Move Over, Apple Pie--America Is Sweet on Malls : Trends: Ubiquitous shopping centers such as South Coast Plaza have become the heart of U.S. culture.

It was a perfect night for camping. Overhead, fluorescent lights were dimmed. A cellophane-and-fake-rock campfire crackled as songs rang out. Sleeping bags lay unfurled in the shadow of the Broadway and Nordstrom.

No, the 600-plus Girl Scouts bedding down inside the Brea Mall one night recently were not working on a merit badge in shopping. The occasion was the second annual Girl Scout “camp-in” inside the Brea Mall.

If it’s weird, wacky, funny, offbeat or even tragic, chances are it has happened at the mall. People have met their mates in malls, proposed in malls, been married in malls and seen their marriages fall apart in malls. People have raced cars, streaked, flung food at each other and committed crimes and misdemeanors, all under the familiar skylights and tile roofs. At least a couple of babies have been born in a mall, and many more people have died--even been murdered--there.

“Sometimes, shopping happens at malls,” Rick Demeuse of Studio City, a veteran of mall marketing, said with a chuckle.

And now, a mall is starring in a movie. “Scenes From a Mall,” a comedy that opened Friday, features Woody Allen and Bette Midler as a couple celebrating their 16th wedding anniversary, revealing infidelities, breaking up, making up and examining the worst and best times of their marriage within the confines of the Beverly Center shopping mall.

They fling sushi at each other in the food court. They scream at each other on the escalator. They ponder their feelings for each other while youths perform rap Christmas carols. They divvy up community property over chips, salsa and margaritas in a Mexican restaurant. They make love in the mall theater while images of death and poverty in India flicker on the screen.

“Real life used to take place in the streets and town squares, but today people spend a lot of their time shopping in malls,” says producer-director Paul Mazursky, who filmed interior mall scenes at the Stamford Town Center in Connecticut. “Whatever can happen in your life can happen in a mall.”

Take romance. It can blossom there.

Santa Claus did double duty as Cupid at MainPlace in Santa Ana last Christmas when the jolly one’s lap was the scene of a marriage proposal. A young man suggested to his girlfriend that they have their pictures taken with Santa. After they were seated, he popped the question.

“To my knowledge, she said yes,” according to general manager Tanya Thomas.

It is not surprising that mall stories abound in Orange County and throughout the country, say industry experts. That’s where people go.

Orange County is home to some of the nation’s largest and most prosperous malls. South Coast Plaza, for instance, has been cited as an example of how malls are becoming “the new downtown of the post-industrial world.” The sprawling shopping center has even been a regular stop for some Orange County tour buses.

On the average, Americans go to shopping centers five times a month--even more if you are younger, according to a Gallup Poll conducted for the International Council of Shopping Centers. Almost half the population looks to shopping centers as a key way to spend leisure time. And on a respectability scale, shopping malls were ranked third--right behind churches and hospitals.

“A mall is like a shrunken-down community, and anything can happen there, like in a city or a neighborhood,” said Keith Foxe, spokesman for the shopping center association. “It is like a city under glass. When you consider how much time people spend there (in malls), you realize that virtually anything can happen.”

Ken and Barbie met in a mall and got married in a mall. In real life.

As shoppers on their lunch hour looked on, Ken Patten and Barbara Edlund exchanged vows June 9, 1989, under a white gazebo placed next to Carnaby Street Stationery, a Federal Express outlet and a U.S. government bookstore inside the Arco Plaza in downtown Los Angeles. Their wedding invitation was a poster displayed in the mall, and their wedding cake--topped with Ken and Barbie dolls--was provided by a bakery in the mall, according to placards placed next to the confection.

What’s more, it was free. Patten and Edlund, both Arco employees who work in the tower above the subterranean shopping center, won a mall-sponsored essay contest (“Why We Want to Say ‘I Do’ at Arco Plaza”), entitling them to the nuptials, which were required to be held during a Friday lunch hour, the mall’s peak time. About 2,000 people attended the wedding in the mall’s center court, which is visible from several levels above.

“It was a blast. People were hanging off the railings to see us,” said Patten, a project manager in networks and information services for Arco. “What better way to have a celebration than with all the people we know? . . . We like this place. We met in one of the restaurants here. We work here. Everything happened to us around Arco Plaza, so it seemed fitting.”

Lots of people use the malls--and, of course, the parking lot--for romance. The hilarious love scene between Allen and Midler in the movie theater is not unusual, according to longtime shopping center consultant Irving Wolf.

Theater janitors sweeping up after the last show inside malls “come up with interesting debris, and it’s not all popcorn,” Wolf said, laughing. “You know what a Peyton Place is? Every shopping center in America is a Peyton Place.”

