The plan was to leave the sterile heart of the hotel strip and head for the Las Vegas Art Museum where we were promised works by Lichtenstein and Dali, among others. Lichtenstein I can tolerate, if only for the humour and modern-day nostalgia it evokes in me; Dali (whose handlers were signing his prints for years after his death), I can hardly abide.

     The Las Vegas Art Museum is a few miles of lower-end strip malls and factory outlets away from the city's tinseled heart where there are galleries of sorts, offering genuine giclee prints: nice, safe investments, numbered (in the thousands!) and "authenticated", that resonated perfectly with the ersatz culture from which they sprang, like the impossibly green lawns and gushing fountains in the midst of the Nevada desert. But as we approached, flashing lights and yellow tape of a real-life police incident blocked access not just to one road in, but to the whole area. Perhaps Martians had landed? (we had already been to the Atomic Testing Museum, and realized the potential for the bizarre); perhaps someone had been sold a half-share in the three-quarter-sized Eiffel Tower on the strip and now demanded a refund--or else? We'll never know. In any case, we turned south, guided by our GPS, and defaulted to the Liberace Foundation and Museum.

     I remember watching Liberace with my grandmother in the 1950s on her RCA Console television with the wooden doors that made it look like another piece of furniture: a sideboard, perhaps, incongruously parked at an angle between couch and picture window. She also liked Don Messer's Jubilee, and apart from that, I can't account for her taste in music, except that I remember her singing "Meet Me In St. Louis, Louie", a song of her own time, now over a hundred years ago. She certainly didn't listen to jazz.

     But Liberace made the cut: he was unabashedly flamboyant (if that is the right code word), and entirely safe in the eyes of my grandmother. He was "Mr. Entertainment", after all: intriguing, inviting, and never dull. He knew his market. And so, when we arrived at the mini mall on Tropicana Avenue where the Foundation, the Museum and the Music Centre line three sides of an empty acre of blacktop, we little expected the extent of the experience that awaited. It was as though the marriage of High Art and Low Expectations had produced this odd, gifted child, the King of Kitsch.

     First, a tour of the car and piano collections, and a whole wall of the key events of Mr. Entertainment's life. Then, to the other side of the parking lot to the Foundation building where, just past a snack bar and gift shop, in a small performance area, a mirror-encrusted seven-foot Baldwin Grand piano awaited. We were ably entertained by a competent show pianist who played, among other numbers, Liberace's famous variations on "Chopsticks", always a crowd pleaser. At the end of the concert, as we were directed toward the next room--the Cape Display--I noticed a woman approach the piano and reach out to touch it, ever so lightly. She had been there; she had touched the Holy Relic of Mr. Entertainment, and had herself been touched.

     Next door, a tour of the Capes, or of only some sixty of almost two hundred that Liberace owned. They hung heavy with rhinestones, fur, feather and brocade, perched on headless manikins around the room, in the centre of which, on a raised dais, was yet another mirror-encrusted Baldwin Grand. We were allowed to try on a cape; not one of his capes, mind, but one modeled in the style of Mr. Entertainment's wardrobe. It was heavy, to say the least. After we had had our pictures taken standing under his portrait, I asked about the piano glittering in the orbital centre of the room. "Well," said one of the Custodians of the Dream, eyeing me, "those who are really qualified are allowed to play it. But they have to be experts, and first you'll have to fill out a form." Agreed. " And wash your hands." Agreed.

     While I was scrubbing up in the adjacent washroom, the forms were brought for me to sign, and then I mounted the dais. With as many runs and ten-fingered chords as I could muster, I played a couple of standards, and even worked in my own variations of "Chopsticks". "Play it again!" said the man who had had me sign the forms, "Play it again!" And so I did. And then, as I was descending from that glittering height, the woman who had so reverently touched the piano in the other room came in from the gift shop. "That's the one--the one I want," she said, just a bit breathless, zeroing in on the CDs laid out for sale. "Which one is it?" I don't know if she was disappointed, or felt deceived in some way to find that only I, a mere mortal, had been messing about on one of Liberace's keyboards, but I think she was steered toward the approximately right one.

     I have a certificate now attesting to having played the mirrored Baldwin, duly signed and dated by one of the Custodians, which we carried out of the place in a red plastic bag that held the silk shirt with piano key motifs, made in China, that I bought in the gift shop, passing up the rhinestone Liberace jewelry.

     As we were leaving, a busload of fans from hotels on the strip filed in for the next tour. They had come to touch and be touched; they had come hoping to see themselves, or at least to catch a winking glimpse of their own lives in a dream that included them. They had come to the Temple of Music and Art in full and reverent expectation of transformation, and the High Priest of All that Glitters, who was everywhere and nowhere, would not disappoint. Of this they were sure.