Lorena Peril revisits a cherished haunt
Lorena Peril swept through her old digs last week. She cleaned house in a gig that was on her bucket list for years, waxing nostalgic as her audience took a shine to the Vegas headliner.
The “Fantasy” singer and her sound man husband,
Ray Jon Narbaitz, trekked to the Arden Wood Christian Science Nursing Care facility in San Francisco. The assisted-living residence figures prominently in Peril’s life.
She spent four years working there as a housekeeper, beginning when she was 18.
Peril’s mother, Ofelia Baker, also worked at the residence.
She had not returned until Tuesday, on a West Coast tour of her “Vegas On Wheels” rolling show, in which she and Ray Jon set up “truckeoke” performances in the middle of a street. Or, in this case, a nursing-home courtyard. The locals billed this particular show as “Housekeeper to Headliner,” which is exactly right. The show was performed in that fabled entertainment venue, Isabel Garden Parking Lot.
“I worked there full time, every day from 7 a.m. to 3 p.m., scrubbing toilets and cleaning bedrooms,” Peril said during a phone chat Wednesday. “We had people watching from the balcony, out of their windows. It was crazy.”
The couple thought to contact the facility as they drove the trusty Dodge Ram 1500 through Northern and Central California. Both have Northern California roots and had performed a few shows in Ray Jon’s hometown of Chico. The return to S.F., Peril’s hometown, was a natural.
“It was my first full-time job,” Peril said. “It’s really where I started singing, while I was working. I sang for the residents on my lunch break.”
Peril was “discovered” one day while on duty. A co-worker, the late musician Phil Serrano, “heard me singing while I was cleaning a bathroom,” as Peril recalls. An accomplished guitarist (and also able maintenance man), Serrano suggested the two collaborate on a few classics, among them “Blue Bayou” and “Crazy.”
The two formed an act called Perilous Partners.
“I never liked that name,” Peril said. “It sounded like an insurance company.”
The two performed at taverns and small clubs until Peril took a Carnival Cruise Line trip with her mother. Peril took part in a talent show on the ship, and the cruise director told her she should be a professional singer, a production singer specifically. She then recorded a song in one of those recording kiosks for ship passengers and submitted it
to the company.
“Six months later, I got the call,” Peril said. “They wanted to hire me.”
Peril would soon move to Las Vegas, staying for a time at Motel 6 on Tropicana Avenue, just east of the Strip. She would work at “American Superstars,” portraying Christina Aguilera, and in the bands Sunset Strip and Sin City Bad Girls at the then-shimmer Cabaret at Las Vegas Hilton. She was hired at “Fantasy” in 2010, took a break three years later to tour in “Grease” in Europe and travel with Ray Jon, and returned to the adult revue in 2016.
Most of the crew Peril worked with at Arden Wood have either left or are no longer with us. But Peril recognized one friend from long ago.
“There was one employee who was a good friend of mine, Chester,” Peril said. “He walked by when I was singing ‘Wind Beneath My Wings,’ and I just lost it. That song was for him, and the 40 or so people who worked with me.”
Measuring ‘Absinthe’
Of all the props used in the staging of “Absinthe,” the most crucial might be a tape measure.
We learn this, and more, in the first episode of a new web series, “VEGASHITSHOW.” The new project is a Spiegelworldtv Youtube project that premiered Wednesday, the day the hit show returned to rehearsals.
In this quasi-documentary, Spiegelworld founder and show producer Ross Mollison talks of “a guideline we didn’t anticipate,” the 25foot requirement between the stage and the audience. He says the show will play to about 100 if forced into that restriction, and he pulls a tape measure across the stage to be sure.
We also learn that the “Absinthe” stage is no longer at the center of the room. It’s moved to the back deck opposite the venue’s entrance. This creates enough space to seat 153 audience members at cabaret tables.
The show is expected to cut its aerial acts almost entirely, and to mask its performers whenever possible. We have learned that stand-up comics don’t need to be masked in shows in hotel-casinos, which seems to cover (or uncover) the Gazillionaire’s act.
The video intersperses quick clips of news coverage of the pandemic, including Mayor Carolyn Goodman’s infamous give-and-take with Anderson Cooper on CNN, and the dire announcements from March of Vegas entertainment shutting down.
“It’s the entertainment capital of the world, and we need to get entertainment back,” Mollison says. “Our aim is to make Las Vegas proud.”