To the Mall

I've been catching "How I Met Your Mother" on and off for a while and I have always enjoyed it. However, as of last season's "Let's Go to the Mall" episode, HIMYM has officially become my new favorite show. The show could have a few posts of its own, but tonight I'm fixated on the Robin Sparkles mall episode.

The "music video" on this episode dropped me right back in junior high. The Tiffany jacket, the Debbie Gibson hat, the jelly bracelets, the robot. And of course, the mall. I laughed so hard while I was watching this my four year old abandoned playing with his beloved trains to come find out what I was doing.

We had our own mall when we were 13, and it was The Place to be on weekends. Naturally, we traveled in packs, and the bunch of us would spend hours on our hair, clothes, and makeup, then ruin them by catching a ride down to the mall in the back of my uncle's pickup truck. The big wave in my hair always survived, though, due to the entire can of Aqua Net I had sprayed in it. Oh, and if we were lucky, our parents let us take the bus. Very exciting for us!

Our main destination was the video arcade, where we could pick up guys/be picked up by guys/meet up with guys we had picked up at an earlier time. To this day I can't walk into that place without giggling a little to myself. It's always a strange feeling taking my little boy in there to play Skeeball when I can remember how much time I spent there batting my eyes.

I should note here that I have I ever been what you could call really successful on singles scenes, junior high or otherwise. I just got bored too fast, and rolling my eyes at some of the dumber lines didn't exactly endear me to the aspiring half-men. Plus, I just hated guys coming up to me and talking to my chest and I wasn't shy about showing it. My face, not my chest. So I "picked up" my share of guys, but it was nothing to the scorecards my some of my fellow mall cruisers were filling up. I therefore spent most of my time waiting for the the other girls to get bored of the guys they were talking to so we could go to the movies or something.

As time went by, and the guys turned into boyfriends, we still met at the arcade. Now we went with only one friend (in my case, Crystal), so we were able to increase our coolness factor by being dropped off by our parents. Woo hoo. We'd meet the guys (who were being dropped of by their Moms or older sisters) at the arcade and head for the movies. Ghostbusters II for some reason stands out in my mind.

I didn't have the hat (Sammi did!). But I did have the jelly bracelets and shoes, and I still own the jeans jacket. I'd forgotten a lot about those days, but thanks to Robin Sparkles I'm feeling mall nostalgia tonight!