You have entered...The Mall Zone...

I must abashedly confess that we once again spent our midday outing striding purposefully from one specifically-targeted Annapolis Mall location (for sneakers) to another (for lunch,) and back again.

I don’t know if I’ve been clear that I don’t find shopping malls to exactly be pinnacle examples of the kind of human cultural sites that are worthy of frequent visits...but, hey, sometimes you need stuff and they serve a niche function. (A function at which Annapolis Mall sadly failed today as, once again, shoes for size 9.5 feet--that’ll be 41 in Euro--proved unavailable.)

Still, on the combined topics of malls and creativity, have you taken a gander at mannequins lately? It’s apparently a specialized art branch to design humanoids for display purposes. I will admit here and now that the talking, sliding, frozen-faced characters on the latest batch of Old Navy® advertisements and commercials give me a small case of the willies. It’s all very Twilight Zone, which might be the point...but even now I find the Zone a little disconcerting, unless the episode features William Shatner to give it a buffering dose of hamminess.

The Stepford people from Old Navy, however, have nothing on the pseudo-children in the kids’ department at Nordstrom. I will show you.

Exhibits A and B: Are these characters human? I reckon not, unless they display a heretofore unheard of genetic mutation triggered by eating too much squid. Either that or they’re...you know...aliens. You can tell because of the smug expression on the face of the blue-shirted boy who, it’s safe to say, clearly calls all the shots. When all the spelling bee champs at your children’s schools turn out to have faces like these, well...don’t say I didn’t give you a heads-up. (Note that the little girl in the pink dress is not even normal by squid-people standards. My guess is that she is actually a pet.)

Now we turn to a very different but equally disturbing vignette from Lord & Taylor, the department store that must be traversed to access Punk’s Backyard Grill from Nordstrom, without walking through the parking lot. We’ll call this Exhibit C. Quite apart from the fact that this boy’s face is apparently melting into featureless uniformity, it must be quite unsettling to have to dress up in your monkey suit only to find yourself at this party. (Umm...Mom? Do we hafta stay? Nobody here has a head.)

All I can say is, mannequin artists must be fascinating people with curious backstories. Our lunch, by the way, was tasty as usual. It was not squid.