Ahh! Where has the time gone?!?! The Husband and I have been traveling a lot recently (him more than me) and this post fell by the wayside.  Luckily, I’m able to get it out before the museum closes on the 17th.  If you’re in Las Vegas and haven’t been yet, get your butt out there this week!

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When we moved to Las Vegas, we truthfully had no idea who Liberace was.  The name sounded familiar but we didn’t recall knowing much about him, if anything.  Friends had been to his museum, though, in town, and we planned one day to go ourselves.  As I was skimming the New York Times on my iPhone a few weeks ago, I learned that the museum is closing in mid-October.  With a big travel schedule the next few weeks, we moved our “one day” up to this past weekend. (Oops! Wish we had gotten this out earlier! The rest of this post is in real time )

The Liberace Museum is located at Tropicana and Spencer, in a shopping center essentially dedicated to Liberace.  One end of the shopping center has his restaurant and the museum portion that has a number of his costumes…

While the other end has the main museum with history, his cars, and his piano collection.

The museum will be open 7 days a week until it closes, at which time it will regain its focus on the Liberace Foundation, which we learned he started in response to the scholarship he earned at young age to pursue music.

The museum entrance also includes a free tour at 11am and 2pm.  While we were there shortly before the first tour of the day, we decided to do a self-guided tour again, going at our own pace throughout the museum.  The first room we were in began to provide us background on who Liberace was.

As we moved into the main room of the main museum, we learned about his family, who was mostly very musically talented.  His parents and grandparents, if I recall correctly, came to the U.S. from Italy…

In addition to the history, this portion of the museum included many of his amazingly decorated cars.  I’ll leave you to those photos and will catch up with you farther down for the piano collection

Liberace was an incredibly talented pianist and showman.  With his love of music and pianos, and the great amount of money  he had, he collected pianos from all over the world and all throughout history.  One of his pianos is one of the oldest ones in existence.  This room was my favorite, as a girl who used to love playing the piano herself.  Unfortunately, our camera died before we could get any great photos of the pianos but here’s a snapshot.

When we were done in the main museum, we headed across the lot to the gift shop and costume building.

We switched to the iPhone camera at this point (thank goodness for multi-function phones!) and unfortunately these photos don’t give his costumes justice.  They were colorful to say the least!

Towards the end of his life, if we understood correctly, Liberace spent some time at the museum.  It had a bedroom (with his furniture still there) as well as a room to repair his costumes.  Throughout the self-tour, we were hoping to hear his music and we were happy to find that in the last room before the gift shop.  It was a small banquet room with one of his pianos, and film of him playing in the background.

Liberace seemed like a fascinating and talented performer and entertainer.  While not as popular as Elvis we imagine, (especially since we didn’t know who he was until we moved here), we likened our tour to a mini mini version of a Graceland (if you haven’t seen our visit there, be sure to check it out!).  We enjoyed our visit and we’re glad we were able to make it there before it closed.  If you have a chance to head out this week, we encourage you to do so.  For those of you outside of Las Vegas, there’s talk of them possibly taking the museum on the road so keep an eye out for it in your neck of the woods!