What is Mississippi but a series of gutted strip malls testifying to a brief period of economic growth?
What is Minnesota but the Mall of America and U.S. Bank Stadium?
So I and Cam Bonelli, editor of the Leader’s sister newspaper the Litchfield Independent review, set out for the Mall of America the weekend before Christmas for a scavenger hunt.
Someone in the office rightly suggested I collect hazard pay for this assignment.
I know you Minnesotans proudly have your own way of doing things, but here’s the thing about Mississippi: Down South, we watch where we walk. I couldn’t help but find a sharp difference in our populations as soon as I entered the mall through the Macy’s department store, where hundreds of taller, richer folks didn’t mind mowing me down with their baby strollers.
“Mommy, KILL THAT MAN!” a child cried, just before I felt those polymer wheels crush my larynx.
A similarity to Minnesota and Mississippi Christmas shopping is the unadulterated rage stoked by a need for hot deals and triggered by anything up to and including having to wait for a panini at the Tim Horton’s. Grabbing coffee turned out to be a bad idea.
Technically, I was supposed to be hunting for the famed home plate and stadium chair, which were left alone when Metropolitan Stadium was blown to bits to make room for … something more insidious.
The Nickelodeon Universe theme park is a city of plastic horrors. Giant cartoon faces look down and laugh at you, their eyes hollow and uncanny. And every minute or so, a roller coaster car full of kids screams by overhead like a fighter jet. Bonelli and I needed to find that home plate and get out, so we resolved to finish quickly.
I was told the stadium chair marking some home run or another could be seen from the plate. Yes, of course it could be, if not for the sickeningly colorful Spongebob- and Dora-themed strongholds made to assert a kind of gleeful capitalistic dominance over parents. We had to find the home plate and the chair separately, traveling from one end of the wasteland to the other. Getting a photo of each was a practice in, again, getting run over with baby strollers.
Not part of the scavenger hunt was drinking at the Hard Rock Cafe, but I did that, if only because it was the nearest escape route from Nickelodeon Universe.
As one might imagine, the rest of my visit was something of a blur. One young man at a kiosk accosted us and definitely said, “You two look like you care about the planet!” And I definitely replied with, “No, I hate the planet.” I don’t hate the planet. But mall-going, I’ve found, consists of two parties: those dying at the hands of kiosk goons, and those bravely hollering expletives to fight them off.
We did a bit of strangulated Christmas shopping, cursed the assignment and attempted an escape. I had for some reason been under the impression that Minnesotans preferred a kind of understated image on the U.S. map.
I was wrong.
If the Mall of America is representative of the state’s sensibilities, then those sensibilities rival the South’s: rambunctious overindulgence is a key part of being southern, albeit MOA’s brand stinks of cash. The South’s outlandishness was always a byproduct of desperate boredom, so I feel.
One of these days I will return to that mall, and on that day, I will be much richer and much taller.