And, as in the new movie, romance can sour at the malls.

Noted divorce lawyer Jennifer King of Tustin (she represented baseball star Wade Boggs in the Margo Adams palimony suit) recalls that one client got the first inkling that her marriage was on the rocks while she was shopping in a mall.

The woman spotted her husband shopping for a negligee in Bullock’s in South Coast Plaza. Figuring the lingerie was going to be a surprise gift, the woman didn’t tell her husband she saw him shopping.

So she waited. And waited. The wife never received the lingerie.

“That was the first clue that there was another woman,” King said. “If she had never seen him in the store, shopping for the lingerie, she wouldn’t have known--at least, so soon.”

Life can begin in a mall. Perusing the stores inside the Tri-County Mall in Springdale, Ohio, one day about 20 years ago, a pregnant woman suddenly went into labor and quickly delivered her baby on a bench, consultant Wolf recalled. “Fortunately, the manager of the shopping center was an ex-policeman, so he had some background.”

Both mother and baby were fine. But it is not always a case of the mall, the merrier. In 1988, a baby was born and abandoned in a mall. The infant girl, born in a toy store inside the Farmington Valley Mall in Simsbury, Conn., where the mother worked as a cashier, was found in good condition in a trash can behind an electronics store.

And life can end at a mall.

Sitting on a bench inside the Mall of Orange, 12-year-old Jacalyn Calabrese was shot to death a week before Christmas, 1989, by a 12-year-old classmate. As scores of gift-laden Orange County shoppers watched in horror, the girl slumped to the mall’s brown tile floor after Juan M. Cardenas Jr. fired a single shot from a .22-caliber pistol into Calabrese’s head, in a misguided attempt to show off when the girl told him she did not believe the gun was real. Cardenas later pleaded guilty to one count of involuntary manslaughter with a firearm and was sentenced to a year in Juvenile Hall.

Two days before Christmas, 1985, a twin-engine light airplane crashed into the middle of the huge Sun Valley Mall in Concord, Calif., exploding in flames and killing four shoppers and three people aboard the plane, and injuring 78 people. The pilot had been flying too low and became disoriented in a cloud bank when the plane slammed into a glass skylight between two department stores, throwing a ball of flame into the enclosed shopping center.

Hardly the stuff that marketing directors’ dreams are made of. But sometimes even their best intentions go awry.

Mall consultant Tracey Olson of Newport Beach recalled an exhibit of stock cars inside a mall in Iowa, several years ago. After the mall closed, the cars’ drivers were left alone in the shopping center, and they started talking and bragging. “One thing led to another,” she said, and soon the best of the drivers was dared to drive his car around the mall--on the inside.

The driver revved up the engine and was off, she said. “He headed towards Woolworths, laid down some rubber and made the turn.” But mall tile floors don’t offer the same traction as asphalt roads. The driver lost control and ended up inside Hal’s, a men’s clothing store.

“We learned the hard way,” she said, “to always take the keys and unplug the batteries whenever you have a car show.”

A clothing store inside the Mall of Orange was the victim of a boating accident last year when shopping center promoters were setting up for a sports, travel and recreation show. While workers inched an expensive Fiberglas boat into place in the mall’s concourse area, the bow nicked the front window of a store named Outfitters.

“The whole window just shattered,” said the mall’s Linda Cerro “I had to call the store owner and tell him, ‘Your window has been hit by a boat.’ It wasn’t funny at the time.”

Indeed, Hollywood has been no stranger to shopping malls--even before Mazursky put one in a movie title.

The opening minutes of Arnold Schwarzenegger’s new movie, “Kindergarten Cop,” were filmed inside Santa Ana’s MainPlace. In last year’s “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure,” the two stars showed off modern culture to Genghis Kahn, Sigmund Freud, Socrates, Napolean Bonaparte, Joan of Arc, Billy the Kid, Ludwig von Beethoven and Abraham Lincoln by plunking the historical figures down in the fictitious San Dimas Mall.

“This is where people of today’s world hang out,” they told the time-transported figures.

But the best mall scene in the movies, several mall buffs agreed, was the chase scene in “The Blues Brothers.” For 2 1/2 minutes, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd lead dozens of police on a car chase through an enclosed mall, calmly noting the various shops as they crash through store windows, plow into mannequins and displays, run over an art show, destroy a florist’s stand and send shoppers running for cover before exiting through a J.C. Penney window.

“It amazes me that more has not been done in shopping center settings,” says mall marketer Paul F. Kastner, who is writing a book about humorous things that befall people in malls. “Things are always happening in malls. There’s a great book in it. It would be a great setting for a television series, because so much goes on in a mall.”