On a recent weekend morning, a blaze of neon cut through the air-conditioned halls of the Lloyd Center mall.
It’s a workout group led by a woman wearing a windbreaker jacket, a headset mic and a high ponytail. “Sisters Are Doin’ It for Themselves” plays from her Bluetooth speaker.
“Are those arms moving people?” she asks her followers. “Show off those guns!”
Every Sunday morning, Vera Mysteria (the stage name of Krista Catwood) leads about two dozen people on a fast-paced power walk across the three-story mall. She calls it the Food Court 5000.
They march through the normally quiet corridors of Lloyd Center in a neon and nylon frenzy, blaring a soundtrack of 1980s pop dance hits to the surprise, delight and sometimes indifference of other mall goers.
On average, the Food Court 5000 covers about 3.5 miles in under two hours.
“It’s the funnest thing I do of all my activities,” said Leslie Kelinson, the self-described oldest member of the group at 80 years old. “This takes you out of your comfort zone and gets you to do crazy things.”
The group strikes a pose on every escalator and waves at every passerby. Kelinson says the mall walkers get one of two reactions from the bewildered people they pass.
“They’re either really gracious and wave back, or they freeze,” she said. “They don’t know what to do. I mean, we’re zany, and Lloyd Center’s pretty sedate, and we come through like gangbusters.”
The Food Court 5000 began about five months ago. For her day job, Krista Catwood is a business operations analyst for AARP Oregon. But as her alter-ego Vera Mysteria, she’s been hosting and producing burlesque and drag shows in Portland for more than 15 years.
“I came up with this because I hate working out,” Catwood said. “If I need to move my body, there needs to be costumes involved, there needs to be other people involved. So, this scratches a lot of the itches for me. It’s fun, kooky music that I love, and it’s getting together groups of people to also be weirdos in public.”
The result is, as the Food Court 5000 website states, “part workout, part performance art, and all-around a great excuse to take over a shopping mall in the name of nostalgia and movement.”
The weekly mall walks are free and open for anyone to attend. Eighties-attire is encouraged but not required. There are only a few “rules” for the Food Court 5000: wave to absolutely everyone you pass, wait for others (because no walker is left behind), and you must pump your arms during the whole affair.
“Otherwise, you’re just walking at the mall, you’re not mall walking,” Catwood said.
The walkers meet every Sunday at 11 a.m. in the Lloyd Center food court. But this reporter joined them for a special Saturday edition of the Food Court 5000 that coincided with the Mall Crawl, a new monthly promotion organized by Lloyd Center retail tenants. The idea is to hold sales, raffles and other specials the second Saturday of each month to entice people to the Northeast Portland mall that is, indeed, still open.
While many of the storefronts are vacant and the anchor tenants are all gone, Lloyd Center has attracted a handful of indie shops, nonprofits and experience-based businesses. A Star Wars-themed light saber store and sparring space opened in May. The old Spencer’s is now a pinball museum. A roller skating academy opened in what was once a Finish Line.
Floating World Comics, Gambits Cards and Anime, Brickdiculous (a LEGO store) and dicepool, a tabletop game shop, all call Lloyd Center home.
The mall directory lists more than 70 active tenants, and about 50 of those are retailers or organizations open to the public.
“The vibe at the Lloyd Center mall is just magic,” Catwood said, describing the mall as “in her punk rock era. It’s a transitory phase, where most of the staple stores have left, a lot of the major franchise stores have gone, and so what’s left is a lot of nonprofits, a lot of organizations. We’ve got independent businesses and groups that meet here, and so it’s an accessible third place. It’s free for us and other groups to come and meet up, and there’s really no other mall that I know of like it.”
Mall walker Venessa Jensen took a quick detour during a recent Food Court 5000 to buy a pair of fuzzy green sneakers she’d been eyeing at shoe store Shiekh.
“My family home is two blocks away from Lloyd Center,” she said. “So, I’ve seen Lloyd’s Center in all of its glory, and this is just a lot of fun to be a part of it when it’s doing this weird, nerdy, creative community space vibe. I described it a few weeks ago as it’s having a half-life as kind of an Avalonian, nerdy fairyland of whatever goes.”
For those interested in joining the mall walkers, learn more about the Food Court 5000 at foodcourt5k.com. Find out about the next Lloyd Mall Crawl by following the event’s Instagram page.
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