Dark Thoughts From South Coast Plaza

Until Tuesday morning, the rolling blackouts that had hit Orange County the previous 24 hours seemed manageable.

Some businesses went dark. A school or two. Restaurants. Some intersections, some homes.

There was no panic. It was nothing we couldn’t handle. When the going got tough, the tough got going.

Privately, some of us probably found ourselves thinking: ‘Hey, this isn’t so bad. I could have been a pioneer.’

Then, late-morning Tuesday, the latest in a series of rolling-blackout flashes coursed through our newsroom: A small part of South Coast Plaza might be going dark. Who knew whether all of it might not be next.

Curses! They can darken our schools and goof up our traffic signals, but they better not touch South Coast Plaza!

That’s hitting us right in the breadbasket. It’s the equivalent of a foreign country bombing the White House--a move designed to break our will.

More than anything else, South Coast Plaza is who we are. It’s what we do.

Sure, we have our towns and our neighborhoods and our churches.

But in Orange County, South Coast Plaza is ground zero.

It’s a place where mall signs proudly state, “Lose Yourself in a Utopia for the Chic. Where Fashion Ranges from the Essential to the Fabulously Decadent.”

“Lose yourself” would take on a whole new meaning with no electricity. I haven’t seen the Utopia yet where you have to grope around in the dark.

Naturally, I rushed to the scene. Except for the people who shooed me away, everyone I talked to agreed that no lights at South Coast would mean the blackout people had gone too far.

A woman emerged from a shoe store at South Coast, carrying a package. She wanted to be identified only as Sharon of Costa Mesa.

Informed of the potential outage, she nodded her head. “The air-conditioning is off, so it’s really hot,” she said. She pointed to a bank of overhead lights and noted that many of them were off.

I said the mall still seemed pretty bright. “You don’t get over here much, do you?” she said. I conceded that point, and she said she could tell the difference. “It’s not bright and cheery,” she said of the mall, adding that because shopping “wasn’t fun today,” she was heading home early.

Just outside Saks Fifth Avenue, Cassie Piasecki of Newport Beach stopped and agreed, at my suggestion, to contemplate a world without shopping. By occupation, she seemed perfectly suited to the task.

“I’m a domestic goddess,” she said. “I work out, I shop, I tan.”

Judging by appearances, she’s hitting on all cylinders.

As fate would have it, she said, she’d been at Fashion Island the day before when the lights went out midafternoon. Her kids were in a darkened bathroom, she said, “and the store I was in couldn’t ring me up.”

Needless to say, the experience jarred her. “At first when I thought about the blackouts, I thought, fine, if it happens to everybody else.”

However, that night, she said, she made a point of turning her lights down and her home computer off.

By midafternoon Tuesday, it appeared that South Coast would not be blacked out. No darkened bathrooms, no silent registers unable to ring up sales.

A small section of the shopping center apparently did go dark in the morning, but for less than a minute.

Orange County, take that as a shot across the bow. The next blackout could be the big one.

Pilar Cadena, who works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art shop at South Coast, didn’t want to contemplate that. That doesn’t mean, however, that employees are taking the prospect lightly. “We’re not having fun; we’re worried,” she said.

I asked her to imagine, just for a moment, a blacked-out South Coast.

She thought for a second and said, bleakly: “It’ll be a big commotion.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com.