in the day. It showed a wide-eyed Tom standing between two cool kitties in tight orange tops with mucho midriff showing (theirs, not his). Tom has his hands on their shoulders, his wedding ring barely visible in the photo.

In the photo, Tom is working. That’s because, since September, he’s been writing a local column for the Las Vegas Sun.

His note accompanying the photo explains that he went to a Vegas nightclub for a column that is running today

(www.lasvegassun.com). As long as he was at the club, he figured, why not get photographed with two knockouts?

In reviewing the photo and the look on Tom’s face, it dawns on me that I’m going about my job all wrong. Or, perhaps, living in the wrong town.

I ring Tom up on his cell. He sounds happy. I ask how the job is going, as if I don’t know.

What’s up with this photo, I ask. “I found myself as a 54-year-old man-about-town columnist who had not ever set foot in a nightclub,” he says. “My idea of a club was the Mickey Mouse Club. The idea of going into a bar with very, very loud music and very expensive drinks was abhorrent to me, because I have tender ears and I can’t afford expensive drinks. But I needed to experience what kind of town I’m living in.”

Tom Gorman -- consummate professional.

I find it hard to believe he’d never been in a nightclub. He swears it’s true. Seedy strip joints, yes, but never your standard nightclub.

He visited Tangerine, as the club is known, on Wednesday. “Because it was locals night,” he says. “No cover.” Donning a leather jacket he’d bought at the Burlington Coat Factory, he’d left his wife, Jeanne, at home in her pajamas and robe.

The room doesn’t even open till 10 p.m. Tom says he stayed 2 1/2 hours. Tangerine’s website says, “The speak-easy style of 1920s burlesque sweetens Las Vegas’ newest nightspot.”

My jealousy grows. I ask about the women in the photo. “I wish I had their names,” Tom says, with what sounds like fake regret. “They’re simply hostesses at Tangerine.”

If he’d had $300, he says, he could have ordered a bottle of booze and some ice and been escorted to a table with a couple of leather couches for friends and had the waitresses pour drinks all night. Every so often at the club, he says, a three-piece band comes out, plays a song and dancers do mild burlesque striptease.

That’s about the time I complimented Tom on his career move, knowing his last two residences in Orange County had been Laguna Hills and Garden Grove. Sure, he could have found a dumpy little strip joint in the O.C., but he’s in the big time now.

I didn’t need to spell it out to Tom, who confesses that he and Jeanne considered it a walk on the wild side if they could theater-jump at the Irvine Spectrum. I’m looking forward to reading intrepid Tom’s account of his night on the Strip in Sin City. Mainly, I wonder what it’s like to have your Sunday column done by midweek.

But enough about my problems. Before hanging up, I ask why he sent us the photo. “Just to show you I miss you,” he says, with what again sounds like fake regret.

Sounds like you’re having fun, I tell him.

“My work has forced me to discover the other Tom,” he says. “And I am smitten with him. He’s a lot more fun than the other guy who lived in Orange County.”