Once upon a time … there was a magical city, Las Vegas, in a desert valley in the United States of Nevada. Buffets were delicious and inexpensive. If someone didn’t have a job, they didn’t want a job. Hotels, schools, and homes were built and filled, immediately. Cellular telephones were as large as an adult’s forearm and weighed ten pounds. No one had ever heard of a text message. Photographs were developed from film. An hour was the soonest you could see them.
A wonderful new invention, caller ID, stopped crank callers in their tracks. The World Wide Web was just coming onto the scene. Al Gore was still claiming its invention – or was that an urban legend? It was so long ago that the word, windows, referred only to glass encasements in physical structures. Rich kids had Apples and Atari. That is when this story begins, in the last days of the pre-digital world.
You see, before one could sneak a look at a cell phone or emails, Google a name, access cheaters online, or hack a Facebook account, people dared to fall in love, and even then, it often ended badly, and at times, in tragedy. For in that magical land, just as in all the best fairytales, love rarely ended in, “Happily Ever After.”