Amerikan Girls on holiday

Back in the 80's there was a tv miniseries called "Amerika" - 14+ hours of melodrama centering around the concept of what if we had lost the Cold War to the Soviet Union?

With marketing phenomenon like American Girl and institutions of higher spending such as the Galleria Dallas, the Amerika scenario is a Communist pipe dream.

Been to Dallas before as a lad and did the obligatory West end clubbing thing as well as frolicking on the grassy knoll within site of the Texas School Book Depository. Dallas was pretty much like any other big city I've visited only it's full of Texan's, which can be good (if you're a Texan) or bad (if you're a normal person).

Living where we do, only a 5+ hour drive to the home of America's Team (the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders) Wifey and I thought it'd be a hoot-of-sorts to splurge on our oldest daughter's 8th birthday last weekend and take her and her sister on a road trip down to Dallas for reasons soon be made clear.

Texas vs OSU at home and Texas Tech vs. OU at home meant lots of traffic heading north, and plenty of longhorn plates in the gas and zip stops along the I35 corridor, but other than that our drive down was painless.

We checked into our Hotels.com room at a suite joint across the way from the Galleria, and unburdened the trunk of it's luggage and pre-wrapped birthday presents (including two new internet-purchased American Girl dolls with almond shaped eyes and hair length and color that matched our girl's).

A quick late night outing to pick up some bottled water and get my street bearings (something odd I do when I find myself in new surroundings...weird I know, but I like to know where I am) and I happened to drive by our American Doll destination of desire.

There I spotted a host of security guards patrolling the outer environs of the American Girl shop. Odd since the store wasn't scheduled to open for another 10 hours.

Not so odd when you took into consideration the groupings of Mothers and Daughters who were bundled up in sleeping bags and fold up canvas chairs, camped out in line at the doubled glass door entrance to the mecca of resin doll and doll accessories lying in wait within.

Seems our daughter's birthday outing and our on-a-whim desire to road trip down here just happened to coincide with the grand opening weekend of this particular American Girl Boutique and Bistro (the only one of it's kind in Texas, the other B&B is located in Atlanta, whereas the larger American Girl Place's are in LA, Chitown, and NYC).

So, some fanatics were camping out in line at yet another grand opening of yet another niche store. This is America.

As a nation, we've camped out for Springsteen tickets, iPhones, Halo 3, and Black Friday sales. Surely the desire to be the first mother/daughter pair in line for the opening of a doll store shouldn't raise more than a few eyebrows.

And the fact that a few doll devotees would spend the night in the chill of a fall Dallas evening, shouldn't cast any doubts that the following days grand opening wouldn't be anything but smooth sailing and easy going.

I mean, c'mon, it's a doll shop. How crowded could it be? (Insert impending doom theme from any horror movie here...)

Yeah, me too....I suddenly got a bad feeling about all this...