The Aurora Mall found a surefire way to keep teens away from the food court Friday night: Go Gershwin on them.
A jazz quartet took the mall back in time, with a 50-something platinum blond cooing, ” ‘S-wonderful! ‘S-marvelous! That you should care for me!”
It wasn’t so ‘s-marvelous for the teens.
At least it wasn’t Stravinsky.
The official clampdown starts Sept. 23, when security guards will begin checking IDs and asking unaccompanied teens under 17 to leave.
Leave to go where?
The mall administrators don’t know. The mall is a business, and if a bunch of kids in baggy clothes intimidate patrons, then they’ve got to go. It doesn’t matter if many of those kids don’t cause trouble.
The policy leaves teens in Aurora with one less safe place to go. It’s the same thing that’s happening to suburban teens being shooed away from parking lots.
Instead of dealing with unruly kids by calling their parents or even banning those who don’t know how to behave, the mall decided to adopt a zero-tolerance policy: Zero teens under 17 can enter the mall after 5 p.m. on Friday and Saturday unless they’re with an adult.
Any other time they’re welcome to come and empty their wallets.
Dozens of adults have written and called me to say they applaud the mall policy.
“Where did you get the idea that the mall is supposed to be a playground for unruly, unsupervised teens?” wrote Scott Wyatt, a 41-year-old from Aurora who has a teenage son.
Unruly kids should be dealt with separately. The ones who behave should be able to shop with their friends, play at the arcade there and afterward get a Coke and slice of pizza at the food court.
If a 16-year-old can work at the mall, shouldn’t he be able to shop there?
Wyatt disagrees: Parents shouldn’t let their kids go to the mall on their own. He said unsupervised teens might run off from there and go have sex or to do drugs. He said he never lets his son Cory go without him or his stepmom.
I wanted to get Wyatt’s observations on the first night of the curfew, so we met at the mall. We walked around, checking out the teens. We didn’t find any lewd behavior or loudmouthed teens, just boys swimming in their oversized clothing.
I told him if the guys could trim their shirts and pants there would be enough fabric to cover up some of the girls.
That’s when Wyatt, a blond-haired, blue-eyed conservative, revealed that his son dresses the same way.
I later spoke to Cory. He said he thinks the mall policy “is just overkill.”
He contradicted his father, saying he has gone to the mall plenty of times without him. But when he goes to the Aurora Mall with his friends, they are eyed with suspicion because of the way they dress.
“The security guards follow us,” Cory said. He said they try to eavesdrop on their conversations. He doubts the policy will alleviate fears adults have, because the unruly teens tend to be older anyway and not subject to the curfew.
After several discussions, Cory and his dad came to agree that the new mall policy may not be the answer.
Wyatt said the two of them now realize the curfew won’t stop unruly behavior. It’ll just give teens one less safe option on a Friday night.
Cindy Rodriguez’s column appears Tuesdays and Thursdays in Scene. Contact her at 303-820-1211 or crodriguez@denverpost.com.
