Marking the quirky last chapter of Portland’s Lloyd Center

Portland’s Lloyd Center is scheduled to close Aug. 8 after more than 65 years in business.

The current owner, Urban Renaissance Group, plans to demolish the mall to make way for housing, businesses and a new music venue. Groups such as Save Lloyd Center Mall and the Save Lloyd Ice Coalition are holding out hope that a city hearing in June could prevent the mall’s closure, but it seems likely that the Lloyd Center is in its final days.

After its last anchor stores shuttered in 2021, the mall’s low rents and large usable space attracted a wide array of community groups and independent retailers. In its last incarnation, the mall became a hub for the kind of quirky community that Portland prides itself on.

We’ll listen back to three conversations that capture that recent era: Jason Leivian is the owner of Floating World Comics. We spoke with him in 2022, shortly after he relocated his store from Old Town to the Lloyd Center.

In 2023, we talked about a production of Samuel Beckett’s “Happy Days” that was staged in a former Victoria’s Secret store in the Lloyd Center. It was put on by the Northwest Classical Theatre Collaborative, which aims to bring theater to nontraditional spaces. We were joined by director Patrick Walsh, the collaborative’s executive artistic director, and Portland actress Diane Kondrat, who starred as “Winnie” in the play.

Finally, Krista Catwood joined us last summer to talk about the Food Court 5000. That’s a 1980s-themed mall walk that Catwood leads every Sunday morning in the Lloyd Center.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Portland’s Lloyd Center Mall is scheduled to close on August 8 after more than 65 years. The current owners, Urban Renaissance Group, plan to demolish the mall and make way for housing, businesses and a new music venue. Groups like Save Lloyd Center Mall and Save Lloyd Ice Coalition are holding out hope that a city hearing in June could prevent the mall’s closure. But at this point it seems likely that the Lloyd Center Mall really is in its final days.

To be clear, it’s been a slow and weird wind down. The mall’s last anchor stores closed in 2021. Then something surprising happened. A wide array of community groups and independent retailers arrived, attracted by low rents and lots of usable space, and the mall became a hub for quirky community, a site for gallery shows and secret roller discos and live theater. We wanted to commemorate that era in the Lloyd Center’s history, its final incarnation when a dying Portland mall became its most Portland-y.

So we’re going to revisit three conversations that capture that essence, starting with Floating World Comics. Owner Jason Leivian originally opened the store in Old Town in 2006. He stayed there through a recession, pandemic shutdowns, and the escalating debates around homelessness that often centered on the neighborhood. Leivian eventually decided to move across the river to the Lloyd Center. We talked to him just after Floating World reopened there in 2022. I started by asking him what his dream for the store was when it first opened.

Jason Leivian: I wanted to have a shop that encompassed all of my interest in comics, which includes mainstream comics, underground comics, independent comics, self published zines. And I wanted it to be a place where people could come in and sell their zines in the store, and for it to become part of the Art community. And we did that through our First Thursday Art Shows. Then that worked out well and we started branching out into publishing and putting together all sorts of other events. So yeah, that all came together really well at the beginning.

Miller: Why did you choose Old Town to start?

Leivian: The shop first started in a little active space in Northwest, underneath the I-405 freeway where I could just find a little month to month spot and that was like, it was a good place to start but there wasn’t many people walking by out there, but it was a good destination spot. We actually had people coming out every day. Then a painter from the active space, he told me he had just moved to a studio in the Goldsmith Blocks, at Fifth and Couch. So that got my attention and I moved over there and that’s where we started for the first six, sixteen years and being in that location, you know, it connected us to those First Thursday Art Openings that were happening all in the neighborhood with all the galleries there, you know, we had Compound Gallery, Upper Playground, Everett Station Lofts. So yeah, those were some good times in the first ten years or so.

Miller: What was the vibe like at that time in that neighborhood?

Leivian: I remember it was kind of sleepy and quiet compared to rest of downtown, parking was definitely much easier and I mainly just have a lot of great memories about those First Thursdays when you just get so many people coming out to those Art Shows and we have people coming in the door, spilling over from the other galleries. And I just got to meet so many great artists in the community, so many great artists traveling from around the country and the world. Yeah, there was a lot of exciting events going on back then.

Miller: What has it meant to you as a Chinese-American small business owner to be in Old Town Chinatown to start this business in a place that has a lot of history?

Leivian: I feel like the importance and relevance of that to me is just something that emerged and it wasn’t something, growing up that I ever thought about, and maybe that’s the experience of a lot of Chinese-Americans where we grew up as Americans and I don’t think about, but I didn’t think about my Chinese identity or Heritage as much when I was a kid. Then, growing older you start to realize like, well, this is a part of me that’s maybe missing and as you start to find different ways to access it, either through my family or traveling back to Taiwan or China or things here like being in Chinatown. It kind of opened my eyes to, and I’m like, well this is a part of my identity and I’m actually proud of it and I guess I never realized that it was absent, you know, growing up, and so now I feel just fortunate that I’ve been able to discover a way to, to access that part of my identity.

