February 10-16, 2005

naked city

Bubbly Bath

Glass High: From inside, Morris Wilkins' pop-art tub "just seems like any other whirlpool."

Celebrating Valentine's Day in a giant champagne glass.

by Carolyn Wyman

It's 4 p.m. on a frigid Sunday in late January and I am sitting completely naked in a 7-foot-tall champagne glass. Frolicking with your sweetie in this pop-art whirlpool bath is supposed to be the ultimate romantic experience at Caesars Pocono couples resorts. But as activities between me and my husband Phil got more vigorous in our glass perch, my thoughts turned to the fireplace in the living room below. What if I fell out and into it? What if I drown? Would the obit headline read, "Champagne Addict Succumbs"?

Phil and I have celebrated previous Valentine's seasons with the prosaic candy, flowers, expensive restaurant meals — even a heart-shaped tub in Niagara Falls where our fun was frequently interrupted by calls from gentlemen looking for a previous occupant named Candy. But we also got married at Lucy, the giant elephant building in Margate, N.J., and love kitsch culture like Caesars Pocono Resorts founder Morris Wilkins' champagne glasses.

Wilkins put the Poconos on the romantic map in 1963 when he invented the first heart-shaped whirlpool. When competitors copied, he created and patented the people-sized champagne glass. Wilkins eventually sold his four resorts to the Caesars gaming company. They're now owned by the Starwood hotel chain (they of Westins and Sheratons), though the resorts retain the Caesars name and continue to be sold as Vegas-flashy but upscale-respectable all-inclusive couples "playgrounds." From the luminous pictures on Starwood's elaborate Web site and in its catalogs, Pocono Palace looked like Nero's Golden House spiffed up for a state dinner.

That's why we were so shocked when after the two-plus hour drive from Philly, we pulled into the Palace parking lot and saw something resembling an aging Best Western. Forget doormen or bellhops: The Gallery Mall-style glass doors on the main Arena building weren't even automatic. Seating in the cavernous Greco-hunting lodge lobby consisted of a single park bench situated beside a fire extinguisher-adorned pole. The free afternoon hors d'oeuvres the catalog had boasted was a tray of cubed Kraft cheese.

Pocono Palace, with its nine-hole regulation golf course and tiny lake, is marketed to "sports lovers." But one look at its indoor "sports complex" (a small pool, racquetball and basketball courts, and antique arcade games) and we quickly decided to concentrate on collaborative water sports in our room.

All of the higher-end ones are attractively furnished, multilevel (you step into the champagne glass from the bathroom) and feature multiple pools and baths. Unless you have an Andy Warhol fetish, I wouldn't even recommend shelling out the extra bucks for a champagne glass. There are mirrors everywhere except where you could see yourself in the glass (which is probably just as well because anyone looks ridiculous in it). As a result, though, when you're in there, it just seems like any other whirlpool. In fact, the best room is probably the $350-ish glassless, windowless Garden of Eden Apple, partly for the protection it affords from having to see the cheap and bleak Palace compound.

The Caesars resorts' cheapness seeps into the rooms in the form of extra charges. In a $400-$500 room with a fireplace and a giant champagne glass you might well expect complimentary champagne and champagne glasses. But we didn't even get fireplace logs and bubble bath. That's how we ended up drinking champagne out of plastic bathroom cups.

Caesars resorts rooms do come with all-you-can-eat dinners, for which we overdressed, judging from the baseball caps and sweats at our group table. Caesars Pocono Resorts marketing coordinator Cathleen Bell had told me that all kinds of couples are customers but everyone at our table was in (or living with someone in) construction. We listened politely and cluelessly as the dinner conversation ranged from driving pilings to racing four-wheelers to raising goats and kids (with corporal punishment). Everyone else had seen and loved Meet the Fockers (which makes sense since it was, in fact, what we were all doing). They also reported on the resort's daily organized social activities, including a musical-chairs-type game that involved women putting a cucumber in their partners' pants.

The food was actually quite good, if generic, as was the covers band that performed in the nightclub along with a comic after dinner. The comic echoed the dinner conversation about kid-slapping before closing with a long hemorrhoids bit that made us wish we had returned to the room sooner.

In fact, our advice for those who might like to stay in this place is the same as for the kids who are driving many of their corporal punishment-believing parents to a Caesars Pocono romantic escape: Stay in your room.

At press time, Caesars Pocono Resorts still had some openings for Valentine's weekend. Call 877-822-3333 or visit www.caesarspoconoresorts.com.