Saturday Night at the Mall Autograph

I always assume most of the country is like the St. Louis region, which I've lived in for my whole life. Routinely, I find out things I find normal are actually unique to our region. For example, apparently we're in the minority of the country in using the name Soda, whereas many more people use Pop or Coke, which sound weird when I hear them.

One of those things that's been "the way things are" in this area (and maybe yours, I don't know) for many years is that teens and preteens hang out at the mall on Fridays and/or Saturdays. It's from about whatever age the parents are comfortable dropping them off alone for a few hours, until around driving age. As a result, not only are our malls packed with extra shoppers on those evenings, they are packed with herds of kids. As a result, I generally avoid going to the mall on those evenings if I can, preferring to go during the day Saturday if there's really something I need there. But, the Cardinals had a day game Saturday, and one of the local memorabilia stores held a signing at 6:30pm. I decided to brave the crowds and meet Randal Grichuk

Randal Grichuk 15

He was a few minutes late (totally understandable and expected on a game day), and I bought my ticket as a walk-up so my line number was pretty high, so I had plenty of time to people watch in line. I saw kids dressed as anime characters complete with brightly colored wigs, teens dressed for the prom, and plenty of people who were craning their necks around to try to see who we were all waiting for. I always seem to have an inordinate number of strangers approach me in life, and keeping with tradition, for some reason I was the one people would ask "who's here?". Some seemed to have no idea who I was talking about when I said Randal Grichuk, and said "ah, cool" and moved on. My favorite one of those was a guy wearing this shirt:

Bill Murray

Once Grichuk arrived, the line moved pretty quickly. I got a ball signed, as you can see above. A young girl in front of me was having a photo signed, which showed him and her at a previous signing. I was imagining how I'd frame and display a set of photos like that to really show off the inception-like nature. For now, though, I'll stick with my baseball collection I suppose.