Cabbage Patch Outfits

To be cliché, the 1990s was a simpler time — a time before social networks such as Facebook or MySpace or even Friendster. The Internet was still in its infancy, dominated by powerhouse providers such as AOL. There was no Wikipedia or "blogosphere" and individual opinions were relegated to Angelfire or Geocities pages in sparse, rarely-traveled corners of the Web.

If you wanted to communicate with someone through our dial-up dinosaur modems, you could either waste an hour on instant messenger sending a handful of sentences back and forth or risk being targeted by some serial killer in a chat room. Cell phones were still a ways off for us and texting even further down the road.

We had the mall, the original social network site.

I guess it was inevitable that we gravitated toward the mall. By the time we’d reached our teens, my generation was already fully indoctrinated into the cult of consumerism. After all, we were the product of parents who had literally fought one another for Cabbage Patch Kids and Power Rangers action figures each Christmas; we were babysat by Saturday morning cartoons that were little more than thinly-veiled toy commercials. And with the disappearance of main streets throughout suburban America, the local mall became quite literally the only place for teens too young to drive to hang out.

Consequently, every weekend, between 7 grade, my friends and I would descend upon the Ocean County Mall like Romero’s zombies, wreaking some serious PG-13-level havoc.

Now the Ocean County Mall from my memories is a vastly different place than the one that sits perched on the corner of Hooper and Bay avenues today. Prior to being purchased and renovated by the Simon Property Groups Inc., the Ocean County Mall was dank and outdated. People drove to the Monmouth Mall or Freehold Raceway Mall to shop. The OCM was strictly for loitering; one needed to look no further than the labyrinth of brown-tiled planter/benches that serpentined the main concourse for proof of that.