Transcript of interview with Alan Feldman by Claytee White, September 24, 2014

Alan Feldman fell in love with Las Vegas because of the Siegfried & Roy show at the Frontier. After the opening illusion, Crystal Chamber, “I don’t remember breathing.” Feldman grew up in a home with a creative father who was a self-trained musicologist and expert on Paul Robeson. His mother worked as a bookkeeper so Alan was encouraged to be grounded and to soar. As a theater major at UCLA, he was encouraged to hone his Public Relations skills. That expertise brought him to Las Vegas and to Steve Wynn and to work toward a changing relationship with the Culinary Workers Union Local 226. His work here has been life changing; management and labor did not have to fight at the end of each contract. He speaks of the changed understanding in this way: “…we also wanted to make a better product, and in making a better product we needed the employees to step up. Because if you are going to put five million dollars into a restaurant in 1990 where prior to that the most anyone had ever spent was a million, if you were going to tell the world come to Las Vegas because the experience is better, then the experience needed to be better. Maybe this is the part of Steve that he does deserve credit for, although, again, I think it's more—no, he's not alone now and folks like Jim Murren have absolutely taken up this same kind of notion. The building doesn't deliver your bags. The building doesn't hand you the meal. The building doesn't take your order. So great, you've got a volcano and you've got fountains and you've got stunning architecture. Fantastic. But if you don't have a smile on your face when you're welcoming someone to the hotel, it sucks and the rest of it doesn't matter.”