Miller: Can you give us a sense for what the last two and a half years have been like running a business in this neighborhood?

Leivian: The big thing was the pandemic, and the shutdown, which is what? March of 2020, that felt like the end of the world. It felt like the end of the business. We essentially closed, we laid off all of our staff and this was before, like I’d been following the news so I knew that they were working on something like the PPP, I knew that they were working on something, but it hadn’t passed yet, that those funds weren’t available. So that was a crazy time for everyone. And it felt like you know, once the PPP came in, we felt like we were starting a new business from scratch, which was essentially our online business. So you know we’re doing curbside pickup, we’re going into the store to ship, do shipping fulfillment but we’re not open to customers. So it felt like my business ended and then I had to pick up the pieces and put it back together. Eventually, the…

[Overlapping voices]

Miller: Can I ask, you know there’s a financial piece, here, which is gigantic, but there’s also the social or emotional one.

Leivian: Yeah…

Miller: It was, up to that point was your experience of running the store. I mean how important was it to have people inside the store as opposed to just having them be names and credit card numbers for orders…

Leivian: Exactly…yeah…

Miller: …you could fulfill?

Leivian: To me, emotionally, that’s all of it. That’s what it’s all about. And so to lose that, yeah, we, I was glad that we were able to pivot and do some online sales but I don’t find that fun. Like it’s you know, posting books on Instagram and selling them. There was a few moments, early COVID, when there was some novelty of doing the hybrid thing and doing online events. But man, there’s just no replacement. In the two years since we reopened, that component never fully came back. We never got quite as busy as it used to be. We weren’t seeing as many visitors and I think I might have mentioned it in the press release. Just, it feels like I haven’t had any fun at work. It’s been just kind of boring for the last two years…

Miller: Because people aren’t coming in to the same extent?

Leivian: Yeah, not as many, it felt just more like work. I was like, okay, I’m going to work and we’ll make some sales today, but we’re definitely missing that huge social component when we used to have monthly book release events and yeah, so losing that is a huge emotional below and yeah, I mean like having to close the store, back at the beginning of the pandemic, that felt like the end, it felt like the end of the store, you know, and then emotionally, I had to rebuild it, you know.

Miller: In your press release or farewell letter or pivot letter, whatever you might call it. One thing you didn’t mention was homelessness and it was a striking omission or choice largely because your business is, as I noted in the intro, it really is in so many ways the epicenter of public discussions and even public policies about how…

Leivian: Yeah.

Miller: …they should deal with homelessness and other business owners who are your neighbors have been very public saying this is a catastrophe, a crisis – city,...

Leivian: Oh, yeah.

Miller: …do something, and there’s not, there are a lot of different points of view about that, about what the city should do,...

Leivian: Yeah.

Miller: …but it’s not something you mentioned in the letter and I’m curious why?

Leivian: Yeah, it absolutely is a crisis that needs to be dealt with. I didn’t put it in the letter because the homelessness wasn’t a primary factor in me moving, those elements have always been in Old Town throughout the history of the store. The difference is, previously, I guess that stuff could be kind of in the background when you had so many people working downtown and so much life and energy going on and all these things. And since the pandemic, you don’t have people working downtown, the streets are basically empty except for the homelessness. So the contrast is so striking and now it’s like yeah, basically, I guess I left it out of the letter because I just, that’s like a whole other huge discussion that’s important to have. But it didn’t particularly, to me, it didn’t seem particularly relevant to this move or this change. So I left it out of that.

Miller: If you’re just tuning in, we’re talking right now with Jason Leivian and the owner of Floating World Comics for sixteen years, the store was based in Portland’s Old Town Chinatown. Today is its First Day, a kind of soft opening in its new location in the Lloyd Center Mall. I want to read a few sentences from that letter that you wrote because they really stood out to me, you wrote this: ‘Something felt out of step, It didn’t feel right to try and go back to business as usual. Everything is still pretty weird. And I started feeling that surreal sense of liberation from the early days of the pandemic, when anything seemed possible and we might actually try something new.’ So what did you decide to try?

Leivian: Right. So, that out of step feeling is, I was looking around, of where else to move. I looked at some other neighborhoods and it seemed like all the rents have kind of gone back to pre-pandemic prices and I’m just thinking like I don’t feel like I’m quite there yet, I don’t feel like we’re quite there yet, and…

Miller: Meaning if you’re going to pay full pandemic prices, you’d want full pre-pandemic business and you don’t think you can get that right now.

