It's a party just as F. Scott Fitzgerald described in his unforgettable Roaring Twenties’ novel "The Great Gatsby“: You let a complete stranger twerk on and scream at you, you don’t care about dripping sweat dripping off the guy next to you, the spilled vodka on your pants, even the blood on your right wrist. You let go, you let yourself fall.

Letting go is like falling asleep or falling in love: you can't do those things by halves. It’s no coincidence, that “falling” is the concept shared by all of them - and well: when you fall, you fall.    

"We, as a species, are not made to be alone. We have to gather - not just with friends, but also with strangers", Aoki remarks during a conversation before his show.

His show was the last to go ahead on the Las Vegas Strip before last year’s shutdown. That was on the night of March 13. He locked the city gates, so to speak, and now, on the first weekend without any restrictions, he's opening them again. The Los Angeles Times said in its preview of this event: "It is the test of America’s ability to reclaim itself."

Of course you can think of this first weekend as one of the upper cicles of hell: those jam-packed clubs, all those people without face masks on the legendary strip, those guests at the pool parties without any fear of physical contact. The sold-out hockey arena during the Golden Knights’ game.

On the way to the stadium, there is a major traffic jam. The police has reported a person on the bridge next to the arena in danger of falling off. Yours truly has to climb out of the car and over the fence lining the highway - hence the bloody hand. Perhaps it is a coincidence that the situation is resolved at the very moment the Knights score the winning goal and the ecstatic cheers of the crowd can be heard even outside. Then again, perhaps it isn’t.

You could also say that the Covid infection rate (4.4 per 100,000 in the past seven days) and the high vaccination rate (52.1 percent of Americans have received at least one jab) make it possible for weekends like this to go ahead again. The city is following the recommendations of the CDC, which states: travel within the United States is allowed, Vegas is authorized to lift the restrictions.

The sheer mass of people is rather frightening, after almost 15 months of loneliness. But only those who really let go experience all the things that dreaming, falling in love and a weekend in Las Vegas can hold in store. After the plague, - the Renaissance, after the Spanish flu - the “Roaring Twenties”. Well then, Fear and Loathing must be over at some point: Let’s delve, roaring, into a 48 hour Vegas Renaissance.

"The pandemic hit us all very hard - some days we didn't make a dime," she says: "Now people are standing in line for photos with us, it's going really well." We, that's a whole group of Super - and Antiheroes: Batman, Bumblebee, Boba Fett. The costumes are very elaborate, but without tourists, there is no revenue, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Quick question: What does someone like her do during the pandemic? Flower’s honest answer: "I was a guinea pig for vaccines."

You hear countless stories like that, the city has suffered from the restrictions of the pandemic like no other. Unemployment rose from four to more than 30 percent in 2020. At some point it was just about surviving, somehow. "People stick together in this city," says Justin Knorr, who, like so many people in Vegas, is simultaneously holding down three jobs that are in no way connected to each other: He’s a flight instructor at "Indoor Skydiving“, a bartender in "Pioneer Saloon", where Clark Gable got drunk after his wife's death and he owns a home for assisted living. There was a Corona exodus from California because people were unable or unwilling to afford the cost of living anymore. About Vegas, Knorr says:

Vegas doesn't has neither the laid´-back attitude of Los Angeles nor the rough pride of New York. It defines itself by diversity, megalomania and decadence, and is therefore more American than any other city. Vegas thrives on people flying in from all over the world (well, currently, because of international travel restrictions, from all over the US), spending time together in a very confined space and then disappearing back to all corners of the globe. Lifting restrictions a little doesn’t help a city that only makes money when everything is fully occupied. It's like letting go: you can’t do that by halves, either. You do it or you don’t.

Some people say that if you want to feel how the US is doing, you have to take the pulse of this unreal, impossible, outrageous city. It has been going at a rate of one, maybe two beats per minute for the past 14 months. The city was literally on life support: It needed an extra 130 million dollars from the federal government on top of the relief funds. Mayor Carolyn Goodman had suggested that the city could be some kind of test area to see whether masks and keeping a distance really work. That did not happen. But some people like Victoria Flower volunteered as guinea pigs. "I made a couple thousand bucks, but the testing made me kind of sick," she says: "This is a lot better, and a lot more fun."

Freemont Street, Downtown Las Vegas, Saturday Night: There is that famous moment in “Star Wars” where Luke Skywalker enters the Mos Eisley Cantina, frequented by the Galaxy’s craziest creatures.

This is, in essence, the great thing about this real place with real people, in contrast to virtual places like Twitter, where everyone hides behind a keyboard: Nobody thinks they are smarter than the others, nobody tells anyone what to do and how to behave. There are hardly any arguments, no scuffles, no fights. Las Vegas has hired hundreds of additional law enforcement officers for this first post-corona weekend, but they (like the firefighters) are standing around, looking rather bored.

People don't want to fight, they want to party. Panem et circenses. Bread and games. It's that simple, and has been for than 2000 years.

 Fitzgerald writes in "The Great Gatsby": "I like the big parties because they're so intimate. There's no privacy at small parties." Vegas is throwing the biggest party imaginable this weekend, and everything remains peaceful precisely because no one cares about the next guy. Celebrate and let celebrate.    

How that works exactly can be seen a few hours earlier at the “Wet Republic Ultra Pool”. The people stand in the blazing sun, it’s about 110 degrees, up to their hips in pool water. They drink gallons of booze. And every two or three minutes, just as Aoki did in the club the night before (if not quite as elaborately), the DJ tells the plebs celebratis, via the breakdown - the beat getting faster and faster before a brief moment of calmness - that it is time to get extatic, if you please. The people obey, they jump and splash around in the water. Every now and then, waitresses sprinkle guests with champagne as if they had just won a Formula 1 race.

When you let go and let yourself fall, you realize in the midst of these thousands of people splashing in the pool what exactly it was that you had missed: It wasn’t debating pandemic and politics, arguing with neighbors about mask and distance, discussing presidential and federal elections with strangers on Twitter, but doing that what the legendary character Heinrich Haffenloher wanted to do 35 years ago in the unforgettable German TV series "Kir Royal": Let the pig out! (yes, we say “pig” instead of “dogs” in Germany, which probably says a lot about Germany and the US).

He climbs up even further and watches how two of these angelic creatures let go of the railing and glide down slowly: “It’s possible that some priorities have shifted - what remains is what the Roaring Twenties in the last century were all about: people go out and have fun."

Aoki adds: "I believe that there is one lesson from the pandemic: We have to tear down walls, erase boundaries, and music can be the connecting element."

He proves this during his show, mixing multiple genres, Afropop with Alternative, K-pop with 90s rock, Latin with Hip-Hop; but his real mastery can be seen when he makes people let go: “This weekend can be a message to the world: Go ahead, let's get vaccinated so that we can do this more often."

Algate is happy, the place is jam-packed, some guests have been queuing since the afternoon, all VIP tables (the cheapest reservation requires spending a minimum of $30,000) are occupied. “The funny thing,” says Algate, “it feels like nothing happened. Everything is as it was before."

And suddenly, you realize: Nothing has changed, there is no new normal, no new deal, and if what happened this weekend in Las Vegas is any indication of how things will be in the US and maybe the whole world: No, people don't want to remember or change. They just want to forget that those past 14 months (and those that may come from now on as long the pandemic lasts) ever existed.

No one who has come here will remember this as the first weekend without restrictions in Las Vegas, which is exactly why it is unforgettable. People get what this city has always promised them: rich memories and massive memory lapses.