Thursday, December 08, 2005

My brother is in town for a work training so he's been staying with us while he's here. When he first arrived in Portland, I was still at work, so he just took the train to my office, dropped off his things, then went shopping at the mall near here. The Lloyd Center is a pretty big mall, and it has always seemed very suburban and tame; I usually just go over there to see a movie or to eat at the food court. Okay, strike that last sentence--while I was writing it I remembered one time Margaret and I went to see that Mormon movie "Charley," the classic Mormon story of bad girl meets Mormon boy, discovers error of her ways, becomes Mormon, gets married, has a baby, gets cancer, and dies--it was the feel-good hit in Provo when it was released. Anyway, there were only 5 other people in the theatre to see the movie (as you can tell, the heart of Portland isn't the bastion of Mormon population that it once was--they've all moved out to the suburbs where the Costcos are). As we were sitting down, a girl ripped a length of toilet paper off some that she had and offered it to Margaret. She declined, but the girl insisted, saying that we'd need it. To be nice, Margaret took it, and halfway through the movie, when Charley is struggling with chemotherapy and doesn't even have the strength to lift her own baby out of its crib we're trying to hide the fact that we REALLY need that tissue, but don't want the girl who gave it to us to see us using it. Okay, that was just a long intro for the part that illustrates my point about the seedy underbelly of this mall that one rarely sees. During a lull in the movie, and since I'd probably drunk a large Diet Coke and was about to burst, I got up to go to the bathroom. As I rounded the corner to the little foyer area between the theatre and the main hallway, I saw a girl giving a guy oral sex!!! (And they say that romance is dead.) They stopped as soon as they saw me, and were gone by the time I came back--I guess they had figured that there wouldn't be anyone seeing some Mormon movie and that they were safe. I wonder if anything like that happened when the film was screened in Salt Lake? Nah, the closest thing would probably be someone trying to foist off a Book of Mormon onto a movie-goer who they had found out wasn't Mormon while they were in the foyer.

Well, to continue--despite the preceding story--the Lloyd Mall is GENERALLY safe and tame, but my brother, who was dressed in a Carhart barn coat, had a fitted stocking cap on, and has a goatee, walked through the mall and got several offers to buy jewelry and other items that were clearly stolen from the stores! I guess he looked questionable enough to the theives to think that he would be interested. Can you believe that? People JUDGING OTHERS just by the way they LOOK! I am SHOCKED! He said he was pretty confident that it was real gold jewelry, too, since they still had the pricetags on! That NEVER happens to me! I guess I look too innocent to attract them--that, or I look like the kind of person who would turn them in. Either way, I'm stuck with having to pay retail and I HATE that!

1 comment:

Dave D. said...

So now's your big chance to go for that Cro(w)-Mag look you've always wanted to try!