Is public nudity free speech?
Vegas’s Lost Baby gets plenty of pics and tips, but a new bylaw will restrict where street artists can ply their trade.
The Lost Baby is having a slow night.
Gerald Morrissen, 44, stands in the crowded downtown Las Vegas pedestrian mall known as the Fremont Street Experience, dressed in white diapers, baby bib, sneakers and an umbrella hat, a red plastic tip cup dangling suggestively from the waistband. His face contorts as if he’s teething.
The self-titled Lost Baby of Las Vegas relies on the kindness of strangers, making goo-goo eyes at passing tourists hoping they’ll fork over a few bucks to have their photo taken with a bit of Sin City outrageousness. He brandishes a $1 bill like a sour pacifier.
“This,” he sighs, cigarette in hand, “is five hours’ work.”
But the night is still young on the downtown drag that could be known as the Fremont Street freak show, a rogue’s gallery of in-your-face provocateurs whose exhibitionism rivals the raciest show on the Strip, or worst of casually dressed Walmart shopping.
Imagine a collection of out-of-work Far Side cartoon characters competing for your attention, and you get the idea of what it’s like to walk this goofy gauntlet, and this being Vegas, most likely with a drink in hand.
Regulars include a 77-year-old man in a skimpy slingshot leotard (camera click!); a 265-pound man in a red stretch bikini who bats false eyelashes at passing old ladies and poses with young bachelors (click!); and a 54-year-old woman with straggly grey hair and a rotund belly creased by an angry scar, dressed in a see-through blue hula skirt, her breasts bound with grey electrical tape (double click!). Tips follow.
But now the performers (and we use that term loosely) are unhappy because city officials enacted new rules designed to dampen the debauchery. Due to take effect in November, the regulations will confine performers, panhandlers, buskers and other tip-seekers to two-metre-diameter circles so they can’t hound passersby like petulant children.
Vegas performers say the new regulations violate their First Amendment rights. This is a public place, they reason, and therefore anything goes, especially in a city specializing in round-the-clock titillation.
Michael Troy Moore, an attorney for the Sonic Laborers and Visual Entertainers Union, which represents the performers, mailed a cease-and-desist letter to the city and says he will file for an injunction.
“We’re not stifling anyone’s free speech,” says city Councilman Bob Coffin, who wrote the regulations. “We’re bringing order to the chaos.”
Coffin says the rules target behaviours he described as jaw-dropping.
“We can’t approve the level of taste, but we can stop these people from bothering tourists,” he says. “I’m talking about the guys in jock straps with their butts hanging out, ‘nuns’ in pasties flopping their breasts around. They have no talent, and we’re hoping they won’t earn any tips if they don’t have any talent.”
But the Lost Baby doesn’t care what anyone thinks. He’s on one knee, offering a bogus marriage proposal to Clarice Berg, an 82-year-old tourist from Winnebago, Minn.
“I think he looks great,” says Berg, as the man-child kisses her hand. “We don’t have anything like this back in Winnebago.”