Leivian: Yeah, that’s a part of it. And also a lot of like I don’t know, I feel like, I look at a lot of the neighborhoods and I don’t feel like they’re fully quite back yet. We’re still not quite there and you know that feeling of wanting to try something new. So I remembered that my friend Tony had just opened up his record store at the Lloyd Center. I saw his instagram post. And of course my first reaction was like, ‘I didn’t even know the Lloyd Center was still open.’ So I contacted him and asked him how it was going and he says, ‘It’s going great, so far, like we’re a destination spot. Our customers are coming and finding us, we’re doing shows here, we’re having like weekly DJ parties and the Lloyd Center is all for it. They’re just letting us, you know, have these great parties because they just want to bring more people in.’ So I’m like all right, I’m gonna come down there tomorrow and take a look. So I did a couple visits, you know, all week. I kept coming back to the Lloyd Center to see what the foot traffic was like. I was basically trying to find reasons why this would be a bad idea. You know, I’m like, this seems so crazy. Like I’m gonna go there and, and silly, but I came and I did not find those reasons to deter me. And actually I just kept getting more excited the more that I came here and I couldn’t stop thinking about it, to the point where it’s like, oh my gosh, I think I’m actually gonna do this and I think we can make this work.

Miller: Your friend’s record store, called Music Plastique; there’s an article about it just today in the latest issue of Willamette Week and the writer there noted that the record stores had some events and has been buzzing with activity, he said. But he also said that much of the Lloyd Center quote,’Still feels like a lawless ghost town with kids on skateboards,...’

Leivian: Laughing…

Miller: ‘…sailing past the many vacant storefronts.’ Is that a feature or a bug for you?

Leivian: To me, it’s kind of a feature, that energy is pretty great. Those kids don’t seem like the ones that I’ve seen skating around, they just seem to be having fun, and it’s a different sort of lawless energy than say, what I’m used to in Old Town.

Miller: You can handle some kids on skateboards?

Leivian: Yeah, completely. And it reminds me…

Miller: But, does that mean… it’s, sorry, what did you say? What does it remind you of?

Leivian: It reminds me of when I started my shop, like sixteen years ago, back in Old Town, that youthful energy. I don’t know, it’s exciting and invigorating to me and I think, the Lloyd Center is gonna want to find a balance. Of course, they don’t want skaters too to make their customers feel deterred or uncomfortable, so, who knows how long that will last, but…

Miller: What’s the vision for what the Lloyd Center could turn into? I mean, Music Plastique and you are kind of the, some of the early arrivals of Lloyd Center, 2.0 or 10.0 or whatever it’s going to be, and I think some others are possible, but we’re still talking about a relatively small number of independent Portland businesses in a big space. What’s your vision?

Leivian: Yeah, so this, to me, is the truly exciting part and this is what I couldn’t stop thinking about when the idea first came to move here. So the rents are very affordable here. I mean, any businesses out there that are not happy with the location that they’re at or maybe businesses that closed during COVID and they just never thought that they would reopen. I mean there’s a huge opportunity here. You can come down, find a space that might look good for your business, and it’s fun when you lease a space here, you get, like all the fixtures that were left behind by the last store. So I’m in the old Torrid space, which is just a nice big retail space, but we got a lot of like, shelves and fixtures left behind. So those are kind of fun amenities. We have, the bigger vision is what if every cool, you know, business and artist that we love about Portland, the things that have made Portland great for the last twenty years and you know, a lot of those spaces have found it tougher to get a foothold with rents increasing. Like this feels, like when I talked about that renewed feeling of possibility, you know, from the early days of the pandemic, like this is that opportunity, this is Portland twenty years ago, when rents were affordable enough for artists to try things and you could have like an art incubator, like how amazing would that be if we had like an Indie Mall, like all of our favorite Portland businesses and possibly restaurants, you know, here in one spot, like what if the food… what if the Food Court got built out the way like Pine Street Market was going, you know, with like the best restaurants in town doing their take on mall food…

Miller: You know, where my brain immediately goes is, let’s say this really does work, that your vision you just outlined really works. I imagine that in fifteen years, then there’s retail gentrification and Banana Republic says, ‘Hey, there’s a mall here that we’ll move into it,’ and you all get kicked out again. But that’s maybe just the way the world goes.

Leivian: Yeah, let’s reset the cycle. That’s the problem. I guess we would deal with fifteen years from now, and like we’re thinking big, you have to think outside of the box when you’re like, ‘What do we do with this big space? Like what are you gonna do with the anchor?’ There’s obviously no retails or you’re not, you’re not gonna get a grocery store probably, moving into any of those anchor stores, but one of my employees, Sam Ashhurst is a Filmmaker from the UK, moved here recently and he had this amazing brainstorm that he was talking to one of my customers who works in the TV industry here and he’s like, ‘Well, how’s filming been going in Portland?’ And the conversation was like, well actually the filming is slowing down. It’s harder. A lot of the studios are leaving because it’s getting more expensive here in Portland. It’s getting harder to find spaces to film. And then we had just been talking about all these big spaces here, like, you know, the empty Macys and Nike and Nordstroms and so the idea is that there’s possible grant money available. We want to talk to city officials about this. And I’ve even talked to Tom Kilburn, the owner, I kind of planted the seed with the new owner at Lloyd Center and he’s like, ‘Oh, this sounds interesting, let’s keep pursuing it.’ But anyway, the idea is what if we took one of those floors and soundproofed it and then you could build a sound stage in there an independent you know, movie studio that television and film can rent out, but also make it very accessible and kind of like sliding scale for independent filmmakers to come in and use as well. And I’m like, that is such an amazing, you know, out of the box way of thinking about using a huge space like that, you know, so just ideas like that, just keep coming. And I mean we’ve only been doing this for a couple weeks and it’s just like every day, new ideas are coming in.

