On January 31st, 2020, The Zone, an interactive Britney Spears experience in a 30,000-square-foot repurposed K-Mart opened to the public. The brainchild of Jeff Delson and Shannon Ramirez, the Instagram-tailored “pop-up museum” located across the street from The Grove in Los Angeles was slated for greatness by sheer virtue of all the publicity fawning over it from the outset. Not to mention the inherent millennial cash cow potential it was always designed to have. It only helped that the experience was actually pretty goddamn amazing. Almost otherworldly (and we all know Britney Spears was the original Elon Musk when it comes to Mars). It was, with the curse of hindsight, so obviously any Britney or pop culture fan’s “closing ceremony for Earth” in 2020, as the performance from Shakira and Jennifer Lopez would later be “jokingly” called after their February 2nd Super Bowl Halftime Show collaboration at Hard Rock Stadium.
But only those who went to The Zone could truly understand it was this seemingly self-indulgent foray into frothy nostalgia that served as the last time anything would ever feel “normal” again. And while we all insist that “normal” is just around the corner, nothing will ever be as it was. Just like it wasn’t after the Spanish Flu, try as the world might to eradicate it from their collective consciousness. It has only ended up being regurgitated all the more in the present epoch (but at least most of the people who lived through it got their wish with regard to never hearing about the plague again).
Of late, it’s been posited that once the Spanish Flu “died out” (or rather, became a part of the seasonal flu strains we still see today), everyone simply did not discuss it. Wanted nothing more than to forget and suppress these memories and horrors. Even though talking through that kind of trauma–spotlighting different people’s plights–would have been key for both the population’s emotional well-being and posterity for future generations such as this one (in desperate need of referring to this precedent, still called “the mother of all pandemics”). Rather than going back to the serious stoicism that marked the many uprisings and revolutions of the decade (not to mention the Great War), including The Mexican Revolution, The Easter Rising, The Arab Revolt, The Russian Revolution and The German Revolution, it was as though the masses preferred to get blackout drunk and party so as to stamp out all memories of that awful 1918-1920 period. By this logic, 2020-2022 should be the period through which we continue to endure this fresh hell (though COVID-19 appears to signal some portent of more novel viruses to come, as we hadn’t infiltrated Mother Nature as severely then as we have now, invoking the expected consequences of fucking with animals’ habitats). But it seems less likely that we’ll be able to forget it thanks to the daily documentations of the internet.
And so, back to The Zone, anyone who might ever want to see it (whether for the first time or again) will have to wait much longer. At the moment, the website sadly reads, “Temporarily Closed.” Optimistic indeed. What the post-Spanish Flu/COVID-19 parallel also has to do with The Zone as it pertains to re-opening is the fact that even when this is “over,” nothing will be as it was, including the pop-up… as it was originally intended to be experienced. For those of us who just barely eked by before it was shut down, it might very well be the last majestic public “interfacing” on record. Multiple elaborate rooms filled with all the Glory of Britney’s continued pop culture relevancy, taking up an estimated ninety minutes to go through for optimal photo-taking cachet. In many respects, too, it served as a crest (or nadir, depending on who you ask) of millennial existence–literally created solely for the eye-catching upload to social media. And who better to help embody this millennial zeitgeist than millennial talisman Britney Spears herself? It certainly wasn’t going to be Xtina (even though a “Dirrty” room would be epic in an imagined Aguilera version of The Zone called The Voice Within).
And so, on that wondrous Friday, January 31, 2020 that we didn’t know would be the last time we had a true sense of what it meant to have “free rein” in a public space, we flitted from the “…Baby One More Time” room(s) (extending from a class filled with desks, a locker area and a basketball court) to the “Oops!… I Did It Again” room to the “Stronger” room to the “Me Against the Music” room to the “Toxic” room to the “Circus” room to the “Blackout” room the “I’m A Slave 4 U” room to the “Piece of Me” room. Taking our time, getting the ideal footage (in conjunction with the cameras in select rooms linked to The Zone’s app). Living through the videos as though they were our own, and there was no shame in being completely geeky about it (as someone once told Britney during the transition from “What U See [Is What U Get]” to “Lucky” on Oops!… I Did It Again, “Yo Brit, you’re a nerd”).
For roughly $60 a head, the price to witness the last time anything felt normal (in all of its “extraness” and absurdity–maybe that’s called “L.A. normal”) was well worth it. Because returning to the scene–if it ever actually proves possible–with a mask just smacks of being a little too literal re: the “Toxic” correlation. And honestly who wants to take a photo amid such beauty with the enforcement of a face covering? Or a tag team of workers running behind you to clean every surface you’ve just touched? It defeats the entire purpose of paying for such a setting. Of course, if The Zone were to become “by appointment only” per individual group, that would be an entirely different story. Alas, that doesn’t seem very financially sustainable for the creators of The Zone. If only Britney could use all that talk of redistributing wealth to include a day inside this former K-Mart for just you and your friends (what’s left of them, anyway) after it was completely wiped and sanitized from the last group.
