Trolling for Bargains: A Fond Farewell to Macy's of Voorhees

Trendy Toys Charm Necklace

Tee: Macy's

Skirt: Marshalls

Shoes: Betseyville, Macy's

Bag: Betsey Johnson, Macy's

Earmuffs, Betsey Johnson, Macy's

Sunglasses: Relic, Kohl's

Once upon a time, the Echelon Mall was the place to be.  It was the mall of my childhood, the place where I'd pick out my "prize" after every dentist's visit, embark on first day of school shoe shopping sprees, and gorge on My Favorite Muffins (I still miss you, pineapple cheese).  Its premier department store was Strawbridge & Clothier, which seemed like a more glamorous yet humbler Macy's.  Then, when I was in my twenties, Strawbridge went out of business, and the Voorhees store morphed into a Macy's.  Not long after that, some of the other stores started closing, and the Echelon Mall turned into the Voorhees Town Center, encompassing a new crop of nearby condos and restaurants.  These days, even Macy's is splitting the scene, leaving only Boscov's, an Auntie Anne-less (not to mention My Favorite Muffin-less) food court, and a smattering of doctors' and realtors' offices.  Yes, you read that right.  This mall no longer has an Express or a Hallmark, but if you're looking for a two-story colonial, then you've hit pay dirt.

So, I had to get to Macy's before it locked up for good.  On one hand, I was nostalgic and wanted to see what it looked like.  On the other, I was an accessory-a-holic intrigued to gawk at the weird stuff on offer.

Oddly, the most noteworthy items were the mannequins.  Naked and in various stages of dismemberment, they stood sentinel in what was once the children's department.  It was like the "Westworld" prop closet, and I couldn't help but snap a few pictures.

And good thing, too. Tammy (the Torso, a.k.a. my mannequin) was over the moon to see her brothers and sisters.  Even if Kim Cattrall had gone suspiciously AWOL.  (Although I did hear that Andrew McCarthy was caught smuggling out a life-size Santa.)

That macabre merriment out of the way, I was free to feast on the spoils.  Such as they were.  The Macy's overlords had clearly ferried in lots of old stock from some secret warehouse, and it looked as out of place and embarrassed as a new, slightly awkward zoo creature.  For one thing, the entrance of the juniors section was glutted with Lady Gaga/Elton John paraphernalia from some long-ago, unsuccessful merch mashup.  You'd think such a duo would inspire a colorful array of products, but, alas, every top, scarf, bag, and water bottle was black and white with a sad dab of lilac.  The other big come-on was an influx of Betsey Johnson Trolls accessories, which had been created to coincide with the movie of the same name.  Now, I have to pause a beat to explain just how off-put I was by the cinematic reincarnation of my favorite bridge-dwelling buddies.  The trolls of yesteryear were awesome . . . because they were ugly.  Don't get me wrong.  They were most definitely the cute kind of ugly, all endearing scrunched-up faces and unruly hair (as evidenced by the notebooks and attic escapee below).  

But that was part of their charm, whether they cavorted in wizard or princess costumes or just bare-assed in mall kiosks across this great nation.  That said, I gave the svelte, smooth-faced, sleek-haired newcomers the stink eye (no disrespect to Justin Timberlake or Anna Kendrick).  Not only was I not going to see the movie, I was most certainly not going to support these new-fangled upstarts by buying wearables emblazoned with their likeness.  Of course, that was before I received a darling pair of hot pink Betsey Johnson Trolls earmuffs for my birthday.  "Alright, no big deal," I thought, parading around with them in 50-degree weather, "they're just earmuffs; no one can tell that they're from the Trolls line."  But then I went ahead and ordered a trolls-printed tee shirt from Macy's, rationalizing that it was okay because I just liked the colors, and also because it was only $3.00.  So, when I was met with a mountain of pink, turquoise, and black earmuffs in the outerwear department of Macy's that day, I was terribly tempted by the turquoise (which should surprise no one, as this blog is filled with accounts of me declaring my hatred for things only to fall headlong in love with them).  I marched up to the makeshift counter with my 80% off find only to be told that that register was for real fur purchases only.  Well, excuse me for preferring unnaturally colored and sensibly priced synthetics to costly animal pelts.  I stalked off to another counter, where the sales clerk smirked as she attacked the label of my fuzzy new friend with an angry black marker, lest I try to reclaim my $6.40 at some still-solvent Macy's.  Indeed, the once-obsequious staff had turned kind of surly (not that I blame them, what with getting the boot -- and I don't mean Manolos). 

