January 6, 2026: Que Sera Sera #7

Lucky Brand jeans and Auntie Anne's pretzels in the food court: writing about mall nostalgia and culture for Zona Motel

I was recently featured in Brittany Ackerman’s Mallcore column for Zona Motel, a space full of “literary dispatches from the food courts, fitting rooms, and fluorescent dreams of mall life.” Here are a few excerpts:

Brittany Ackerman: Tell me about the mall of your youth—what did it look like, smell like, feel like?

Mall memories are disjointed, fragmented. Quesadillas on Friday night at Applebee’s, listening to TLC on big headphones in FYE, Auntie Anne’s pretzels and cheese in the food court, chocolate peanut butter Smidgens at Gertrude Hawk. Waiting outside in the dark for someone’s mom to pick me and my friends up. Then, some guy. Someone’s boyfriend. My boyfriend. He was older. He had a Jeep, which was a big reason as to why we were dating. I needed rides.

Trying on a neon yellow Portofino blouse at Express with my older, cooler cousin. Editor pants. Shopping with another boyfriend. Feeling the sensory goodness of a warm vanilla sugar scrub against my hands in the sink at a Bath & Body Works. Picking up ornaments in the Hallmark store, buying stupid gag t-shirts at Christmas. Headphones on at FYE, flipping through CDs at Gallery of Sound. Walking across the parking lot to the Borders next to the mall. Wandering through the bookshelves, fingering the spines of coming-of-age novels and epic fantasy series, staring at incomprehensible varieties of fashion and trade magazines.

The mall complex was a third place—a public space that exists where a person doesn’t have to pay anything, or be employed, a student, or a member to hang out there. Vibrant and open and without particular demands on anyone’s time. Not a fancy mall. Basic and unassuming. Somewhere to be, somewhere to go.

BA: Did you work at the mall? What did it teach you about money, power, or performance?

GT: For a little while I worked at a Lucky Brand store in a different state, on an outdoor shopping street, much nicer than my hometown mall. Newbury Street in Boston. I was chastised because I was supposed to come to work wearing three pieces of Lucky Brand merchandise on my body at all times: bootcut jeans, a Lucky-brand baby tee, and a leather belt. At minimum. I didn’t like the clunkiness of the belt. Sometimes I opted for jewelry or a cross-body bag instead.

We were rewarded if we could upsell people, add an accessory to the purchase. Units per customer, units per transaction. I liked hanging out in the store in the jeans, which were more expensive than any I’d owned before, learning how to fold shirts in sharp rectangles, gossiping with coworkers, Swiffering the floors when the shift was over, getting paid. We didn’t take it that seriously. We were having fun. Which was convenient because we were supposed to perform happiness to the customers. Happiness that you could purchase by buying Lucky Brand jeans.

BA: What was a favorite purchase at the mall?

GT: My aunt bought me a 3-foot-tall Betty Boop light at the mall when I was a kid. She was only 41 years old but she was dying, and I didn’t quite understand that at the time. I did understand that she was pretty and silly and she would tell me jokes and bake chocolate chip cookies with me in her small apartment and let me jerkily drive us around the Viewmont Mall in her motorized scooter that she now needed to get around. I understood that I loved her. I understood that the mall was all one floor, which made it easy to hang out there on the scooter and cover a lot of ground pretty quickly.

I was seven years old, turning eight. I would sit on her lap and steer the scooter through the Food Court to Hot Topic. Her degenerative disease was taking much of the way she’d lived her life away from her. But she could still get a kick out of things. She could get a kick out of indulging me. She could let me talk about gargoyles and take me to see Jurassic Park in the drive-in. She could let me crash the scooter into a mall kiosk. She could buy me nail polish and a giant Betty Boop to worship.

What’s left of your mall now, and what do you feel when you go back?

The Viewmont mall isn’t shiny and exciting like it once was to me. It feels smaller now. But, I still love the surprise and wonder of the mall, of the physical store in general. I love to shop. I love how a store is a place not for knowing what you want, but for seeking to let the universe reveal something to you. A mall supports the concept of aimless, meandering movement through the world as a requirement for revelation.

It’s inconvenient to walk around looking from store to store for what you want to spend your money on, instead of just ordering it online. The inconvenience is the pleasure. To walk around a store or a mall or a city with shops, discovering, is still a pleasure to me. Ordering things from a screen is not the same pleasure. Convenience is not pleasure, or at least not in the way you want it to be—not in a way that ever offers deeper satisfaction. It’s a minimal pleasure, a residue of one. Not an endeavor that bends toward real joy.

Read the whole mall dispatch here.

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Recent writing:

• Live & Let Die in Philadelphia magazine

• Sensual Self-Care in Philadelphia magazine

• Running Saved Kellen Matthews-Thompson’s Life in Philadelphia magazine

• Nicole Lesperance’s new YA murder mystery is a gothic love letter to offseason Cape Cod in The Boston Globe

• COLUMN: MALLCORE w/ Gina Tomaine in Zona Motel