Rabbit-hole-like escape from reality

Rabbit-hole-like escape from reality is the imaginative and commercial premise Rick Weinberg gives his casino plan for the Wonderland development site. He pictures a visitor entering an Alice-inspired world modeled on the original Wonderland amusement park, where elaborate scenery and staged entertainments promise release from the “outside-world shit and baggage.” The fantasy is vivid, but it is not separate from business: the project depends on a gambling license, a board willing to approve his presentation, and incentives he can offer its members.

An amusement park recovered as a design

At dinner, Rachel Weinberg says the plans call for an art wing at the Wonderland development site. Susan Silverman responds that this sounds confident, and Rick Weinberg answers by describing a vision he had formed even before the gambling law passed. The former dog track is not, in his account, the place’s defining identity. He thinks of it as the site of the original Wonderland, which he says inspired Walt Disney and was among the country’s first amusement parks.

Rick places that park at the turn of the twentieth century, on the ground where the dog track was later built during the Depression. The name Wonderland, he explains, came from the earlier attraction. He dates the relevant designs to 1907 and 1908 and describes an Art Nouveau setting modeled on the original engravings by Tenniel for the Alice book. In the year before the dinner, he had begun collecting material from the old park and asked his designers to match its décor. His proposal thus treats the site’s history not merely as background but as a set of visual resources from which to construct a new attraction.

The rides he recalls make that history feel less like a conventional amusement park than a passage into disorientation: mushrooms larger than cars, cats that disappear until only their eyes remain, and rooms that seem to shrink as visitors walk through them. Rick describes the experience as dreamlike. Susan’s dry response—that it sounds like Revere—keeps the extravagant fantasy beside the ordinary locality it is meant to transform. The scene’s central contrast is between a real place with a past and a deliberately manufactured elsewhere.

Immersion as a casino attraction

Rick’s plan extends the Alice imagery beyond architecture and rides into the casino’s service and entertainment. He imagines blond cocktail servers dressed as sexy versions of Alice, alongside performers in bunny suits who would run through the casino every hour carrying pocket watches. The details are not incidental decorations: recurring costumes and performances would make the fantasy visible in the casino’s everyday operation, turning the story’s motifs into part of the visitor experience.

Spenser calls the proposed spectacle “Performance art,” a teasing description that Rick accepts without retreating from the idea. He says he likes smartasses and insists that the others will understand if he gets the chance to present the whole concept to the board. Rachel Weinberg objects to the label “cocktail waitresses,” correcting it to “Server” and calling the former term tacky. Her correction exposes a small but telling tension within the pitch: the plan trades on sexualized Alice imagery, while Rachel insists on a more respectable description of the people who would enact it.

The exchange also distinguishes Rick’s imaginative confidence from the project’s unresolved status. He has already assembled a detailed picture of the casino, but he still needs to present it to the board, and he speaks of offering incentives if the license is obtained. The proposed world therefore exists at once as a design, a sales argument, and a conditional future. Its elaboration does not mean it has been approved or built.

The promised escape and its price

Over dessert, Rick describes the casino as a place where people can leave behind the burdens of the outside world and fall down the rabbit hole. The metaphor makes immersion the project’s chief promise: the visitor is not simply offered games or a themed room but invited to imagine crossing into another world. The meal itself supplies the immediate setting for this pitch, as Rick stabs at chocolate cake while explaining the fantasy. Spenser punctures the grandeur by adding “With Alice the waitress,” returning the sweeping promise of escape to the practical, commercial figure who would help stage it.

The rabbit-hole idea also gathers together the plan’s contrasting registers. Rick’s account moves from a recovered historical amusement park to fantastical rooms and disappearing cats, then to casino servers, costumes, and hourly performances. The mixture makes the proposed escape both dreamlike and conspicuously organized: designers reproduce historical décor, performers repeat planned routines, and the entire spectacle must be presented to a board. The elsewhere Rick imagines is carefully packaged and dependent on institutional approval.

His language of release is therefore inseparable from the casino’s commercial purpose. The fantasy is meant to attract people to a gambling development, and Rick frames the ability to leave ordinary “baggage” behind as one of its appeals. The scene does not establish that visitors will experience the promised transformation; it establishes how Rick wants to sell the project and how completely he has imagined its atmosphere.

Wit, quotation, and the scene’s counterpoint

The conversation’s Alice references are not only part of Rick’s design. They also shape the dinner’s verbal play. After Rick identifies the rabbit hole with escape, Spenser quotes, “If everybody minded their own business, the world would go around a great deal faster than it does.” Asked who said it, he answers, “A powerful woman.” Rick responds by calling her smart, and Rachel smiles at her husband. The exchange briefly turns the Alice framework away from the casino plan and toward wit among the people at the table.

Susan closes the exchange with “Curiouser and curiouser.” Her line returns the conversation to the novel’s language while preserving its teasing, ambiguous tone. The phrases make the planned attraction feel like a shared imaginative game, but the earlier references to a license, the board, and incentives keep its financial and political conditions in view. The rabbit hole is at once a storybook image, an entertainment strategy, and Rick Weinberg’s pitch for a casino that would make escape itself part of the product.