I (ahem) trolled the rest of the Betsey Johnson trinkets in search of more souvenirs but didn't have the heart to get another necklace or purse charm.  You know how sometimes you buy stuff that you don't really want?  Just because it's cheap and it's there?  Like, if you had a bag of Oreos and you ate the whole thing even if you didn't like Oreos very much?  Wait, what am I saying?  Everyone loves Oreos!  Let's go with Triscuits instead.  Because that's how I felt about shopping that day.  Content with my parting gift of electric blue fluff and in no mood to force down whole-wheat crackers.  So I left that old mausoleum/museum in search of a store that would endure forever.

In other words, I went on Amazon.

Movie Moment: Friends With Benefits

Like many moviegoers, when I heard about the romantic comedy Friends with Benefits, I thought, hey, didn't Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher already make that movie?

Well, sort of.

Like No Strings Attached, Friends with Benefits stars a tough cookie heroine (Mila Kunis) with a guarded gooey center. Yet Kunis's Jamie is edgier and more vulnerable than Portman's Emma, making for a more compelling and likable character. Likewise, Justin Timberlake's Dylan trumps Kutcher's Adam. Whereas Adam is eager to be Emma's prince charming from the get-go, Dylan doesn't really know what he wants, which makes him more believable. Although he's a little steamrolled by the more dominant Jamie, he's a worthy opponent, chipping away at her crusty shell until they both end up on equal footing. But what truly makes Friends with Benefits the better movie is that it's really about two friends instead of two near-strangers who just happened to have sex. Kunis and Timberlake have an easy chemistry that cuts through the dating game motions they so cynically mock. Indeed, they first hook up after rolling their eyes at a sappy romance starring Jason Segal and Rashida Jones (which, by the way, was funny to watch given Segal's and Jones's animosity toward each other in I Love You Man). It gives you that whole what-if-two-friends-watching-movies-on-the-couch-just-went-for-it? element that was missing in No Strings Attached.

Stuff to watch for: 1) a cameo by Shaun White as himself and 2) Richard Jenkins as Timberlake's father with Alzheimer's. I know, I know, what's something so serious doing in a romantic comedy? But it works.

Friends with Benefits is fun and, dare I say, poignant without being cheesy. At the end, I left the theater happy.

Movie Moment: Bad Teacher

The premise of Bad Teacher is pretty much encapsulated by its title. It's a story about a (very) bad teacher (Cameron Diaz), Elizabeth Halsey. She shows videos instead of teaching, smokes pot in the school gym and parking lot, dresses provocatively, pelts her students with dodge balls (not cool, coming from a former dodge ball victim), and misappropriates money from the school car wash to use toward her boob job. Exposed as a gold digger by her former fiance, Elizabeth is forced to move into a low-rent apartment with a biker she found on Craig's List ("Modern Family's" Eric Stonestreet). Nevertheless, things seem to be looking up when 1) trust fund-toting substitute teacher Scott Delacorte (Justin Timberlake) joins the staff and 2) her lone friend Lynn ("The Office's" Phyllis Smith) tells her that she can earn a huge cash bonus if her class scores well enough on a state standardized test.

As a person and teacher, Elizabeth is just awful. Even worse than her negligence is her out-and-out meanness. (She tells a student that her mother's cookies suck and initially refuses to date Russell Gettis [Jason Segal] because he's a lowly gym teacher.) And yet, it's difficult to completely hate her. She's so outrageous that she's entertaining. Plus, her arch enemy and fellow teacher Amy Squirrel (Lucy Punch) is such an annoying goody two shoes that rooting for Elizabeth seems almost okay.

At first glance, it seems odd that the writers, the director, whomever, chose to create an educator so over-the-top inappropriate that she gets away with everything and has nearly no redeeming qualities. (I say "nearly" because she does exhibit a few flashes of insight when she administers tough-love advice to a couple of students, an instance that resurfaces with deus ex machina abruptness at the movie's ending.) Yet upon closer inspection, it's clear that the creators aren't slamming the American education system or implying that our schools are rife with Ms. Halsey clones. Rather, Bad Teacher is a satire on education's many critics, a sort of cleverly crafted rebuttal intended to defend teachers. (As in, surely there's no teacher out there as bad as Ms. Halsey!)

Then again, maybe I'm giving everyone too much credit and it was just meant to be a sensational movie designed to rake in lots of money. (The movie boasts more than a few gross-out moments to vouch for that.)

Heavy issues aside, Bad Teacher is entertaining, largely owing to its cavalcade of teacher's lounge caricatures. John Michael Higgins makes a few appearances as the clueless and dolphin-obsessed Principal Snur, and Phyllis Smith's Lynn is just so . . . Phyllis. (If you watch "The Office," then you know what I mean.) Timberlake's Scott is a preppy dweeb who matches love interest Ms. Squirrel corny catchphrase for corny catchphrase. It's hilarious to watch Russell quietly mock him, which he does at every opportunity in an attempt to win Elizabeth's affections. As for Russell, he loves teaching but shares Elizabeth's irreverence for rules and her disgust for phonies. Therein lies their burgeoning bond.