Miller: Is anybody outside walking past the store right now?

Leivian: It’s just employees right now, but I just waved one of my neighbors here, but while we’ve been moving in, it’s been really fun, just seeing people look at the posters in our window, people waving at us and cheering us on as we build the store. So that’s been pretty cool, too.

Miller: That was Jason Levian, the owner of Floating World Comics. We spoke to him in 2022. The store will be moving to Pioneer Place Mall this summer. We are remembering Portland’s Lloyd Center today. It’s scheduled to close in August.

In the last few years, the mall became an unlikely place for artists to try out different creative experiments. One of those projects was a 2023 production of a Samuel Beckett play called “Happy Days.” It was put on by the Northwest Classical Theater Collaborative, which aims to bring theater to underserved communities in non-traditional spaces. This show was no exception. The play was staged in a former Victoria’s Secret in the Lloyd Center. Portland actress Diane Kondrat starred as Winnie. She joined us along with Patrick Walsh, who directed the play and served as the executive artistic director of the Collaborative. I asked him how he decided to put on this play in the old Victoria’s Secret.

Walsh: Yeah, I mean, Northwest Classical Theater Collaboratives mission is kind of to make theater accessible and bring it to different audiences. Unfortunately, since the pandemic, we haven’t really been able to fulfill that mission. So the board and myself from the last, really year, we’ve decided, in this time, everybody is really underserved. So, especially in Portland proper, how are we able to bring art and bring people to this place? And basically I called the Lloyd Center and they were super game to be able to put this play on. And then we kind of just moved forward. And so the last year has been producing, it’s been figuring it out, it’s been casting, it’s been rehearsing, it’s been doing tech rehearsals. And we’re just really lucky to be able to partner with the Lloyd Center on this as well.

Miller: So you called them and they were very excited. I mean, clearly they’re doing all kinds of things to try to figure out what they are and how they can not cease to exist. What was it like the first time you walked into the closed store?

Walsh: I got a tour of all the spaces that were available. And when I went into the Victoria’s Secret, this big gust of wind kind of comes at you because nobody’s been in there in a while and you just walk in and I was like, oh God, this is perfect, this is perfect.

Miller: Why? What did you see that made you say that?

Walsh: So much space that we could use. Like so many ways to make the themes of “Happy Days” make sense. So much of what Winnie talks about in the play is that I’m being watched and also like what my worth is, like as a woman, as a human being in this place and what that means as you get older too as you like age out of a certain archetype. And so just seeing that, thinking about all the people who used to use this space, walking around, looking, watching. I was just struck by it. I was like, oh, this is going to be perfect. This is gonna be absolutely perfect.

Miller: Diane, can you describe “Happy Days” for people who are not familiar with it?

Kondrat: It’s non-linear. It’s poetic. It’s intensely emotional. The highs and lows of the amusement park ride that Winnie’s on, go very fast and you don’t see the turns coming, so it’s a real visceral experience for people. Opening night, there was a skating party in the mall and some people who saw the show didn’t even hear the music because they were so focused on Winnie and, and the show. But you could hear it. It was a lot, but it didn’t matter because you try to figure it out as an audience member. You’re feeling all this stuff, but you’re also wanting it to make sense. So you go on a real ride with a master writer.

Miller: I’m totally intrigued by your saying that the audience is trying to figure it out, because they don’t know what’s going on. It’s one of the things that I liked about it. At no point does Beckett tell us why your character is stuck there. I mean, for example, we don’t find out that this is punishment for something that she’s done. She’s just there and she has to deal with it and we as the audience have to deal with it. But you as a performer, does it help you to come up with some back story to think about why you’re there?

Kondrat: We talked about this in rehearsal. Those kinds of questions are so big that it almost doesn’t serve. I do have understories for a lot of what happens to her and why she feels the way she does. But as far as history goes, who knows? Is she there for a month? Has she been there for 1,000 years? Who knows? And Beckett, like you said, is not one to answer such questions. So those are the big sorts of ideas that none of us have answers for in the world. Why things are the way they are. Why is some person plagued with disease and somebody else rich, rich, rich and happy and has nothing wrong? I don’t know, just that way.

Miller: As an audience member, it seems that one of the challenges for you, as a performer here, is just threading the needle between humor and horror. I mean, and real horror, being stuck, maybe forever. We don’t know. How do you balance those two poles?

Kondrat: My favorite form of theater is dark comedy. And so I like that anyway,

because when things are very, very dark, you better be able to laugh your head off, because if you can’t, then you have to make another even darker choice. So for me, it just seems natural to turn on a dime like that, emotionally. It’s just that Winnie does it faster than me and she’s far more optimistic, as Patrick can attest, than I am as a person. So, I’ve met people like this. It isn’t me who, when faced with horrific situations, brightens up and carries everyone with them. And that’s what Winnie’s like. Except she doesn’t have a lot of people to carry, except for Willie.

