The truth is, you never know who's going to walk into your store. Really. It could be anyone. It could be some Hollywood actor, a neurotic bitch, or. . . Oh my God!. . . It's the former President of the Philippines, Corazon Aquino, and an entourage so goddamned big it was insane!

This must've been somewhere in the very early 90's. It was me just me and one staffer yapping away during a slow time on a Thursday night. Suddenly, the mall started to stir. When you work in a store, you learn to read the 'mall atmosphere', and you can tell when shit is happening.

Enter stage right: A polite mob of photographers, press people, and God only knows who else, formed into the shape of a giant, dense, shuffling horseshoe, keeping a civilized distance from President Aquino. She had three or four political attendants around her as she made her rounds of the stores.

I shit you not, she was wearing The Yellow Suit that anyone over thirty knows was her signature. I had no clue why she was in town, but the button on her jacket read "We've deposed our dictators. Please come invest in our country again. No really, come invest. We're fucking dying over here." may have explained it.

Now we'd gotten our share of celebrities in the store, but this was our first president.

Conditioned instinct kicked in: CALL TORONTO HEADQUARTERS AND AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS. So I did. Joel, the gayest regional manager the retail world ever knew, answered his phone and I had to tell him twice who had walked in the store.

"Yes, she's even wearing the yellow suit!" I said.

"Well don't talk to me, go give her something!" he said, "Then call me back. . . I want to hear all about it."

You see, Roots is notorious for sucking the ass of any celebrity that walks in the door. They'll give away anything with a logo on it, with the hope the celebrity will be photographed wearing it. It's a tactic that's worked well for them. We could basically give away anything to any recognizable celebrity, with the caveat of "just don't go crazy and give them leather jackets."

Why? Leather jackets don't have logos.

I hung up the phone and cautiously approached the entourage.

The President's unbelievably hot daughter, who looked to be about twenty-four years old, had somehow been produced from the throng of people and was looking over baby clothes.

As I approached I looked around quickly for something to offer. What do you give the president of a country? What's the protocol?

Instinctively, I grabbed two royal blue tee-shirts off a shelf. They were the horribly tacky Roots logo tee-shirts, so cloyingly Canadian with a monochrome profile of a beaver gnawing on something, or holding a stick, I don't know which.

"Mrs. President," I said, my voice becoming firm, as if I regularly addressed heads of state on important matters. "I'd like to present this gift on behalf of Roots Canada, to you and your family."

She looked down at the two bright blue tee-shirts, no doubt keenly aware of how horrible they were, and then said, "Oh. . . No. . . No thank you."

Figuring she didn't understand our generous custom, I said, "Oh, no, it's okay," I lowered my voice to reassure her, "You can take them. They're free. Really!"

"Oh, no-no-no-no-no, thank you, no," was her reply, in a tone she might've used if I'd tried to slide her a bundle of twenties, nodding for her to just take it.

One of her political attendants from the Canadian government gave me a cold smile as if to say, "that's plenty from you".

So on behalf of Roots Canada, I tucked my tail between my legs and inched back behind the register where I should've been from the beginning.

I'd left the hideous shirts on the counter near where her daughter was pawing the baby clothes, wrenching them out of their sealed plastic bags, and I noticed how President Aquino's gaze kept returning to the shirts. She fingered them cautiously, the way you would if you'd just opened your backpack in September after leaving a sandwich in it all summer long.

So the daughter, tossing around her long straight hair, giving glamorous smiles to the photographers and completely ignoring our existence, bought a stack of baby clothes. I'm sure Joel would've told me to comp her, but I didn't dare. Then as quickly as they'd arrived, they departed. Our store was quiet again. No more media and flashbulbs. No more yellow suit.

The tee-shirts remained on the counter, an artifact of the whole affair, and I told the staffer that, yeah, I thought I should probably go take my break now.