The Great Raid of Eyeshadows was a coordinated theft at South Coast Plaza in which two dozen girls on roller skates swept a department store shortly before closing. Remembered by Prairie Wheeler as an episode in her history with Ché, the raid joined careful planning to a sudden, dangerous rescue—and left behind a spectacle still discussed in retail-surveillance circles.

Planning and the Raid

The girls entered in black jeans and T-shirts, carrying empty backpacks. They knew the store’s layout and moved with clockwork precision, arriving shortly before closing and leaving only minutes later with their bags filled. Their haul included lipstick, eye shadow, mascara, earrings, headbands, bracelets, pantyhose, and sunglasses.

The stolen goods were promptly converted into cash through a fence named Olis, who later resold the merchandise at a fair far from the store. The operation therefore depended not only on the girls’ coordinated entrance and escape but on a route for turning the merchandise into money.

Prairie’s Rescue of Ché

During the escape, Prairie saw Ché about to be trapped between a security guard and a boy in a plastic jacket, slightly older than the girls, who was shouting as though the stolen goods belonged to him. The guard was unfastening his holster. Prairie skated into the crowd, shouting wildly to interrupt the pursuit; she reached Ché, seized her wrist, spun them both around toward the right direction, and got them out.

Prairie remembers the flight as a burst of extraordinary speed, with the people around them seeming to move in slow motion. The store’s loudspeakers supplied a jaunty orchestral transcription of Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene,” played on oboe and strings. Its cheerful sound helped soothe the bystanders and encouraged them to treat the commotion as ordinary, even as the girls disappeared into the evening gloom.

Memory and Afterlife

Prairie recalls the raid while teasing Ché about her hard attitude toward the world. Their comic-and-straight-man routine reaches back to childhood games of cops and superheroes; the raid complicates the joke, since Prairie herself had used physical force when Ché was in danger. Her recollection preserves both sides of their partnership: the bravado that made the escapade possible and the quick decision that turned a theft into a rescue.

The episode acquired a public afterlife as well. The raid was still discussed with alarm at retail-surveillance conferences across the country, its precise timing and intimate knowledge of the store marking it as more than an impulsive shoplifting spree. In Prairie’s memory, however, its defining moment is not the inventory or the getaway route but the instant she skated into danger, grabbed Ché, and carried her out with the crowd and music closing around them.