Miller: Does it feel authentic? I mean, is it real good cheer or is it forced?

Kondrat: It’s necessary for her. And in that, yes, it’s real because she would feel it if it wasn’t real, right? It wouldn’t do the job for her. It wouldn’t save her if her enthusiasm wasn’t actual, not to say she doesn’t fall back down the mountain. But she’s always, well, “let’s push that boulder out of the way and put the picks in the wall and keep going” because she has to, that’s her job that Samuel Beckett has given her.

Miller: I read in Oregon Arts Watch that you drew on your background in clown technique for this role. What is clown technique in the classic theater sense? And how did it help you?

Kondrat: Clown is a sacred art that I wish I could become cogent in before I die. I’ve taken some workshops with some masters, but my work in the past has been verbal. Clown work is a lot more physically based in a lot of situations. So, since she’s from the waist up only, in the show, until things get worse, the timing of gestures and the imagery in gestures has been the biggest thing that I’ve relied on to illuminate the script. Also because Beckett very clearly has said that he actually loves clowns and loves what they do. And of course, they illuminate a basis of humanity that goes beyond language. So you’ve got all this language from Beckett. And then I try to bring physicality and timing that can support that, so you have an even bigger picture of emotionality. It’s not just talk. There are times like when words fail, when he says, what do you do when words fail? You have to figure out some other way to be funny.

Miller: Patrick, how did you change the space to make it what you wanted?

Walsh: Well, I mean, just to start off with, we had an excellent design team like Molly Stowe on lights and Kira Bishop on set and Jessica Cruz on costumes. So we basically closed off the entire thing and most of it is behind plastic sheeting, so when you walk in the front door, you’re immediately . . . and there are sounds that are coming from behind the sheeting, there’s like lighting that’s happening to kind of put the audience into a journey. And like we’re going to watch this play, we’re taking you out of our world and we’re moving towards something else which leads to this area in the back that we’ve curtained off with red curtains and that is where Diane starts the play, kind of buried up to her waist.

So we’ve really transformed the entire space, but we’re not trying to hide it’s a Victoria’s Secret at all. I mean, it’s part of that. We’re saying that this woman was in this place and this earth kind of came up and grabbed her, at some point.

Miller: Patrick, sometimes an audience member has to stretch a little bit to find contemporary resonances with older works of art of various kinds. With this play, you don’t have to work at all. It’s painfully inescapable that the resonance of climate change is one of the reasons. We could talk about others. In one scene, Diane’s character, she’s stuck in this hellscape that is getting unbearably hot and all she has to withstand this sun, perhaps, is a measly umbrella. What were you going for in that scene in particular?

Walsh: I mean, I just think [of] the existential dread that we’re all going through right now, particularly in a string of 107-degree days that we have to deal with. It’s not so much that the scene is so much about her not being able to let go, or her not being able to like move forward, this idea of stasis. But also the idea that we can’t, that all of us, all the time are facing like, what are we gonna do about this heat? What are we gonna do about these problems? What are we gonna do about homelessness on our streets? And that you can feel really frozen and stuck. And so, as we were moving through, that was something that we talked about all the time. I think we all feel so trapped, so isolated in an age of climate change and in the time of COVID and we were trying to bring out that existential ennui for the whole audience.

Miller: And Diane, I mean, one of the biggest themes that your character is grappling with or painful emotions is just, is anybody listening? Can anybody hear me? At one point, there’s another character, this husband character who talks a little bit, grunts sometimes, makes various bodily noises. And all your character wants is some acknowledgement, often that he’s there. I mean, literally will he just move his little finger? It’s like a “like” button. Is anybody hearing me? I’m screaming into the void. What is it like to be a performer who’s asking, “can you hear me?”

Kondrat: Playing Winnie is a wonderful gift. And there are times . . . our tickets are $10 and so there are people who have bought tickets. I talked to somebody the other day who said, “I love this because it’s in the mall.” No idea about the show. No idea. For some people, about theater etiquette, we’ll call it. So I do see things, I hear things from the audience and sometimes I hear nothing. Beckett is mystifying, and in those moments when there is nothing, then her plight comes completely into my heart.

Miller: Because hearing nothing is different from hearing an engaged audience that’s being quiet?

Kondrat: Yes. And, particularly in this space, one of the things . . . we’re in like a little keyhole in the rectangle of Victoria’s Secret. So the acoustics in this space are fabulous. You not only have the potential to echo through this big rectangular space, but you can almost be as if you’re on the radio, in this space, you can be really quiet. So I have both things and when no one’s listening, as she says, in the second act, that is what I find so wonderful, eyes on my eyes. There’s nothing to replace the connection between human beings in the real world. And that’s why theater still exists, in spite of movies, in spite of the internet, in spite of everything else, we learn as human beings by story and by shared emotional experiences. So it’s really fabulous to have an audience and it’s horrifying to have none, to feel the emptiness, which certainly was my situation at the end of rehearsals when we’d done all our work. And it was like, OK, we’re ready for somebody to come and it’s like, nope, nobody’s here. It’s illuminating, I’ll say.

