Limelight Marketplace: Jesus Is Coming Back, and He's Pissed!

Walk in the front door and a wave of stink assails you--the compacted smells of a half-dozen narrow stalls specializing in overpriced perfumes, soaps, and other stinkum, a chokingly sweet odor that's familiar from every shopping mall in the U.S.

Next be confronted by masses of clueless tourists, munching on cupcakes and smashing into each other like atoms in a cyclotron in the hopelessly crowded space. Sometimes, forward progress seems impossible as shoppers clog the narrow passageways and catwalks that the real estate developers have managed to leave after renting every available square inch. There is virtually no place to sit down, no place to linger, no place for seniors to power walk or mall teens to preen and show off - a suburban mall devoid of anything that makes such a place entertaining.

You, hapless pilgrim, have entered the new Limelight Marketplace, an upscale shopping mall artlessly and irreligiously wedged into a 160-year old gothic Episcopal church of great architectural distinction, filling it with shockingly white balconies, narrow hanging passageways, and silver-flocked wallpaper, forms of glitz so superficial that only the most gullible will be dazzled. It's so totally a mall for rubes. On the gala opening day last Friday, the place was filled with a profusion of flowers, as if the church were being forced to attend its own funeral.