Entertainment Diet: Mark Hall-Patton

Once upon a time — and for a good chunk of his career — Mark Hall-Patton was a simple museum administrator who, in his current continuing gig, oversees Clark County’s museums system.

Then came a little show called “Pawn Stars,” where, thanks to his sideline job as a resident expert, and to Hall-Patton’s continuing amusement, he has become a celebrity of sorts.

Maybe it’s the signature hat, or the beard, or just the infectious joy with which he can talk about just about anything having to do with history, Nevada or the Old West that makes people want to corral him for a quick conversation or an autograph.

When he’s not at the museum and not on TV, Hall-Patton and his wife, Colleen Hall-Patton, who teaches sociology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, enjoy exploring Southern Nevada and pursuing interests that tend to revolve around home, collecting and just spending time together.

Tripping: One thing we like to do is take drives. We’ll drive the lakefront road out at Lake Mead or do the loop through Red Rock or go down to Eldorado Canyon, just go somewhere, just to get out in the countryside, because we like having open space around us. … The other thing, as you can probably imagine, is that Colleen and I are often working on something — our own writing, another article that I’m researching — and that’s something that’s also fun for us. I love doing research. I do it all day in my job, but I do it in the evening as well, and that’s something we do share. But we just love getting out of town, and one of the nice things about being here is, it’s such a beautiful area and you can go to Bryce, Zion, the Grand Canyon, Death Valley, some of the most wonderful parks in the country, and it’s a few hours’ drive.

Dining: Colleen and I don’t go out to dinner a lot. Our tastes are rather plebeian. We like California Pizza Kitchen, Olive Garden and even IHOP and that sort of thing. We don’t do a lot of really fancy restaurants. Just, really, kind of standard stuff. … My standard for lunch is the Omelet House out here (on Boulder Highway). It’s tried and true and has great food and it’s one of those places that doesn’t put on airs about it … . But if we are able to have dinner at home, I’m very lucky. Colleen’s a great cook, and we like being home.

TV: I don’t watch a lot of TV. I will watch “Pawn Stars” to see what they’re using from what I said. I’ll go on and talk for half an hour and they’ll use three or four minutes, so it’s better if someone’s going to ask me about it, that I know what I’ve said. I tend to watch movies when they make it onto the movie channels. I like some “Scorpion” and I like some of the “NCIS” and that sort of thing. They’re formulaic but fun and they’re great mind-numbing stuff when you get home.

Books and badges: I’m an inveterate bibliophile. I’m a collector, and I’ve got 20,000 volumes in my library at home and I’m constantly adding to it, constantly upgrading collection areas. I’m always just reading, pulling something down, ‘Oh, let’s look at Indian slavery …” Not much fiction … to me, the stories of people are much more interesting if they’re real, but that’s just me. And I’m a collector. I always have been. I will go to, say, a postcard show and I’ll sit there for five hours going through a hundred thousand postcards and just have a ball. Law enforcement badges, swords, postcards, antique photographs, souvenirs that are a piece of what they are. I love the irony of those.

Music: We like music. We saw Celtic Woman when they were in town. We have seen Don McLean and Joni Mitchell, and years ago we saw Paul Simon and Bob Dylan. And, actually, one of the more recent ones is, I have a group of guys that a couple of times a year we go out for an evening, just a guys’ night out, and one of the guys got us passes to the Brooklyn Bowl when Jane’s Addiction was playing … I have wide-ranging tastes in music, from rock ‘n’ roll to country and western to classical to whatever.

Movie: When we go to the movies, we go to the two-dollar cinemas where we can get a whole evening for 10 bucks. But we did see the latest “Star Wars” on the big screen and “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit.”

— John Przybys