Miller: Patrick, my understanding is that you were working in theater in New York City when you came out to direct your first production for Northwest Classical Theater Collaborative. What was that experience like for you?

Walsh: I mean, I’ve stayed, so it was great [Laughter].

Miller: It was a disaster. Never came back [Laughter].

Walsh: Yeah. I mean, I love it here. I love it here. I love the audiences. I love the people. I love the fact that every other place that I’ve ever been to before, like the first word you always hear is ‘no’ from somebody if they don’t want to do something, right? Like if I called a mall in New York, they would just tell me to go away. But it’s like here, I called the Lloyd Center and they’re like, that sounds great, we would love to help you with that. And everybody’s like that here. As long as you bring them an idea, people are so willing and kind to help and they’re so game for anything.

So my first experience coming out here, almost nine years ago now, was just absolutely fantastic. And I’m just so happy to be here and be part of this community, even while we’re all kind of dealing with all these things that are happening around us all the time.

Miller: What have your experiences been like in mounting productions in prisons in Oregon?

Walsh: Well, I have two experiences. One is that we tour shows and I’m also kind of a long-term volunteer at the Department of Corrections. So I’ve directed adults in custody in three plays up at Two Rivers Correctional in Umatilla.

Miller: So, adults in custody, both as audience members and as actors.

Walsh: Yes, sir.

Miller: Do any stories stand out from both of those different versions of making theater?

Walsh: I think just in natural, like when you’re making theater in a traditional space, you ask all the time, like is anything that I’m doing . . . a lot like Winnie, like you’re screaming into the void, like is the way that I naturally participate in the world affecting anybody? And the thing that I will say is that before I started doing this sort of work in non-traditional spaces, I would say I had one moment ever of being in a rehearsal room or seeing a show of what I would just call true transcendence. And you don’t know me very well, Dave, but I never use that word. And when I would go up to Two Rivers or when I would do these shows in prisons or shelters, there would be two or three of those moments every single time.

Miller: Why? Why was it hitting people differently? And why were you picking that up?

Walsh: I think mostly because what I have learned is that the people who benefit the most from the arts traditionally have the least access to it. And the way that people like to bury or burrow into their lives to find resonance. I think when we live in a large urban center, we take it for granted that we can go to the museum, we can go to Portland Center Stage. We can see shows if we want to. For so many of our audiences, they had never seen a play before. They’d never seen a play, they’d never been to a museum, they never heard a musical instrument outside of maybe an acoustic guitar. And so being in that room, being in those rooms and being able to facilitate that growth, through artistic engagement and connection, is something I’ve never had in a traditional theatrical space.

Miller: It sounds like a lot of what you’re talking about is maybe first-time audience members. What about first-time actors?

Walsh: Oh, yeah. I mean, we did Hamlet up at Two Rivers and we split up Hamlet into seven different roles and there was one guy who was Hamlet and he was illiterate. I mean, he could not read, he had never learned to read. He was a 40-year-old man and by the end of it, he had memorized everything perfectly. And he delivered theatrical language like that, like he was born to it, and I still get goosebumps when I’m talking about it now. It’s like those moments of transcendence, those memories that I have. Because now when people ask me, are the arts important, I can give them 100 concrete examples.

Miller: Diane, we have just a minute left, what’s going through your mind in the 30 seconds before the curtain opens, when you know you have 90 minutes where it’s you - you are the show?

Kondrat: I can’t tell you my trigger. It’s a secret, but it is an imaginary circumstance that fuels her emotional life in the first moment. So I spend that time preparing to be fully present emotionally, when the bell rings and the lights come up and I can’t tell you because…

Miller: I didn’t even realize it was a secret. But you are in her head already and in a way that helps propel you as her for the next 90 minutes.

Kondrat: I’m playing around with the nerve I have for the whole first act. I must, I need, I have to. I can’t tell you what it is, but it’s an overarching emotional motivation.

Miller: Well, it worked, whatever it was.

Kondrat: Oh, yeah.

Miller: I will not ask you what it was.

Diane Kondrat and Patrick Walsh, thanks very much.

Kondrat: Thank you.

Walsh: Thank you so much, Dave.

Miller: We spoke with them in 2023 about the Northwest Classical Theater Collaborative’s production of “Happy Days.”

We end our remembrance of the Lloyd Center with the Food Court 5000. That is a group of neon-clad fitness enthusiasts who power walk their way around the mall every Sunday morning to a playlist of 1980s hits. The colorful crew is led by Krista Catwood, who also goes by the stage name Vera Mysteria. We talked with her last summer about the mall walk she pioneered. I started with a basic question: What is the Food Court 5000?

