Chris Jones: Tonight is Wednesday night in Las Vegas, which means Scott Thompson has to become Carrot Top a little earlier than he does most nights. He has Tuesdays off, so yesterday he didn’t have to be Carrot Top at all if he didn’t want to be, except he left the serenity of his house to have lunch with his friend Nicolas Cage, who was wearing a white leather suit. Cage, knowing that a white leather suit has a way of changing everybody in its presence, had asked in advance whether it was okay for him to wear it, and Thompson agreed to provide the necessary counterweight. Perhaps feeling on a roll, Cage has just texted Thompson with another proposal. The rodeo is in town, and tomorrow Cage wants to go to a western-themed gift show called Cowboy Christmas to buy Thompson a pair of chaps. This time last year, Cage and Thompson stumbled into Cowboy Christmas, and Cage came out the other side in full cowboy getup, including his own pair of chaps and a southern accent that took him a long while to shake. Cage was transformed to his soul that day, and now he wants Thompson to join him in league with the horsebreakers. So tomorrow: chaps.
But first comes Wednesday. Six nights each week, 240 nights each year, the fifty-year-old Thompson appears as Carrot Top down at the Luxor, playing between Menopause the Musical (“The Hilarious Celebration of Women and the Change!”) and a burlesque show called Fantasy (“The Strip’s Biggest Tease”). And on three of those nights—Wednesdays, Saturdays, and Mondays—Thompson has to arrive early for a preshow meet and greet. His most fervent admirers pay an additional forty-nine dollars on top of their seventy-one-dollar tickets to chat with him in the theater’s lobby, take pictures with him, and get his autograph.
When Thompson surfaces from his dressing room, his personal assistant—a deeply loyal and connected forty-eight-year-old man named Jeff Molitz—is at his shoulder, as he almost always is. Molitz, nicknamed Porno Jeff because of some work he does on the side, is short and bearded, with a long ponytail and a closet filled with Carrot Top–branded clothing. “It’s the uniform,” Porno Jeff says. They met through Porno Jeff’s local Mail Boxes Etc. franchise, which Thompson sometimes used to ship his trunks of comedic props, including what he calls Hugh Hefner’s walker (it has a big dildo taped to the front of it) and Rosie O’Donnell’s buffet tray (there are five of them). Nine years ago, Porno Jeff became Thompson’s full-time assistant, and he has since evolved from Man Friday into celebrity-by-proxy. He hosts a Super Bowl party at his house that has become massive enough that Monster Energy drinks and Kraft Nabisco sponsor it; he calls up a picture on his phone of the more than two thousand packets of Kool-Aid that arrived earlier today.
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