Movie Moment: (Surfing) The Social Network

When I first heard about the movie The Social Network, I was interested. I hadn't known that a Harvard undergrad was the mastermind behind Facebook, or that he hatched the whole thing while I myself was in college. I wanted to know what kind of person this guy was, and why he was motivated to create such a Web site. Which is a little curious in and of itself seeing as I'm not the biggest Facebook fan (despite the fact that I'm on it). So, this afternoon, my mother, sister, and I went to see The Social Network. The theater was packed with people of all ages, which surprised me (somehow I expected to see mainly twentysomethings).

I should begin by saying that the entire story is told as a fragmented flashback. That is, in the beginning we find out that Mark Zuckerberg (played by Jesse Eisenberg) is being sued by his best friend and a couple of big man on campus types for creating Facebook. The back story begins with Mark and his girlfriend hanging out in a classically dark and depressing looking college town bar. Mark is telling his girlfriend how badly he wants to be accepted into the Phoenix or the Porcellian, two exclusive intellectual Harvard social clubs. He drones on incessantly in a voice not unlike a robot's, ignoring his girlfriend's attempts to guide his monologue into a conversation. The scene clearly establishes Mark as an intellectually superior but socially inept computer nerd who seems to have no feelings (as opposed to the more common stock character of the sensitive, lovable nerd). Predictably, his girlfriend dumps him, and he retreats to his room to get drunk and spill his post-breakup vitriol into his blog. Spurred further by alcohol and bitterness, he goes on to hack into Harvard's server data to create an online game in which guys can rate girls' hotness factors (a pursuit slightly less demeaning than comparing girls to farm animals, which was the game he initially devised). The Web site is a huge success, gaining unheard of hits overnight. The next day Mark is approached by a pair of trust fund case twins (the aforesaid big men on campus) who want him to develop their pet project, an unsophisticated social networking Web site called Harvard Connect. Mark agrees, then avoids them for the next month or so to develop his own Web site: The Facebook (an endeavor which does not involve using Harvard Connect code). The brainchild is Mark's, but the start-up money and financial savvy belong to his best (and only) friend, Eduardo. The way Mark sees it, people are even more interested in finding out stuff about people they know than they are in finding out stuff about celebrities. More particularly, guys want to know if certain girls have boyfriends without having to make fools of themselves, and The Facebook facilitates garnering such information. Apparently, Mark's one of those geniuses who knows how to capitalize on what people want despite being the world's worst people person. Meanwhile, Eduardo has been invited to pledge the hallowed Phoenix club, a fact that exacerbates Mark's sour grapes, causing him to quip, "You'll never get in." (In this, Mark turns out to be wrong.)

What happens next is kind of anticlimactic. As The Facebook (the "the" isn't dropped until later) gains popularity, Mark and Eduardo begin to argue about the direction of the project. Eduardo wants to host ads to generate revenue, but Mark doesn't, reasoning that doing so too soon would compromise the integrity of the site. Then Napster creator Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake -- who else?) gets involved, and things begin to escalate before the inevitable plummet. Interestingly, Mark isn't in Facebook to make money. He's more invested in hosting a party that everyone wants to go to, with certain hopefuls being "shut out" via rejected friend requests (similar to the way in which he was shut out from those exclusive clubs, although he never puts this into words). To be sure, Sean agrees that launching ads before it's time is like throwing the coolest party of the year and then sending everyone home at 11:00. In one of the movie's most compelling lines, Mark says to Eduardo, "You want to shut the party down!" (Just for the record, I think the most compelling line is uttered by Eduardo as he heads out to the Facebook offices by Mark's invitation. It went something like this: "I didn't know if I'd been invited to the meeting or the party, so I dressed for both." Random, I know, but it seemed markedly funny to me in a deadpan way set against the movie's otherwise humorless backdrop.)

As a thinker and fellow creative type, I respected Mark's vision and his commitment to his project. He'd dreamed up something big, and in his own weird way, he was true to it. But he wasn't a very nice guy, and on more human grounds I didn't like him at all. Not the way he trashed his ex-girlfriend online or the way he took $19K of his best friend's money for start-up fees and then cheated him out of his shares (on the very night when poor hapless Eduardo was wondering if he'd been invited to California to crunch numbers or party down). Movies in which you can't root for the main character are always difficult to enjoy, and The Social Network was no exception. It was informative and engaging in an academic sort of way. But it was in no way the kind of stirring human drama I'd anticipated. I'd been ready for Internet-bred social upheaval (in "You wrote what about me on Facebook?!" fashion) and a classic little guy against big, bad corporate (or in this case, academic) America tale. What I got was a dry documentary headlined by a misanthrope in a hoodie.