‘Tis the season to be ambushed by those mall kiosk pit bulls that jump out and chase you and don’t let up.

I usually alter my path to avoid them. But this time I was a pit bull reporter on the prowl for a story about who these people are.

So, I let Leo, the dude with slicked hair and a cool grin, accost me with the vibrating tentacles of a $200 plastic back massager that looked like it came from a dollar store.

When he started his sales pitch, I started mine.

I used the same pushy spiel on him that he uses on his prey, and with similar results: he turned me down and down and down.

I finally gave up. “What, you don’t want to be in the paper?!” I stammered, putting on my best pout.

I was feeling the rejection when Shani Krudo approached, looked me in the eye and politely said something like: “Excuse me, I’ve got just the thing to make you even more beautiful.”

She was a more sophisticated stalker than most others in kiosk alley. The winsome gal with flowing brown hair, lacy sweater and sensible shoes seemed more caring friend than a commando trying to wheedle me out of $150 for anti-aging cream. (I have to admit, it couldn’t hurt.)

Better yet, she readily agreed to be in a story.

Krudo, 32, knows she’s the person everyone tries to ignore at the mall. She even came across the globe to be ignored. She lives in Israel.

She was born in the USA and moved there as a kid. This is her fourth holiday season hawking kiosk kitsch at American malls. For three months, she goes at it 11 hours a day, cajoling passersby to her cart for a product demo and, hopefully, a sale.

“I’m here to save money,”  she says.

She studied alternative medicine. This job is a study in humanity. “An anthropological experience.”

“I think it’s interesting that people are not able to say what they mean. They’ll say, ‘I’ll be back later’ or make up some story. It makes me feel like they must think I’m an idiot. I wish they’d just tell me the truth,” she says.

“Some days it is hard. I really have to push myself. I’m just a person in the mall. They have no idea who I am.”

Nor do they care who she is. No matter.

Krudo not only exfoliates faces, she waxes existential philosophy.

“Viktor Frankl wrote the book ‘Man’s Search for Meaning.’ Did you ever read it? He was a Holocaust survivor and a psychotherapist,” she says. “One of the things he said was that man can adapt to anything; as long as you find meaning in what you’re doing, it’s OK.”

The mall stint is what it is.

“There’s ups, there’s downs. Even the downs are sometimes a gift for us to be able to appreciate something. If there was no bad, then how would we know what good is?”

—Got a story?Go to gazettedev.gazette.com/yourspace

Shani Krudo, mall kiosk saleswoman Photo by Photo by Andrea Brown

Andrea Brown, Your Space columnist Photo by