I remember the days when the mall was the place to be. As a middle-schooler with no cell phone and no driver’s license, there was a limit to what I could do on the weekends without my parents tagging along. One activity that would involve only my friends and me was the mall. Yes. Park Plaza Mall, where a kid could roam and be independent and feel like an adult for an entire afternoon.
A few of my friends and I would get one of our moms to drop us off (as far away from the door as possible), and we would walk up to the glass doors, our purses on our shoulders and shiny lip gloss slathered on our mouths, and make our way confidently into the airy, echoing sanctuary of shopping.
Now the catch for me was I had little to no money to spend, but that does not matter when you’re 13 years old at the mall with your friends. Even though the only thing I may have walked out of the mall with was an Auntie Anne’s pretzel or a bottle of nail polish from Claire’s, it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t buy all of the clothes I wanted from American Eagle or that I couldn’t get all of the makeup I wanted from Bath and Body Works, I got to be on my own for an afternoon, and no amount of money in the world could purchase that type of freedom.
The other freedom the mall offered, besides roaming through racks of clothes and numerous stores in dress-up world bliss, was the ability to flirt with boys that did not go to my school. The mall boys were not as threatening, at least to me. Now, this is not to say that I actually flirted, but it is to say that the idea of flirting with a cute boy at the mall was much less intimidating than talking to Johnny So and So in math class.
As we sat down in the food court, a table of boys would catch our eye, and we would make a silent pact to try and talk to them or at least get them to follow us around the mall. This would involve a little eye contact, a lot of giggling and, most importantly, the pass. The pass is when the entire table of girls gets up at the same time and deliberately walks past the boys’ table. Done correctly, there should be girls going by on both sides of the table, so in essence the boys were surrounded by their presence. This is all theory, of course; I never personally participated in the pass, but I’m sure numerous friends of mine had mastered this technique by the time they graduated high school.
If done correctly, the pass would enable the girls to capture the entire group of adolescent boys for at least the remainder of the afternoon—contingent upon the fact that there was NOT a videogame store in the mall. I believe there was a videogame store in Park Plaza at this time in my life, so the statistics of successful attempts of this move may have been few and far between.
The funny thing is that I have many friends who, as adults, would admit that a day at the mall, in any context, is still pretty much the best thing in the world. I am not one of those people now; the mall has lost its luster, and while I enjoy an occasional mall adventure it will never generate the same spark in my mind that it once did.
However, if you are one who still get sparkles in your eyes when you think about the shopping mall, I commend you, and I send you off with this mantra: Shop till you drop, because there’s nothing like a day at the mall with your friends or your daddy’s credit card.