Down the rabbit hole

“Down the rabbit hole” links a dangerous pursuit to Rick Weinberg’s more seductive vision of Wonderland: a place where visitors could leave ordinary life behind. The phrase moves from a terse answer about being led into a trap to the organizing image for a casino designed as an immersive, Alice-themed escape.

A clue in the pursuit

When Spenser says that the people following him and Z are leading them, he answers Z’s question about where with “A rabbit hole.” The metaphor gives the pursuit a sense of deliberate descent: they are not simply being followed but steered somewhere. The next moment makes the danger concrete. A Town Car stops hard in a parking lot, another car brakes almost against its bumper, and the Town Car reverses as Z maneuvers away. Lewis Blanchard gets out, approaches the driver’s window, and confronts them. Here, the rabbit hole names an unfolding threat rather than a whimsical adventure.

Wonderland imagined as Alice’s world

Later, Weinberg describes the original Wonderland as an amusement park that stood where the dog track was built during the Depression. He says he has been imagining the place since before the gambling law passed and has collected objects from the old park to help his designers recreate its Art Nouveau décor. The historical attraction, as he tells it, drew on the illustrations in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: oversized mushrooms, cats that disappear until only their eyes remain, and rooms that shrink as visitors walk through them. His account turns the rabbit-hole image into a design principle for the proposed casino, joining the site’s earlier identity to a new commercial spectacle.

Escape as a sales pitch

At dinner, Weinberg makes the metaphor explicit: the casino would let people leave behind the burdens of the outside world and fall into another one. His gesture is pointedly ordinary—he says this while stabbing at a chocolate cake—while the promise is expansive. The rabbit hole becomes an invitation to temporary escape, not merely a reference to Alice or the park’s history.

The exchange also shows how that imagined world is being packaged. Weinberg proposes blond cocktail servers dressed as sexy Alices and bunny-suited performers carrying pocket watches. Rachel Weinberg objects to the term “cocktail waitresses,” correcting it to “server.” The fantasy is therefore both carefully themed and openly commercial: its motifs promise dreamlike transformation, while the conversation exposes the labor and branding required to stage it.