So I’m at Southcenter mall, and I think I almost got stabbed. No, I’m serious.
The youth group is here today, Saturday, when the throngs of Tukwila are at their peak and it’s easy to get lost in the crowd. Unless, like me, you’re dressed in women’s clothing, are wearing lipstick and eye-liner, and a shaggy white wig. That’s kind of the point, though. We’re playing “Where’s Waldo,” though from the looks people are giving me, the name of the game might as well be “Where’s Weirdo.” Which is cool, except I’m learning that you can’t go out in public dressed like a curiously shaped grandmother with a man’s jowls and expect not to walk away with a few stories.
The first of which occurred as I walked in the front door from the parking lot. A man—I can only describe him as being thuggish—did a violent double take as I passed by. Wanting to let him know that I was in on the joke, that I didn’t actually dress up like this as normal Saturday entertainment, I winked at him.
Then I fled.
So lesson one: if you’re going to dress up like this, don’t wink at anyone, especially people who belong in the ”Gangsta” folder of your “People-in-the-World” filing cabinet. They take life seriously.
I was found, rather easily, by the various groups of students who were out hunting for me. Not able to bear the Dear God What is that Thing looks I was getting from every passerby, I deposited myself in front of a Starbucks and brought out my laptop. I lowered my shaggy head over the keyboard and didn’t look up until I saw a crowd of Converse sneakers around me. Then I signed their paper and bid them a fond hunt.
Things were going pretty well, after that.
After the next group found me, I made my next mistake. In the midst of a crowd, I yelled out, “Hey, can one of you get me a Starbucks?” When I stop to think about it, I imagine that I also would have spun around and stared had a misshapen white-haired lady sitting on a bench next to me yelled out to a bunch of teenage girls in a rich baritone.
One of the onlookers, a man with diamonds in his ears and a baggy white shirt, looked beneath my white locks and instantly became, well, aghast. His mouth dropped open and he put his hands on his knees. He asked me, “Dude, are you a dude?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Are you gay?” I could see his mind trying desperately to find some category for me. I can’t blame him for that, either, since most cross-dressing men at least dress up to look good. I absolutely did not in any way resemble an attractive human.
“No,” I said.
“Well, how old are you?” He was still bent over a little bit at the waist, like the angle was the only appropriate way in which to puzzle through a man who dresses up like an ugly grandmother and demands coffee from passing mall-rats.
“Twenty-seven,” I said.
He jumped, put both hands on his chest like he’s been punched there, said “I’m twenty-seven!” Like maybe the similarity of our ages meant that whatever had compelled me to dress like this, it was waiting right around the corner for him. Or maybe he was just amazed that a man my age would play dress-up.
“How old are you,” he asked one of the teenage girls.
When she told him that they were all around 16, he looked back at me and shook his head. Now I was a twenty-seven year old man dressing up like a hideous white-haired woman with lopsided breasts, harassing minors.
It was time for an explanation, which he accepted reluctantly. Then he asked me if he could take my picture with his camera phone. Then he called his buddy to tell him about it. Then he asked me for my email address, so he could email me the picture of myself. Like maybe he thought that I had no idea what I looked like. I obliged. Here it is.
Later, when the game was near finished and we had all begun to make our way back to Nordstroms to meet with the rest of the group, I saw Laz walking toward me. Earlier we had met and exchanged stories about our adventures, and drawn even more strange looks from passersby, me with my full head of tangled white mane and him with his iron-gray beard and fisherman’s hat. We must have looked like the strangest couple in Tukwila, come to the mall specifically to scare children. Kind of like anti-Santas. Anyway, when he approached me he had taken his beard off.
“We’re not allowed to dress like this,” he said, and he held up a piece of paper. It had a numbered list on it. He drew my attention to the eighth item.
“It is against Mall Policy to conceal your true identity,” it said, “or to disguise yourself so as to be unrecognizable.”
I smiled at him. “Aw, what… someone say something to you?”
He nodded gravely. “Yeah, and they told me,” he said, “they mean business. They’ve had their eyes on a strange lady in a hideous white wig all night long.”
That would be me.
Later, when we returned to the group, I was sans glasses and wig. The boys in our group gasped—my glasses had concealed the mascara and eye-liner I had meticulously applied under the tutelage of a youtube video an hour before the game. The girls had a different reaction.
“Who did your makeup?” They looked at my face with the practiced eyes of experts.
“I did,” I said.
I’m still trying to figure out if I should be proud of that.
On a Lark 