Shock and awe
I secretly hate shopping, especially at the mall, which explains why I was crabby and sour when Kayla, Dana and I walked into Macy’s (a store I hate) on a marathon shopping excursion yesterday.
My mood was no match, however, for the hullabaloo we found at the base of the escalators. Once we made it through the circle of people clutching camera phones, we found two statuesque (in the literal sense) Storm Troopers, gamely posing with their costumes and weapons. Dana and I laughed and squeezed between them to get to the escalator. Before Kayla, frozen in fear and confusion, had the chance to follow, the Storm Troopers cut her off, following us onto the escalator. When we, Thing 1, and Thing 2 reached the top, we searched high and low for Kayla, before finding her half way down the escalator, practically cowering.
Being confronted by a wonderfully authentic Darth Vader at the top of the escalator might have made matters worse, but we didn’t have time to question the presence of the Evil Empire at a department store. Dana grabbed a dress off the rack and went to the closest dressing room (women’s lingerie) and we gamely followed her. As Dana redressed and we stood, bored, an elderly man emerged from the dressing room next door, clutching a girdle.
“Don’t worry, I love cross dressing,” he told us with a jovial grin and a little chuckle as he left.
Kayla and I turned to each other. ”So! Weird!” we agreed. Surely, I thought, his little old white haired wife had gotten to the register and forgotten this pair of commercial-strength unmentionables in the dressing room. But as we heard the man, far past even the blush pallor of middle age, tell the saleslady that he would take one pair in the taupe and one pair in the black (“I like what it does for my skin tone”) and discuss the support options of “power panties”, I realized that the trip had gone from bad to worse. Or, as I resolved to look at it, boring to awesome.