Catwood: So the Food Court 5000, like you mentioned, is a weekly retro mall walking group. It’s free. Anybody can join. And we meet up at the food court at Lloyd’s Center Mall. We start at the top, we do a lap around the top, the middle, bottom floor, then do it all over again. It’s 3.5 miles. So music is blaring, outfits are highly encouraged but not required. We’ve got folks dressed to the nines from 8 years old to 80 years old, like a neon wacky train chugging through the mall.

Miller: Why did you start this?

Catwood: I needed to. Honestly, I hate working out and I think one thing that we all universally agree on is that body movement is important. Exercising is important and I just cannot get motivated to do it. I have a long history of performing at events, so I said, OK, if I’m gonna work out, how am I going to get motivated to do it? I decided it needed to feel like an event. There needs to be costumes involved, it needs to be ridiculous and I wanted some sort of other people there so there’s accountability. And I flashed back on way back in the day when I used to work at Bridgeport Village and in the Washington Square Mall, seeing the mall walkers circle up in front of the shop that I worked at. I said, that’s it. That is absolutely what it needs to be.

Miller: What do you remember from watching those mall walkers? When was this?

Catwood: This was in, I would say like 2015-ish.

Miller: OK, so not that long ago.

Catwood: Not that long ago. What I remember … this specific group, there were two. There was a group of moms that would come with their strollers and they would circle up and do funny stretches in front of the shop. And then there was the older folks, who were 60-plus, mostly retirees who were coming through early in the morning. I remember laughing and thinking, that’s ridiculous. But as it turns out, ridiculous is one of my favorite things. So it made sense.

Miller: It’s funny how it didn’t even take that long for something you thought was ridiculous to turn into something that you loved doing.

Catwood: No, I love ridiculous things. My whole life has been quite involved around it.

Miller: Oh, ridiculous was good.

Catwood: It’s good ridiculous, yeah. And that’s the thing I feel like I end up saying about the mall walk a lot whenever I’m talking about it. I’m like, it’s stupid, stupid fun. You can’t be in a bad mood when you’re going on a mall walk and you’re surrounded by other people who are just full of joy and silly. It feels great.

Miller: How many people were at the very first one?

Catwood: We had about eight people at the first walk. Most of them were my friends. So when I decided that I thought this was an idea to do the mall walk, I sort of put it out there on Instagram and said, “who would do this with me?” And I had a bunch of people say they wanted to do it, but eight showed up. And then it just kept growing from there and we had about 50 people at our last walk.

Miller: Do people ever join you who are actually just at the mall for other reasons?

Catwood: One thousand percent. And I always try to sort of rope people in anyway. We have some rules – I’ll go over them later – for the Food Court 5000. One of them is that we wave at absolutely everybody. And so when I’m walking past people and they look like, I call them mall walkers in the wild. I’m like, “Oh my gosh, are you mall walking? Do you want to come join us?” So I try to rope them in.

We get teenagers who join us thinking they’re being funny, and they end up loving it and enjoying themselves. We get moms who are there with their strollers and pushing the strollers that end up joining in. And we have a lot of people who’ll pull one of us aside and say, “What’s going on? What are you guys doing?” And then they end up joining in subsequent weeks.

Miller: Alright, you said that you have rules.

Catwood: We do have rules.

Miller: One of them is you have to wave at every single person you go by.

Catwood: Absolutely.

Miller: It’s a lot of waving.

Catwood: It’s a lot of waving, but it’s fun. If you think about the psychology of smiling, it’s like science has proven if you smile, you feel better. It releases all these beautiful things in your brain. So as we’re walking along, we’re waving at the shop owners, we’re waving at unsuspecting mall patrons, we’re waving at kids, we’re cheering on the kids as they’re sliding down the slide in the play area. It just makes you feel good. And it’s fun to watch people get surprised at what’s going on and the look on their face. And most of the time, it’s a good surprise.

Miller: What are the other rules?

Catwood: OK, so you have to wave at everybody. The other rule is that when you are mall walking, you have to pump your arms like this. Because otherwise, if you’re not pumping your arms like this, you’re not mall walking, you’re just walking in the mall. So you have to show that you are an official mall walker. The other rule is that you have to listen to your body. I say I may look like a professional, but I’m not. So being the boss of your own body is crucial. One of the beautiful things about mall walking is anybody can do it, right?

We’ve got people who use assisted mobility devices who go on our mall walks. We have people who are in wheelchairs who go on our mall walks. We have people who are just out of surgery. I am not responsible for that, we are all responsible for ourselves. So that means if you need to take a break and sit down, if you want to relax in a massage chair, if you want to stop and go get an Auntie Anne’s you can, no one’s gonna judge you. So listening to your body, that’s the other one.

Miller: I mentioned that there’s a real ‘80s theme in this fashion-wise. Why?

Catwood: Because like I said, I personally need a costume to get really motivated to show up. It helps me to get in the zone. It’s like my mall walking uniform and it creates an excitement. It creates this event. It’s something to look forward to. You can spend the week looking for that perfect outfit. So for me it’s a major motivator, for a lot of people it’s a motivator. And it’s fun for people to start thinking about it. It gets you in the zone of party and fun.

