My First Trip To Las Vegas

The year was 1979, I was 17, my wife Marianne was 22 (she was my girlfriend then, we have lived and loved together since I was 16, lucky me 😎 , how I pulled that off is another great story), we were living in Palm Springs California at the time and I was working for a guy who was very rich and heavily “connected”, he was into everything, lots of projects, businesses, companies, investments, you name it and this guy was in it, a super nice guy though, and a great boss.

One day he said he was going to fly us to Vegas from Palm Springs as a bonus and show us a good time, “don’t bring any money” he said, “everything is comp”. He set us up in one of his custom studios and gave us a bunch of cash and said go have a blast, so we hit the town, it was sweet.

Then he told us he called his friends at the Tropicana and hooked us up with a front row table to see “Les Folies Bergere” on Saturday night. I was excited, topless showgirls, I was only 17 so I hadn’t seen any Vegas Shows before, this was going to be fun.

He said to get in to the show we had to go up to the front of the line like we owned the place and tell them I was Cool Mark, he said if we did that they would give us the VIP treatment, he was funny, he always called me Cool Mark. I asked how I was going to get in when I had been getting kicked out of casinos all day because of my age and I had no fake ID, he said don’t you worry about that, you’re Cool Mark, ha.

So he sends a car to pick us up and take us to the Tropicana. We get there and walk up to the front of the line like we own the place, it was funny, everybody in line was decked out in jewels and fancy clothes and suits and gowns, they all looked so rich and important, I am not sure what they thought of us but they all stared with that “WTF are you people doing here” look when we walked right past them up to the front of the long line they were waiting in.

As instructed I interrupted the hostess “Hello, my name is Mark and I have a reservation”, she looked down on her reservation list and said “I don’t have a Mark on the list”, hmmm I thought, “How about Mark Hershiser?”, “no Mark Hershiser on the list” she said, hmmmm I thought again, “How about Mark and Marianne (as we were so famously known lol)”, “no Mark and Marianne on the list either” she said. Damn, I didn’t know what to think now, I was really perplexed, my boss wasn’t the type to say he was going to do something and not do it so this was confusing, what the hell was he doing I wondered?

But then I remembered, he told me to tell them I was Cool Mark, I didn’t really think much about it at the time because he always called me that and to me it was just embarrassing, but I gave it a shot “How about Cool Mark?”, with that she lit up and yelled so everybody could hear “Yes, Welcome to the Tropicana Cool Mark, you are on the top of the list” and she snapped her fingers at the other employees and said “Cool Mark has arrived, can you show them to their table and get them whatever they would like, starting with a bottle of the finest Dom Perignon”. She knew who I was the whole time. This is a true story and the pic is a real pic of Me, Marianne, and Big John (our bodyguard, attorney, and good friend lol) taken at that show on that night, the pic is a bit rough because it’s been around a while, that is not sperm on my head ha…

Me, Marianne, and Big John