Patty meltdown

Las Vegas nightlife: wretched or wrecked? Plus: Lady Tigra gets the electro claws out

SUPER EGO Clear the runway! Clear the runway! She's got a Target elastic waistband and too many Walgreens L'Oreal home highlights in her shag — and she's about to crash-land drunk off her Lucite Shoe Pavillion fuck-me pumps and into my $30 Blue Lotus powertini, with guarana extract, caffeine, taurine, and B vitamins 3, 5, 6, and 12. Somebody call Grey's Anatomy on her jiggly, glitter-thonged ass, stat. Save me, Dr. McCreamy! Save my exorbitant cocktail!

Nightlife 911!!!

Hi. I'm writing to you from the bowels of underground club connoisseur hell, a.k.a. a gay bar in Las Vegas on St. Patrick's Day during spring break.

Try not to imagine it. On the giant video screen: a 2005 frat-boy rave remix of the Cranberries' "Zombie." In the glass tanks lining the dance floor: live piranhas. Streaming through the door: distressed embroidered jeans and bleached-out cocka'dos. Kill me.

"What did you expect?" Hunky Beau reminds me not-so-gently. "This city has the freakin' Liberace Museum. Drop the snob act." So I take some heart in the equality of it all. The Vegas homo-horror crowd out by the airport's no different from the straight-when-sober one thronging the Strip, except the lesbians are real and the other women aren't. Or rather, they're 50 percent less real. Surgery is confusing! It's like silicone algebra. And don't let's even glance at Vegas menswear, 'k? When did Affliction team up with Hurley and Crocs to make Jams?

Other than the occasional squawk of stale reggaetón emanating from pastel Hummers on West Tropicana — not to mention a slew of rowdies screeching "The Star-Spangled Banner" throughout New York New York (never forget!) — the charge-card cocktails, Timba-hop tunes, and space-age bachelor ultralounge aesthetic of omnisexual fantasyland are bottle-serviced with a splash of Burner du Soleil myshtique. In Las Vegas, the apex of a corker evening is a Coyote Ugly boobarella with red contact lenses and vampire fangs writhing on a dry-iced bar to DJ Tiësto. The only thing missing, really, is a topless raver girl revue with dildo glowsticks and peekaboo JNCO jeans. I'm copyrighting this idea immediately.

Everything's slathered in pimps-and-ho cheese and infernal strobing ultraviolet beams, grinding my delicate complexion into hamburger. Is this what you want, America? Awful-looking skin?

Like Manhattan and Miami — where three-quarters of San Francisco's dance music movers-and-shakers are currently scratching their bikini waxes at the bubbly-drenched, forever-2001 Winter Music Conference — Vegas has ...

now officially Disneyfied the salacious grit from my fond partial-memories of nightlife there, on and off the Strip. Bring on the recession, darlings! I'm all for having wild fun — this, after all, is how a majority of Midwesterners will be introduced to club culture — and I realize that a vibrant and shocking underground depends on a slick surface limelight to tunnel beneath. But please: what happens in Las Vegas, stay there.

Lady Go Boom Enough grumpy, let's party! You may remember the excitably gorgeous Lady Tigra as one half of '80s Miami Bass female electro-rap phenom L'Trimm, whose sub-woofin' 1988 hymn to cracked windshields, "Cars That Go Boom" (Hot Productions), raised the fluorescent-suspendered rafters of club kids nationwide at the time. I was there, and Tigra was fierce. Now she's back — grrrl! — with a slinky-nasty new album, Please Mr. Boombox (High Score), and a savvy plan to retake the alternative nightlife spotlight by teaming up with the cheekiest promoters on the West Coast. Fresh from her balls-out show at Los Angeles's latest actually great party, Mustache Mondays, she'll sink her claws into your dancey-pants with gender-bending vocalist and performance artiste extraordinaire Jer Ber Jones and the ever-beaky DJ Chicken at Cafe Du Nord on March 28. Her warped OMD-sampling jam "A Moon Song," especially, has been freaking the red zones in my headphones lately. And please note that I have not made a single tragic Tatiana the Tiger joke in this catty plug, mostly because I wish I'd mauled that hot dead Indian boy first and I'm still bitter. So there.

LADY TIGRA

Fri/28, 8:30 p.m., $15

Cafe Du Nord

2170 Market, SF

(415) 861-5016