Culture, high and pop, on display at the Palms

By Timothy Pratt (contact)

Thursday, Nov. 8, 2007 | 8:57 a.m.

Teenage girls in tight jeans jostle mannequins in a store window to gain an inch of space for angling cameras toward Shakira.

Robin Leach's "one question" to the singer on the red carpet turns into three, provoking a college thesis from the thoughtful chanteuse, who was at the Palms hotel Tuesday night for the premier e of "Love in the Time of Cholera."

Later, inside the Rain nightclub, a middle school librarian three decades into Las Vegas life can't believe she's witnessing such a mix of celebrity and highbrow culture near the Strip, made possible by local money.

"There are more educated people here than other people give credit for!" she says, beaming .

For the members of the Las Vegas Colombian Club in the front row, the night ties their birthplace and their exile into one glorious knot, as demonstrated by the woman who would launch an index finger in Shakira's direction, screaming what sounded like, "I am Colombia!"

In the background, Danny Greenspun, one of the film's producers, nervously floats through these tableaux, on the verge of seeing what $48 million had made possible - according to a true jury of his peers.

Greenspun, a member of the family that owns the Las Vegas Sun, and his wife, Robin, are two of the partners in the film's production company, Stone Village Pictures.

The movie - filmed in Colombia and based on the novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, that country's Nobel Prize-winning author - is Stone Village's third major project.

The event was a first for Las Vegas: a Hollywood film jostling for Oscar buzz staging its public premier e just off the Strip. Not only that, the film is a literary adaptation, the first attempt to transform the Latin American patriarch 's work into fare for U.S. moviegoers. Would it play in the magical realist Peoria that is Las Vegas?

Before we find out, this being a Hollywood-meets-Las Vegas event, first we have to do the red carpet and nightclub.

Shakira has time to quickly comment to this reporter on the coastal region of Colombia that "breastfed" her - she says in Spanish - or nurtured her, for English readers. Why are the twin cities of Barranquilla and Cartagena, where she and Garcia Marquez grew up, becoming cultural reference points for millions in the United States? It's thanks to her hit song, "Hips Don't Lie"; Oprah 's recent vaulting of the 22-year-old translation of "Love in the Time of Cholera" to the top of The New York Times paperback best - seller list; and the movie's launch.

She says something about a new world of porous borders and interdependent cultures. A handler moves her on to the next question.

Finally, she reaches the photographers, who outnumber word - slingers 2-to-1. The camera-wielding scrum erupts in dueling shouts of " Shakira!" equally divided between the hard "r" of Spanish - more like a soft "d" - and the soft one in English.

Inside the club, a crowd of Los Angeles friends of the movie and Las Vegans on hand for diverse motives sample thin slices of beef and creamy pasta. The wait begins for Shakira's promised three songs from the movie, with someone eventually getting the DJ to move from U.S. club wallpaper music to Latin percussion.

Not to lose sight of the evening's literary thread, a table holds first editions in English of the book behind the movie, up for auction. Money raised in the auction, as well as from the $250 -and-up tickets, goes to support the Pies Descalzos (Bare Feet) Foundation, which Shakira launched in 1995 to help children afflicted by Colombia's decades of violence.

Over at a table by the bar, there's a couple blissfully unaware of the book and, it seems, the movie. They're just happy to be in Las Vegas, on the verge of seeing Shakira, for free! Michelle Hernandez and Jose Francisco Rosas are the antithesis of the story Garcia Marquez wove, involving a man who waits more than 50 years to consummate his love.

The two - Rosas, an electrician, and Hernandez, a psychology student - hadn't met until last week. They were thrown together by a Southern California Spanish-language radio station that staged a kissing contest involving randomly selected listeners. Our heroes managed to lock lips for more than two hours, winning a trip to Las Vegas, "Love in the Time of Cholera" included.

"It's a sign of our times : Everything happens so fast," offers Hernandez, explaining her, uh, relationship.

Beers and cocktails later, a Bare Feet video takes the crowd to the same Colombian coast displayed in the movie. The video shows a plucky girl who wants to be a teacher someday, despite being one of the country's estimated 3 million people displaced by conflict. Shakira then appears onstage, driving the front-row Colombians into paroxysm s .

And then it's the movie - more percussion, more passion, plus lush , bright colors and the drawn-out courtship in 19th century Latin America.

Outside afterward, nearing midnight, local lawyer Adriana Escobar Chanos, born in Colombia, is reeling.

"I felt like I was at home," she begins. "You know, you go to all these things ..." she motions with a hand, indicating the sort of charity events where a successful Las Vegas attorney married to a former state attorney general might spend her evenings.

"But I'm so excited to see this story of hope here - and translated into our own culture."