Are You Game??

A Last Hurrah

August 8th the Santas Retake the Shopping Mall

• Meet-Up Location: The Broadway Pub where kids and Santas and elves and Grinches are all welcome. A scant two blocks from the mall we’ll visit.

• Meet-Up Time: Saturday August 8th, from 1:00 until 2:00 PM. After two, the Red Tide will flood toward the mall.

• The Attire: Don’t limit yourself. Think elf, Santa, dreidel, sexy elf, sexy dreidel, Elf-On-A-Shelf, Toy Soldier, Nutcracker, Grinch, Krampus, Christmas Tree, anything that gives the holiday season. Hell, come as the Sugar Plume Fairy.

Alas, this will be the last day of operation for one of the oldest malls in America. Despite being sixty-six years old, it will soon be leveled. The mall, Lloyd Center, contains the skating rink where Tonya Harding got her start. After a massive renovation it reopened in August 1991, with a black-tie soiree for very wealthy people who donated money toward AIDS research. They ate a multi-course meal in a candle-lit department store (Meier & Frank) while Natalie Cole sang a private concert from a stage in the center of festivities. At that point so many people where dead/dying of AIDS that when Cole sang Miss You Like Crazy the swanky crowd erupted in uncontrolled sobbing. I only know because — despite being hillbilly poor — I was dating a hanger-on of the very rich, who got me a seat and a tux to attend. Spooky, to see five hundred Reagan-era rich people suddenly all sobbing over dead loved-ones.

In 1996, at the second SantaCon ever held, my friends and I planned to invade this same mall. Plainclothes Santas smuggled their costumes in within shopping bags and tried to change in public restrooms and fitting rooms, but every effort was thwarted by the police. At the time, in the travel guide Fugitives & Refugees, I joked, “It was the thin blue line vs. the fat red one.” What takes place August 8th will — or will not be — a stunt thirty years in the making. Come early — Trina? Leaux? Colton? — and you can help me inflate flashy balloons to hand out to kids.

Come join us. Even if it all goes sideways it will still make a good story to tell. Or good content for your whatever. Influencers, come influence. Imagine this as the last Burning Man.

If you’re not already in possession of holiday apparel, locally, Lippman’s Novelties has a vast inventory of cheap & pricey Santawear. Here’s a chance to erase gender and race and create a short-lived world where every Santa is equal.