The Whole Family!
Happy Holidays and welcome to this year’s internet edition of the Bicoy Beacon. Since my lovely wife has entrusted the authorship of this year’s epistle to me, you can be sure that you’re reading this far later in the year than she had planned. Since I’m horrible at keeping track of snail mail addresses, some of you are receiving this via email this year. So if you’re even remotely amused by this nonsense, please send us your mailing address so we have it in the future!
2004 has been a time of exciting change in our lives. We left Marietta, Ohio – a community we had grown to love – so I could accept a position with the Nevada Community Foundation in Las Vegas. Needless to say, Vegas is most definitely not Marietta!
Living in Las Vegas is as surreal an existence as one can find in this world – and I mean that as a compliment! Where else can you walk through Wal-Mart and see Elvis buying a jar of Vlasic Pickles. Okay, maybe he was an Elvis impersonator, but the pickles were definitely real.
This remarkable city has been growing at a phenomenal rate for the last 25 years. Nearly 6,000 people move to this place every single month. Since 1980, the population has tripled to nearly 1.7 million residents. To add to the nuttiness, Las Vegas is the most popular tourist destination in the country. Some 37 million people will visit Vegas this year. (As a basis for comparison, my home state of Hawaii hosts only about 6½ million tourists annually.) If you drew a two-mile wide circle in the heart of the hotel district in Vegas, you would encompass 17 of the 20 largest hotels on the planet. Just imagine the whirly burly possibilities! The mere thought truly boggles the mind!
(For the uninformed, a “whirly burly” is what results upon the collective flushing of all the toilet bowls in a metropolitan area simultaneously. As a former elected official with the City of Green Bay, I can testify that this is a real concern of municipal solid waste departments during restroom breaks in major television events like half-time of the Super Bowl. I’m sure how I choose to use my high priced college education makes my parents extremely proud.)
And we mustn’t forget that Las Vegas is also the city of love, although we leave that brotherly stuff to Philadelphia. A total of 99,310 marriage licenses were issued in Las Vegas last year, only 478 of which involved someone named Paris or Brittany.
I could go on and on about what a wonderfully quirky and exciting city this is, but my wife is continually smacking me on the back of my head in an effort to refocus me on the task at hand. Hence, I will now commence with the highlights of our past year. Should you ever find yourself in Las Vegas, be sure to drop my wife a note at ccbicoy@yahoo.com. Since we’ve moved to Vegas, we find that we’ve become far more popular with our old friends and family!
Mele Kalikimaka…
Bret & Cari Bicoy
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