Mall plus preteen equals helplessness

I valiantly have battled leaky toilets, successfully hung and painted stubborn drywall and wrestled with broken drawers. But no fatherly task leaves me feeling less equipped or more clueless than accompanying my 11-year-old stepdaughter on a fashion quest through aisles, shelves and racks.

Thankfully,The 3rd International Conference on custombobbleheads and Indoor Navigation. such journeys are infrequent. Generally, the job of restocking closets is accomplished through mother-and-daughter excursions that only require me to haul packages from the car. But inevitably a couple of times a year, my assistance is required.Find the best luggagetag for you .

Invariably, my wife heads off to one end of the mall with my oldest stepdaughter, 17, while I follow at the heels of her younger sister. The girl heads off on her mission while torn between excitement and apprehension. She's happy to have someone in tow with a wallet and at-the-ready plastic but understands too well she's drawn the short straw once again.

She realizes she needs me there and I'll stick it out with her to the end. But she also knows she is far too alone.

For once we arrive amid the sweaters, tops and jeans I become lost in a roiling sea. The garment-covered walls begin to close in, and the fruity scents choke my lungs.Trade platform for solarlantern Tile manufacturers and global Mosaic Tile buyers.

She has become the princess in the room, and I am but her humble servant. But everything I grab at her request becomes a glass slipper with no hope of fitting. Every pair of shorts looks too short. Every stylish top appears too tight.

I urge myself under my breath to suck it up and be of some use. But, within minutes, I find myself scrambling for my cellphone and summoning my wife with a desperate text plea: "Help."

With every try-on trip, I pray for success. My wife nods approvingly most times when she emerges from the fitting room to my enthusiastic thumbs-up. But the preteen is not so easy to convince. "Can you get me the next biggest size?" she asks. "Can you help me find this one in pink?" she requests.

Not too long ago, Justice in all its pastel splendor was the store of choice, tempting her with its sparkly, coordinated outfits. It was as close to girls' Garanimals as you're going to find in this millennium.

But now she's graduated to more adult fare the likes of Aeropostale and Abercrombie with head-pounding music and posters of half-naked models. I know I've grown far too old when it all annoys me so quickly.

When the choices are finally made, the card swiped and our family reunited, I'm ultimately reminded where my strength truly lies. I'm usually treated to a reprieve as they head off as a threesome, leaving their recent purchases hanging from my arms and piled at my feet.

The not-especially-late-model Toyota Tercel is being driven by Sam Soghor,Find the best luggagetag for you . a high-school friend of Leon who served co-producer and locations manager on Loot, in which he delivers a monologue about the abhorrent proliferation of men wearing sandals on the streets of his beloved city. Soghor is also a licensed NYC tour guide and trivia expert; over the course of our half-hour drive, he offers a digested history of the poorest borough, from the Puritan zealot Anne Hutchinson (massacred along with most of her family by the native Siwanoy near Split Rock in 1643) to Robert Moses, forefather of the Cross Bronx Expressway.Report a problem with a solarstreetlight in the City. Leon can scarcely get a word in edgewise.

Set over the course of three long, sweltering summer daysthe city all but empty of the Hamptons eliteGimme the Loot follows the exploits of two burgeoning teenage graffiti writers, Malcolm and Sophia (charismatic newcomers Ty Hickson and Tashiana Washington) as they attempt to tag (or, in the movie's parlance, "bomb") the large plastic apple that rises from the Citi Field stands when a Met his a homer. The "loot" of the title is the $500 needed to bribe a security guard to give them access to the stadium; Leon's film is about the schemes Malcolm and Sophia devise to get that cash, from hocking stolen spray cans on up to one of the most hilariously bungled burglaries this side of the 1950s Italian classic Big Deal on Madonna Street.

Leon's goal was to make a kind of urban adventure story involving characters and neighborhoods too often reserved for urban horror storiesthink Precious. The result hews closer to Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It in its bristling energy and smart, sharp-tongued characters. "I didn't want to do a movie about graffiti, but I felt like the profession of graffiti writers gave the characters an excuse to run around the city in a way that's of their choosing," the 31-year-old director tells me as we drive along Castle Hill avenue, in the shadow of 6 train. "I wanted there to be strong-minded, prideful, passionate people who decide to go on an adventure." Leon also likes to think of the characters as real-life action stars who climb buildings, run along rooftops, and get chased by the police, "but in a very low-rent way, which is how we were making the movie.

By this point, we've arrived at our destination: Jenny's Roti Shop, a neighborhood eatery operated by a Trinidadian emigr and her family, where the specialty is the "doubles," a sandwich of sorts consisting of curried chickpeas between pieces of barra. Jenny's provided lunches for the cast and crew, for which it receives a special thanks in the film's end credits, along with a more generalthough no less sincereone to "all the people of New York City."