Miller: Do you have a standard playlist or does it change?

Catwood: I have a massive playlist. So I have a long history and love of music. I’ve DJed at an oldies radio station. I used to DJ around town, so I have about a four hour playlist that I’m always adding to that goes on shuffle when we’re out there.

Miller: I described some of my own experiences at the mall in recent years. I also spent, recently, at least a half an hour with my kids playing keyboards and pianos in this one storefront. They offer piano lessons, but they weren’t happening at that time. It was quiet and the super nice piano teacher just let my kids and a friend of theirs just hang out for a half an hour in this piano place.

What’s your experience of the mall in recent years? I mean, what’s your version of the Lloyd Center?

Catwood: So I think the Lloyd Center is in a magical, very, very, very special era that is totally unique to her. It’s a state of transition.

Miller: She’s definitely a she.

Catwood: In my head, she’s a she. I call her she. I don’t know how she identifies, but we’ll call her she.

Miller: Her name is Lloyd.

Catwood: Her name is Lloyd and she, especially because … like you mentioned earlier, the anchor stores are largely gone. It’s filled with nonprofits, local businesses. There’s very few chains left. There’s lots of empty space that you can rent for about $350 for the whole day and hold events there.

So that means there’s all of the space and room to expand. And it’s changed. It’s evolved into a more of a community center focused mindset/feel vibe, to where, since we started the walks, I now know almost most of the shop owners and we all support each other. And it just feels like a third space that’s accessible for whoever really wants to get in there. That’s really unique.

Miller: Whoever wants to. When you started this, did you call up the folks who run the place now and say, hey, I want to start this thing, or did you just show up?

Catwood: That would have been very professional of me, but I didn’t really. [Laughs] I just went in there. So I tried to reach out, I think, through the info website, email. I didn’t hear anything back, but I just said screw it, I’m going to do it anyway. So I did. Since then, they support all of my posts and repost things, and I think are really thrilled. But I honestly can say I’ve never sat down and had a discussion with mall management there.

Miller: I mean, that honestly makes sense to me because there does seem to be something sort of anarchic about the Lloyd Center right now, which is part of its charm. It seems, as I said in my intro, I’d be surprised if there’s a mall that’s quite like it anywhere right now.

Catwood: I would agree with that. And I would also agree with the fact that mall walking can happen in any community across the country, because there’s lots of malls in various stages of growth and I don’t want to say decay but kind of decline, right? So there are places that I think are in similar boats, but I don’t think it has the same community mindset that the Lloyd Center does.

When we meet up at the food court, there’s the Portland Zine meet up that meets there too. There’s a group of people that go and they play Beyblades and have Beyblade battles. There’s people that meet there and do Pokemon Go and wander around. So you’ve got all of these different groups who are using it as a very active third space. And I would argue there’s no other place like it.

Miller: Has doing this walk for five months now changed the way you think about what malls can or should be?

Catwood: Absolutely. I mean, I’m a big fan of thrifting and reduce, reuse and recycle, and I feel like we’ve got these giant monstrosities of buildings that, as a country, we’re struggling to deal with. And I have admittedly started nerding out about all the different ways that people are trying to reuse the spaces. I don’t know of anyone who’s been able to do it very successfully, like they’ve been trying to use it for housing, they’ve been trying to use them for medical offices or colleges.

I think we need to think of how to rebirth these spaces as community spaces and get rid of this old dead narrative that they’re dead. I’m tired of hearing that the Lloyd Center is dead. It’s not dead. It’s like, go on a walk with us on a Sunday and tell me it’s dead. It’s not.

Miller: Is it your hope then that it doesn’t get torn down to be turned into some other new thing? You want it to stay the way it is and just get more populated?

Catwood: I think the evolution is already sort of happening, right? Nordstrom has gone down and is going to be replaced with a music venue. I think that what I would like to see is a combination of the two. I know the company that has it is, that’s currently not the plan, but I also haven’t seen an active timeline of what that change looks like. In the meantime, and again that’s what makes it really special is we don’t know how long we have in that space. So we get to really try to capitalize on it.

Miller: Interesting, so is that part of the excitement for you, that you don’t know how long this current version of the Lloyd Center will exist?

Catwood: I mean, it’s part of the joy in it for me, because I don’t know how long it’s going to be able to look this one particular way. I am super passionate about mall walking in general, surprising folks and showing up in unpredictable ways. So if the Lloyd Center should cease to exist in the way that it does now, I might show up at IKEA. I might show up at your Safeway. I’ll find something.

Miller: That was Krista Catwood, a leader of the Food Court 5000. We spoke with her last summer. We checked in with her the other day. She said she’s planning to do a series of weekly pop-up walks across Portland this summer and is in conversation with another mall to secure a longer term home for her weekly walk. She’s posting updates on Instagram. You can find her at @foodcourt5000. In the meantime, until the wrecking ball comes, you can find her at the Lloyd Center Mall food court every Sunday at 11 a.m.

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